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
13
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
14
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