This consists in trafficking, or at any rate in being supposed to traffic, with powers of evil for sinister and anti-social ends.

We have only to remember how England, in the seventeenth century, could work itself up into a frenzy on this account to realize how, in an African society even of the better sort, the "smelling-out" and destroying of a witch may easily become a general panacea for quieting the public nerves.
When crimes and sins, affairs of state and affairs of church thus overlap and commingle in primitive jurisprudence, it is no wonder if the functions of those who administer the law should tend to display a similar fusion of aspects.

The chief, or king, has a "divine right," and is himself in one or another sense divine, even whilst he takes the lead in regard to all such matters as are primarily secular.

The earliest written codes, such as the Mosaic Books of the Law, with their strange medley of injunctions concerning things profane and sacred, accurately reflect the politico-religious character of all primitive authority.
Indeed, it is only by an effort of abstraction that the present chapter has been confined to the subject of law, as distinguished from the subject of the following chapter, namely, religion.

Any crime, as notably murder, and even under certain circumstances theft, is apt to be viewed by the ruder peoples either as a violation of taboo, or as some closely related form of sin.