1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Magic/Sympathy

Sympathy.—That the law of sympathy is an essential element of magic is admitted equally by the associationist school and by its critics. Under the head of sympathy are embraced the laws of contiguity or contagion, of similarity or homoeopathy, and of contrariety or antipathy.

a. In its simplest form the law of contiguity asserts that whatever has once formed part of a body continues to form part of it or to represent it for magical purposes; thus, by obtaining possession of the parings of a person’s nails, or the clippings of his hair, and by working magic upon them, it is held to be possible to produce on the actual human body the effects which are in reality produced on the object of the magical rite. As is clear by the well-known case of the “life index,” the current of magical power may pass in either direction; if the life of a man is supposed to be bound up with the life of a tree, so that any injury to the tree reacts on the man, it is equally believed that the death of the man will not fail to be manifest by the state of the tree. In particular this sympathetic relation is predicated of wizards or witches and their animal familiars; it is then known by the name of “repercussion.” It is not only upon parts of the body that contagious magic can be worked; anything which has been in contact with the body, such as clothes, anything which has been in part assimilated by the body, such as the remains of food, and even representations of the body or of parts of it such as footprints, &c., may be used as objects of magical rites, in order to transmit to the human being some influence, maleficent or otherwise. The contact demanded may be actual, or mediate, for in Australia it suffices to connect the magician and his patient by a thread in order that the disease may be removed. (i) The use of clothes for magical purposes gives us perhaps the clue to the widespread custom of “rag-trees”; in nearly every part of the world it is the practice to suspend wool or rags to trees associated with some spirit, or, in Christian countries, with some saint, in order to reap a benefit; similarly nails are driven into trees or images; pins are dropped into wells, stones are cast upon cairns, and missiles aimed at various holy objects; but it cannot be assumed that the same explanation lies at the root of the whole group of practices. (ii) This law may perhaps be taken as the explanation of the “couvade”; in many parts of the world relatives, and in particular the father of a new-born child, are compelled to practise various abstinences, in order that the health of the child may not be affected, membership of the same family therefore establishes a sympathetic relation. (iii) In this direct transference of qualities is exemplified another magical process, which may also be referred to the operation of the law of sympathy; it is a world-wide belief that the assimilation of food involves the transference to the eater of the qualities, or of some of them, inherent in the source of the food; a South African warrior, for example, may not eat hedgehog, because the animal is held to be cowardly and the eater would himself become a coward; on the other hand, the flesh of lions is fit meat for brave men, because they at the same time transfer its courage to themselves.

b. The law of homoeopathy takes two forms. (i) The magician may proceed on the assumption that like produces like; he may, for example, take an image of wax or wood, and subject it to heat or other influences under the belief that it represents the human being against whom his malefice is directed, and that without any contact, real or pretended; so that any results produced on the image, which may be replaced by an animal or a portion of one, are equally produced in the human being. There need not even be any resemblance between the representation and the person or thing represented; a pot may serve to represent a village; hence step by step we pass from the representation to the symbol. (ii) The law of homoeopathy also manifests itself in the formula similia similibus curantur; the Brahman in India treated dropsy with ablutions, not in order to add to, but to subtract from, the quantity of liquid in the patient’s body. So, too, the yellow turmeric was held to be a specific for jaundice.

c. Here we approach the third class of sympathetic rites; it is clear that a remedy produces the contrary, when it cures the like; conversely, like by producing like expels its contrary.

Some statements of the law of sympathy suggest that it is absolute in its application. It is true that the current of magical power is sometimes held to be transmitted along lines indicated by the law of sympathy, without the intervention of any volition, human or otherwise; thus, the crow which carries stray hairs away to weave them into the structure of its nest is nowhere supposed to be engaged in a magical process; but it is commonly held that the person whose hair is thus used will suffer from headache or other maladies; this seems to indicate that the law of sympathy operates mechanically in certain directions, though the belief may also be explained as a secondary growth. In general the operation of these laws is limited in the extreme. For example, the medieval doctrine known as the Law of Signatures asserted that the effects of remedies were correlated to their external qualities; bear’s grease is good for baldness, because the bear is a hairy animal. But the transference was held to terminate with the acquisition by the man of this single quality; in some magical books powdered mummy is recommended as a means of prolonging life, but it is simply the age of the remedy which is to benefit the patient; the magician who removes a patient’s pains or diseases does not transfer them to himself; the child whose parents eat forbidden foods is held to be affected by their transgression, while they themselves come off unharmed. The magical effects are limited by exclusive attention and abstraction; and this is true not only of the kind of effect produced but also as to the direction in which it is held to be produced.