An important consequence of thus giving the study of primitive religion the wide scope of a comparative hierology is that magic is no longer divorced from religion, since the sacred will now be found to be coextensive with the magicoreligious, that largely undifferentiated plasm out of which religion and magic slowly take separate shape as society comes more and more to contrast legitimate with illicit modes of dealing with the sacred.
On the whole, however, savage society tends to regard it as something acquired, the product of acts and abstinences having a traditional character for imparting magicoreligious virtue.
Hence the magicoreligious society or individual practitioner piles ceremony on ceremony, name of power on name of power, relic on relic, to consolidate the forces within reach and assume direction thereof.