In particular, the very fluidity of mana makes it hard for religion to identify it with the good will of a personal god. It is all-pervasive, manifesting itself here, there and everywhere in the most momentary experiences of the occult. Or, even when as in the case of the living medicine-man or king it can be referred to a definite owner, it is apt to discharge itself through anything that has been in contact with him; so that, with so many transmitters in the shape of his bones or other belongings, secondary storage-cells of divine energy are distrib uted in all directions. Marra thus implies a religious experience that is primarily of the perceptual order, a frame of mind in which the sacred is simply "sensed." A conceptual attitude is not likely to come into being until the manifestation is indi vidualized by being invested with a proper name. A god, or even the merest demon who can be propitiated by name, has a chance of acquiring a personality and a moral character.
It may be, however, that little more than the binding force of the bare name is involved in the ritual invocation, as when the Roman ejaculated a number of prepos terous vocables corresponding to the parts of the door that he wished to construct rite "according to form." When nornina are thus numina and no more, the stage of mana has not been left behind; and indeed the word "numinous" has been suggested to cover the sacred in its more impersonal forms. It only remains
to add that the mana-taboo formula, together with animatism, pre-animism, dynamism, numinism, or any other terms—the now discarded word fetishism is one of them—that have been used by theorists in the same connection, may or may not apply closely to the beliefs and institutions of some particular people, and may or may not be represented by appropriate words in a given language. Their value consists entirely in such help as they may afford in describing generally a phase
the religious life in which the need of coming to terms with the mysteries that beset life at once from within and without is satisfied mainly by ritual action, running ahead of articulate and reasoned doc trine, but none the less powerfully moving.
June 190o and June 1904, first used as a general category by R. R. Marett ; see also The Threshold of Reli gion (i9i4) ; R. H. Codrington, The Melanesians, being his source for the Oceanic use of the word ; H. Hubert and M. Mauss, "Esquisse d'une theorie generale de la Magie" in L'Annie Sociologique, VII. (1904), W. Wundt, Volkenpsychologie, VI., II., Pt. II.; A. Lovejoy, "The Fundamental Concept of the Primitive Philosophy," in Monist, XVI. No. 3; "Orenda and a definition of Religion" in American Anthropologist, N.S. IV.; K. T. Preuss, "Der Ursprung der Religion and Kunst" in Globus (19o4) ; C. Fox, The Threshold of the Pacific (1924)• (R. R. M.)