THE LAWS OF SYMPATHETIC MAGIC

The laws of sympathetic magic constitute a small but central subset of what might be called magical thinking. They share with the larger category that they promote beliefs about the world that are generally contrary to current scientific beliefs. However, unlike most other examples of magic, the laws of sympathetic magic do not necessarily invoke a sense of human or animate agency as a device to account for events in the world (see Nemeroff & Rozin, 2000; Tambiah, 1990, for a discussion of magical thinking in a broader context). In contrast to the larger category of magical thinking, the laws of sympathetic magic may be more tractable to experimental study for three reasons: (1) they are clearly defined; (2) they are present in abundance as modes of thought among contemporary people in developed societies; and (3) they invoke principles (e.g., contact, resemblance) that are easy to manipulate in the laboratory.

Edwin Tylor (1879), James Frazer (1895), and Marcel Mauss (1902) proposed three laws of sympathetic magic that they took to be universal principles of thinking. The law of contagion holds that “once in contact, always in contact”; when objects make physical contact, essences may be permanently transferred. Thus, fingernail parings contain the “essence” of the person to whom they were previously attached, and foods carry the “essence” of those who prepared them. The law of similarity holds either that like causes like (causes resemble their effects) or appearance equals reality.