Magic I take to include all bad ways, and religion all good ways, of dealing with the supernormal—­bad and good, of course, not as we may happen to judge them, but as the society concerned judges them.  Sometimes, indeed, the people themselves hardly know where to draw the line between the two; and, in that case, the anthropologist cannot well do it for them.  But every primitive society thinks witchcraft bad.  Witchcraft consists in leaguing oneself with supernormal powers of evil in order to effect selfish and anti-social ends.  Witchcraft, then, is genuine magic—­black magic of the devil’s colour.  On the other hand, every primitive society also distinguishes certain salutary ways of dealing with supernormal powers.  All these ways taken together constitute religion.  For the rest, there will always be a mass of more or less evaporated beliefs, going with practices that have more or less lost their hold on the community.  These belong to the folklore which every people has.  Under this or some closely related head must also be set down the mass of mere wonder-tales, due to the play of fancy, and without direct bearing on the serious pursuits of life.

The world to which neither magic nor religion belongs, but to which physical science, the knowledge of how to deal mechanically with material things, does belong wholly, is the workaday world, the region of normal, commonplace, calculable happenings.  With our telescopes and microscopes we see farther and deeper into things than does the savage.  Yet the savage has excellent eyes.  What he sees he sees.  Consequently, we must duly allow for the fact that there is for him, as well as for us, a “natural,” that is to say, normal and workaday world; even though it be far narrower in extent than ours.  The savage is not perpetually spook-haunted.  On the contrary, when he is engaged on the daily round, and all is going well, he is as careless and happy as a child.

But savage life has few safeguards.  Crisis is a frequent, if intermittent, element in it.  Hunger, sickness and war are examples of crisis.  Birth and death are crises.  Marriage is usually regarded by humanity as a crisis.  So is initiation—­the turning-point in one’s career, when one steps out into the world of men.  Now what, in terms of mind, does crisis mean?  It means that one is at one’s wits’ end; that the ordinary and expected has been replaced by the extraordinary and unexpected; that we are projected into the world of the unknown.  And in that world of the unknown we must miserably abide until, somehow, confidence is restored.

Psychologically regarded, then, the function of religion is to restore men’s confidence when it is shaken by crisis.  Men do not seek crisis; they would always run away from it, if they could.  Crisis seeks them; and, whereas the feebler folk are ready to succumb, the bolder spirits face it.  Religion is the facing of the unknown.  It is the courage in it that brings comfort.[6]