Etymology And Magic Yaskas Nirukta Flatos Cratylus And Riddle Of Semanticetymologies

Author(s): Johannes Bronkhorst
Publisher: Johannes Bronkhorst

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Johannes Bronkhorst
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• Erymology and Magic
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has gone out to seek its victim." These rationalizations themselves lead to other activities: "The virtue of a medicine is sometimes spoken of as its soul, and is believed to rise in steam and smoke when it is being cooked. Therefore people place their faces in the steam so that the magical virtue may enter into them. Likewise, Azande say that when they cook vengeance-medicines the soul of the medicine goes up in the smoke from the fire and from on high surveys the neighbourhood for the witch it goes forth to seek." (Evans-Pritchard, 1976: 200). Malinowski (1922: 423) observed that among the Kula the spirits "are not agencies which get to work directly in magic). In the Trobriand demonology, the magician does not command the spirits to go and set to work. The work is done by the agency of the spell, assisted by the accompanying ritual, and performed by the proper magician. The spirits stand in the same relation, as the performer does, to the magical force, which alone is active. They can help him to wield it properly, but they can never become his instruments." On p. 427 Malinowski states that "magic... is a specitic power, ... an inherent property of certain words, uttered with the performance of certain actions... The words and acts have this power in their own right, and their action is direct and not mediated by any other agency." Here the efficacy of magic is explained with the help of certain forces rather than spirits. "Much of the sympathetic magic" (said to underlie) the 'Black Art' of the Malays seems to work by control of spirits", according to Endicott (1970: 174). This is true to the extent that the manipulation of wax figures has been said to serve the purpose of giving the spirits an example of what is expected of them (Wilkinson, 1906: 73). The medicines of the Zulu-the sympathetic associations of which with the desired cllects is often plain (Berglund, 1976: 352 f.) - are believed to contain candla power" (id.. p. 256), which is, however. not traced to any particular source Ip. 257).
These examples show that the effectiveness of magical acts is not always taken for granted, and not therefore in all cases beyond the need of some form of explanation in the eyes of those who carry them out. Yet the explanations offered by the performers in these cases seem completely inapplicable to etymologies. This does not
mean that there are no similarities. We have seen that the Vedic etymologies refer virtually without exception to a mythical reality, and that sometimes a mythrappears to have been created under the influence of the etymology concerned. In both cases a hidden reality is postulated in order to explain the effectiveness of magical acts and of the validity of etymologies respectively.
At this point it will be interesting to consider the theories of Neoplatonism. This is what, in the words of R.T. Wallis (1972: 70), Plotinus (204-270 C.E.) thought about paranormal phenomena: "In these (i.e.. paranormal phenomena) Plotinus, like virtually all his contemporaries, except the most determined atheists and materialists — by the third century A.D. a very rare species--firmly believed. Where he differed from many of them was in attempting to accommodate such phenom ena to a rational, orderly view of the world. The basis of his explanation is the Stoic doctrine of cosmic sympathy', the view that, since the world is a living organism, whatever happens in one part of it must pro duce a sympathetic reaction in every other part. It is by studying and applying the relevant forces that magicians produce their effects. One might cite here Plotinus' Enneads IV.4.40:"But how do magic spells work? By sympathy and by the fact that there is a natural concord of things that are alike and opposition of things that are different, ..." (tr. Armstrong, 1984: 26).
Neoplatonists after Plotinus frequently use the term 'theurgy'." Wallis (1972: 107) observes: "The methods of theurgy were essentially those of ritual magic, its aim the incamation of a divine force either in a material object, such as a statue, or in a human being, the result being a state of prophetic trance. Its justification, most clearly expounded in Proclus' little essay on the Hieratic Art, is the magical Principle of Correspondence', the idea, first that each part of the universe mirrors every other part, and secondly, and more important, that the whole material world is the mirror of invisible divine powers; hence, in virtue of the network of forces linking image to archetype, manipulation of
-Theurgy took as its authoritative basis the Chaldean Oracles which date from the mid-second century C.E.: see Johnston, 1997