The Golden Bough - The Original Classic Edition. Frazer Sir

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       are sought, if at all, only by prayer and sacrifice offered to superhuman and invisible beings. Thus kings are often expected to give

       rain and sunshine in due season, to make the crops grow, and so on. Strange as this expectation appears to us, it is quite of a piece

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       with early modes of thought. A savage hardly conceives the distinction commonly drawn by more advanced peoples between the natural and the supernatural. To him the world is to a great extent worked by supernatural agents, that is, by personal beings acting on impulses and motives like his own, liable like him to be moved by appeals to their pity, their hopes, and their fears. In a world so conceived he sees no limit to his power of influencing the course of nature to his own advantage. Prayers, promises, or threats may secure him fine weather and an abundant crop from the gods; and if a god should happen, as he sometimes believes, to become incarnate in his own person, then he need appeal to no higher being; he, the savage, possesses in himself all the powers necessary to further his own wellbeing and that of his fellow-men.

       This is one way in which the idea of a man-god is reached. But there is another. Along with the view of the world as pervaded by spiritual forces, savage man has a different, and probably still older, conception in which we may detect a germ of the modern no-tion of natural law or the view of nature as a series of events occurring in an invariable order without the intervention of personal

       agency. The germ of which I speak is involved in that sympathetic magic, as it may be called, which plays a large part in most systems of superstition. In early society the king is frequently a magician as well as a priest; indeed he appears to have often attained to power by virtue of his supposed proficiency in the black or white art. Hence in order to understand the evolution of the kingship and the sacred character with which the office has commonly been invested in the eyes of savage or barbarous peoples, it is essential to have some acquaintance with the principles of magic and to form some conception of the extraordinary hold which that ancient system

       of superstition has had on the human mind in all ages and all countries. Accordingly I propose to consider the subject in some detail. III. Sympathetic Magic

       1. The Principles of Magic

       IF we analyse the principles of thought on which magic is based, they will probably be found to resolve themselves into two: first, that like produces like, or that an effect resembles its cause; and, second, that things which have once been in contact with each

       other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed. The former principle may be called the

       Law of Similarity, the latter the Law of Contact or Contagion. From the first of these principles, namely the Law of Similarity, the

       magician infers that he can produce any effect he desires merely by imitating it: from the second he infers that whatever he does to

       a material object will affect equally the person with whom the object was once in contact, whether it formed part of his body or

       not. Charms based on the Law of Similarity may be called Homoeopathic or Imitative Magic. Charms based on the Law of Contact

       or Contagion may be called Contagious Magic. To denote the first of these branches of magic the term Homoeopathic is perhaps

       preferable, for the alternative term Imitative or Mimetic suggests, if it does not imply, a conscious agent who imitates, thereby

       limiting the scope of magic too narrowly. For the same principles which the magician applies in the practice of his art are implicitly

       believed by him to regulate the operations of inanimate nature; in other words, he tacitly assumes that the Laws of Similarity and

       Contact are of universal application and are not limited to human actions. In short, magic is a spurious system of natural law as

       well as a fallacious guide of conduct; it is a false science as well as an abortive art. Regarded as a system of natural law, that is, as a

       statement of the rules which determine the sequence of events throughout the world, it may be called Theoretical Magic: regarded

       as a set of precepts which human beings observe in order to compass their ends, it may be called Practical Magic. At the same time

       it is to be borne in mind that the primitive magician knows magic only on its practical side; he never analyses the mental processes

       on which his practice is based, never reflects on the abstract principles involved in his actions. With him, as with the vast majority of

       men, logic is implicit, not explicit: he reasons just as he digests his food in complete ignorance of the intellectual and physiological

       processes which are essential to the one operation and to the other. In short, to him magic is always an art, never a science; the very

       idea of science is lacking in his undeveloped mind. It is for the philosophic student to trace the train of thought which underlies the

       magician's practice; to draw out the few simple threads of which the tangled skein is composed; to disengage the abstract principles

       from their concrete applications; in short, to discern the spurious science behind the bastard art.

       If my analysis of the magician's logic is correct, its two great principles turn out to be merely two different misapplications of the

       association of ideas. Homoeopathic magic is founded on the association of ideas by similarity: contagious magic is founded on the

       association of ideas by contiguity. Homoeopathic magic commits the mistake of assuming that things which resemble each other are

       the same: contagious magic commits the mistake of assuming that things which have once been in contact with each other are always

       in contact. But in practice the two branches are often combined; or, to be more exact, while homoeopathic or imitative magic may

       be practised by itself, contagious magic will generally be found to involve an application of the homoeopathic or imitative principle.

       Thus generally stated the two things may be a little difficult to grasp, but they will readily become intelligible when they are illustrated

       by particular examples. Both trains of thought are in fact extremely simple and elementary. It could hardly be otherwise, since they

       are familiar in the concrete, though certainly not in the abstract, to the crude intelligence not only of the savage, but of ignorant and

       dull-witted people everywhere. Both branches of magic, the homoeopathic and the contagious, may conveniently be comprehended

       under the general name of Sympathetic Magic, since both assume that things act on each other at a distance through a secret sympa-

       thy, the impulse being transmitted from one to the other by means of what we may conceive as a kind of invisible ether, not unlike

       that which is postulated by modern science for a precisely similar purpose, namely, to explain how things can physically affect each

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       other through a space which appears to be empty.

       It may be convenient to tabulate as follows the branches of magic according to the laws of thought which underlie them:

       Sympathetic Magic

       (Law of Sympathy)

       |

       -------------------------------

       | |

       Homoeopathic Magic Contagious Magic

       (Law of Similarity) (Law of Contact)

       I will now illustrate these two great branches of sympathetic magic by examples, beginning with homoeopathic magic.

       2. Homoeopathic or Imitative Magic

       PERHAPS the most familiar application of the principle that like produces like is the attempt which has been made by many peoples

       in many ages to injure or