SPELL, a word of Teutonic origin meaning something "spo ken." In general terms, the belief underlying the use of spells is that the wish that they embody will be fulfilled, regardless of its goodness or badness, so long as the formula has been cor rectly pronounced. Broadly speaking, then, spell and prayer, like magic and religion to which they severally belong, can be dis tinguished by the nature of the intended purpose.
Ritual is to be seen in relation to its moral context as a whole. For instance, the judicial oath may have lost some of its special significance as a religious act of binding force, but, taken in connection with the solemn endeavour, of which it forms a part, to administer justice in the light of the truth, its validity can hardly be said to have been affected. Or, again, charges of formalism as regards the details of religious worship are reck lessly bandied about, when the spirit and not the letter of the observance should alone be regarded as relevant to the issue. Next, as regards the criterion of intelligibility, we must make sure in using it that we are not making our own ignorance the measure of the intrinsic value of the rite alleged to be without meaning. Just as any foreign tongue is gibberish to the unlearned, so we may be deaf to the most eloquent symbolism if we have not a key to the sense.
To take an example from Australia, if members of the witch etty grub totem desire to secure a harvest of these grubs for the benefit of the community, they repair in procession to cer tain stones that remind them by their shape of witchetty grubs and rub their stomachs with these stones, thus indicating the precise destination to which the symbolized delicacies are meant to find their way. Moreover, this pantomime is reinforced by oral means in the solemn declaration, "We have eaten much food"; where, let the perfect tense be noted, as if for the man of faith the thing were as good as done.
The chief deity of the Masai goes by the name that simply means "The Rain"; and the simplest of their rites consists in crying out "Rain! Rain!" in chorus (see PRAYER). Here the question whether this is prayer or spell ought not to turn on the degree of personality attaching to the god, and still less on a grammatical point such as the possible use of the imperative mood. Surely the religious character of the whole proceeding is sufficiently established by the fact that "The Rain" is for the Masai, the reputed giver of all good things.
In primitive rite the verbal formula tends to be accessory to the dramatic part of the procedure. Sometimes it is but descrip tive of the action, "We are doing so and so," though sometimes the purpose is added, "We are doing so and so, that so and so may happen." Thus the efficacy of the rite, words and all, is apt to seem self-contained. The rite has mana (q.v.), which is almost to say "It works, I know not why" in one pregnant word. Cor respondingly, it becomes a perilous instrument for the ordinary man to handle, and its use is reserved for the man with mana the expert who is strong enough to wrestle with mysteries. Now to be vested with esoteric attributes in one's own eyes no less than in the eyes of the rest bears hard on the weakness of the flesh. True, the wonder-worker may be ready to admit that his mana possesses him rather than he it. An Australian medicine man, for instance, who had given way to European strong drink, became convinced that his healing power had left him and in a spirit of befitting humility retired from practice. Or, again, we have the Malay wizard whose spell explicitly announces that some power greater than himself is working through him : "It is not I that am burying him (in the form of a waxen image), it is Gabriel who is burying him." In Melanesia and elsewhere a man owns a ritual and charms so completely that he can bequeath them to a son. Nay, he can even sell them in the open market, and in such a case we expressly learn that the oral part of the rite—the muttered spell—is what the money is paid for, since it is what the owner can most easily hide and so keep to himself. At this point the spell has clearly become a non-moral thing, a mere trade secret. It will degenerate still further into abracadabra. The folklorist is constantly coming across oral survivals in the mouths of peasants that once were medical recipes or even prayers couched in Latin. Afterwards, when reduced to mere rigmarole, these have been treasured by the unlettered for the sake of the sheer mystery lurking in the unfamiliar sounds. (R. R. M.) BIBLIOGRAPHY.—W. Hertmuller, Im Namen Jesu (1903) ; R. R. Marett, "From Spell to Prayer" in The Threshold of Religion (1914) W. W. Skeat, Malay Magic. See also MANA ; PRAYER ; RITUAL.