ABSTRACT
In my opinion magic has exercised a profound positive function in organising enterprise, in inspiring hope and confidence in the individual. Side by side with this, magical belief has obviously developed an attitude which exerts disturbing and subversive influences, especially in witchcraft and black magic. In the history of culture every phenomenon, I think, has got its constructive and disintegrating sides, its organising functions and its influences which point towards dissolution and decay. Human cultures do not merely grow and develop . They also decompose, die or collapse. Functional anthropology is not magic; it is not a chartered optimism or whitewashing of culture. One of its duties, in the wider cultural sense, is to show that savagery and superstition are not confined to primitive society. Ifwe have insisted on the "white" aspects of magic side by side with its black aspects, it is rather to bring into relief something which has been less fully recognised and elaborated in anthropological literature and in the practical approach to facts. Apart from Frazer's work on Psyche's Task (reprinted as the Devil's Advocate), the constructive side of magic has not been sufficiently recognised; and even now, when formulated, it meets with vigorous opposition-remarkably enough from the modern theologian.'
