Mana in Greece and Rome

Extract

There can be little doubt that of all the services rendered by the late Rector to learning the most widely known is his introduction to anthropologists and comparative religionists of the concept of mana. The debates excited by his short and modest survey of the matter, just before the beginning of this century, have not yet died down, and the “odd piece of twine” wherewith he proposed to bind certain facts together has grown into a thick rope, known by many fine names, such as preanimim, predeism, orendism and so forth, which is stoutly hauled upon by some, while others stumble over it or try to unwind it or prove that it was never really there, or at least that it has replaced something much earlier which formed an essential and legitimate part of the tackle. It is indeed a remarkable thing, on which a Hellenistic philosopher might have founded a thoughtful treatise on the inscrutable ways of Chance, that that one lecture and its unassuming successors raised such a pother, whereas the much longer, more elaborate and by no means unlearned or ill-reasoned work of J. H. King, only eight years earlier, fell still-born from the press and owes its reintroduction to science to the bitter opponent of all such theories of the origin of religion, the redoubtable Father Wilhelm Schmidt.