concept
Sympathetic magic
Like affects like, and things once touching stay connected — two intuitions that turn out to be running quietly in modern Western heads too.
What it is
Two principles that recur across an enormous range of unrelated traditions:
The law of similarity — things that resemble each other are connected, so acting on the image acts on the thing. A figure made to represent a person, a plant shaped like an organ, a ritual imitating rain to produce rain.
The law of contagion — things once in contact remain connected after separation, so hair, nail clippings, worn clothing or a footprint carry something of the person and can be used to reach them.
The striking thing is not that these appear in traditional societies. It is that they appear everywhere, and that they are still operating in people who would deny holding them.
Where it came from
The taxonomy is James Frazer's, from The Golden Bough (1890), which distinguished homeopathic or imitative magic from contagious magic and grouped both under sympathetic magic. Frazer read enormously and organised the material clearly, and the vocabulary he supplied has outlived nearly everything else about the book.
His larger theory has not survived. Frazer proposed a universal three-stage progression — magic gives way to religion, which gives way to science — with magic as a kind of failed proto-science, a mistaken theory of causation. Anthropology abandoned this on several grounds: the stages do not appear in the record, the peoples described as magical also had entirely practical knowledge they applied correctly, and treating ritual as a botched hypothesis mistakes what most ritual is doing. Nobody plants a field by dancing instead of digging.
How it is used
Its most consequential appearance in this section is the doctrine of signatures, which is the law of similarity applied systematically to medicine.
It also underlies a great deal else: the use of personal objects in folk magic and in mediumship, protective amulets resembling what they ward off, and the widespread care taken with hair and nail clippings across many cultures.
And it is running in modern secular people, which is the genuinely interesting finding. The psychologists Paul Rozin and Carol Nemeroff demonstrated this repeatedly from the 1980s onward. Participants who watched sugar being poured into two clean bottles, and then labelled one "sodium cyanide" themselves, were reluctant to drink from that bottle — knowing the label was arbitrary and knowing the contents were sugar. Others declined to wear a laundered jumper described as having belonged to a murderer, or to eat chocolate moulded into the shape of dog faeces. Educated Western adults, tested individually, reliably behave as though similarity and contagion are real.
What we can and cannot say
We can say that as a description of a cognitive tendency, this is extremely well supported. Similarity and contagion look like default settings of human intuition rather than a doctrine anyone was taught — which explains their independent appearance across unconnected cultures far better than diffusion does.
We can say the tendency is not stupid. Contagion intuitions plausibly track something real: things that touched a sick person genuinely can carry disease, and an aversion that over-generalises from that is cheap insurance. The intuition is a heuristic doing useful work outside its range of validity.
We can say Frazer's evolutionary scheme is rejected, and that describing sympathetic magic as "primitive thinking" is doubly wrong — wrong about the peoples it was aimed at, and wrong about the people saying it, who do it too.
We cannot say the principles have any causal force. There is no evidence that acting on an image affects the thing depicted, or that separated objects remain connected in any way physics can find. The laws describe how minds work, not how matter does.
Which leaves the useful question. If these intuitions are universal, then finding a practice persuasive because it feels connected is not evidence that it is — it is evidence that you have a normal human brain. That applies to the reader and the sceptic equally, and it is worth holding on to for the rest of this section.
Further reading
- James Frazer, The Golden Bough (1890) — read for the material and the taxonomy, not the theory.
- Rozin and Nemeroff, "Sympathetic Magical Thinking" — their body of work is summarised in several accessible review chapters, and the experiments are more entertaining than the citation suggests.