On the Origin, Idea, Scope, and History of Ancient and Modern Magic

whose inexplicable nature, at a certain stage of culture, just as easily produces superstition as it offers real material for the spread and development of the same?

Then—what is more peculiar to man than the tendency to break through the bothersome barriers of the present that always constrain him, and to look into the future in order to seize it according to his own whim, and to gain an active, controlling influence over its dark events? A new, productive source of superstition!

Finally, given the mixture of greatness and smallness, strength and weakness, sense of inquiry and credulity—in short, the general feeling of dependency that accompanies man through life—what is more natural than the striving to draw higher beings, as soon as he senses them, into his passions, plans, and states of fate, if possible, to obtain through them, or to make possible, what he feels he cannot obtain or make possible through his own strength?

As general as the tendency of the human spirit is to act independently upon nature and fate, so generally does this striving described here manifest itself in the history of mankind and peoples. And here, in the wide territory of superstition, lies the nearest origin, specifically of magical superstition.

With this tendency, man senses foreign, unknown, invisible influences everywhere in the natural forces and effects of things; he hovers, with the inner comfort that the mysterious and eerie grants to the mind at both lower and higher stages of culture, as it were, in the middle between nature and the supernatural; he sees the wonderful in the natural, and conversely the natural in the wonderful, such that even with the highest individual education, faith and superstition, a sense for nature and a love for miracles can often strangely unite within him.

From this wondrous mixture of reason, affects, and inclinations in man, and their constant influence on his actual life—from which only after a long, heated struggle the individual—and perhaps humanity as a whole, never—laboriously works its way up to clear unity—the various types of superstition explain themselves at the same time, which in the true sense are so immeasurable that to even just name them all would be tiring, indeed impossible.