Sympathetic magic

“ 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 sympathy, 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 other through a space which appears to be empty. ”

“ In some cases of magic which have come before us we have seen that the operation of spirits is assumed, and that an attempt is made to win their favour by prayer and sacrifice. But these cases are on the whole exceptional; they exhibit magic tinged and alloyed with religion. Wherever sympathetic magic occurs in its pure unadulterated form, it assumes that in nature one event follows another necessarily and invariably without the intervention of any spiritual or personal agency. Thus its fundamental conception is identical with that of modern science ”

“ Long then before any Sun or Star gods could be called in, the return of the Vegetation must have enthralled man’s attention, and filled him with hope and joy. Yet since its return was somewhat variable and uncertain the question, What could man do to assist that return? naturally became a pressing one. It is now generally held that the use of Magic—sympathetic magic—arose in this way. Sympathetic magic seems to have been generated by a belief that your own actions cause a similar response in things and persons around you. ”

“ Most of them will be seen to be based on the primitive and worldwide principle of sympathetic magic,—the principle that a relation, analogy, or sympathy existing, or being once established, between two objects, that which the one does or suffers, will be done or suffered also by the other. ”

“ As the concepts by which primitive man justifies to himself his beliefs and practices are naturally vague and hazy, it may seem futile to attempt to reconstruct his reasoning. Nothing final or definite can be asserted on so obscure a topic. But we may legitimately discuss the most consistent and most probable way in which to account for the various forms of sympathetic magic. ”

“ That thought, if I am right, is the possibility of establishing a sympathetic relation with an animal, a spirit, or other mighty being, with whom a man deposits for safe-keeping his soul or some part of it, and from whom he receives in return a gift of magical powers. ”

“ Under the caption of remedies for witchcraft and possession by demons are found such procedures as smearing the walls of the house with the blood of a black dog or burying a reed filled with quicksilver under the threshold. A recipe to rescue a patient from infatuation in love produced by sorcery is hardly translateable, but affords too good an example of sympathetic magic or of human psychology to be omitted entirely. ”

“ 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 well-being and that of his fellow-men.
Sympathetic magic. ”

“ While imitative magic works through fancied resemblance, contagious magic is based on the principle that what has once been together must remain forever after in a sympathetic relation, so that what is done to one affects the other. ”

“ To all of these forms of magic, or spiritualism, the presence and aid of ‘spirits’ is believed to be necessary, with, perhaps, the exception of the sportive or conjuring class. A spirit helps to cure and helps to kill. The free spirit of the clairvoyant in bondage meets other spirits in its wanderings. Anthropologists, taking it for granted that ‘spirits’ are a mere ‘animistic hypothesis’—their appearances being counterfeited by imposture—have paid little attention to the practical magic of savages, as far as it is not merely sympathetic, and based on the doctrine that ‘like cures like’. ”

“ Almost every poem in Sympathetic Magic boasts an admirable image or two. Brown can write, without a doubt. POETRY CANADA POESIE ...wry humour. The poet revels in image and can use it well. Paul Cameron Brown is capable of interesting, even arresting work. CANADIAN BOOK REVIEW ANNUAL 1985 Le voyage exotique devient parfois fantistique... Se plonger dans les pages de "Sympathetic Magic", c' est partir pour un autre monde oil Paul Cameron Brown envoute par les mots et les images. ”

“ Turner these rascals are on the highroad to divinity. The process which they employ to accomplish their ends is a simple application of the principles of contagious magic: whatever has once been in contact with a person remains in sympathetic connexion with him always, and harm done to it is therefore harm done to him. ”

“ This belief in the sympathetic influence exerted on each other by persons or things at a distance is of the essence of magic. Whatever doubts science may entertain as to the possibility of action at a distance, magic has none; faith in telepathy is one of its first principles. A modern advocate of the influence of mind upon mind at a distance would have no difficulty in convincing a savage ”

“ But the possibility of their being so used depends upon the supposed sympathetic connexion between them and the man from whom they were severed. And if this sympathetic connexion still exists, clearly these severed portions cannot be destroyed without injury to the man. ”

“ But we can deride all its threats, you and I. For myself, I own frankly I take all the safety that the charms and resources of magic bestow. You, for your safety, have the cultured and disciplined reason which reduces all fantasies to nervous impressions; and I rely on the courage of one who has questioned, unquailing, the Luminous Shadow, and wrested from the hand of the magician himself the wand which concentred the wonders of will! ”

“ Madness, then, in him, had lit up, as if by lightning-flashes, the hidden links of distant and divergent things; perhaps in somewhat the same manner as that in which a similarly new, startling, perhaps over-true sight of things is gained by the artificial stimulation of haschisch, opium, and those other drugs by which vision is produced deliberately, and the soul, sitting safe within the perilous circle of its own magic, looks out on the panorama which either rises out of the darkness before it, or drifts from itself into the darkness. ”

“ As the magician after having summoned up and marshalled before him a phantasmagoria of shadowy figures, at length perceives them fading from his sight, and, conscious that the spell is fast departing, lays down his rod, so we, approaching to the end of our task, find that the charm is beginning to lose its power, and that the beings we have conjured up are melting rapidly from our vision. Even now they seem to us only as a dream. Yet there is one glimpse more afforded to us before the magic curtain falls on them forever. ”

“ He did everything by incantations; he never worked his intellect. If he had stepped in there and used his eyes, instead of his disordered mind, he could have cured the well by natural means, and then turned it into a miracle in the customary way; but no, he was an old numskull, a magician who believed in his own magic; and no magician can thrive who is handicapped with a superstition like that. ”

“ I, too, would like to hold the magic wand giving that command over laughter and tears which is declared to be the highest achievement of imaginative literature. Only, to be a great magician one must surrender oneself to occult and irresponsible powers, either outside or within one's breast. We have all heard of simple men selling their souls for love or power to some grotesque devil. The most ordinary intelligence can perceive without much reflection that anything of the sort is bound to be a fool's bargain. ”

“ And yet he and his clerk believed and solemnly affirmed, that they had heard the mysterious blows! This dualism, which, as it were, divides man into two beings, one of whom follows and watches the other, while both are unconscious of their identity, is the magic element in these phenomena. This unconsciousness, proving—as in dreams—the inactivity of our reason, produces the natural effect, that we fancy all ghostly appearances are foolish, wanton and wicked. ”

“ And you that sought for magic in your youth but desire it not in your age, know that there is a blindness of spirit which comes from age, more black than the blindness of eye, making a darkness about you across which nothing may be seen, or felt, or known, or in any way apprehended. And no voice out of that darkness shall conjure me to grant a spell against magic. ”

“ The mystic is “in love with the Absolute” not in any idle or sentimental manner, but in that vital sense which presses at all costs and through all dangers towards union with the object beloved. Hence, whilst the practice of magic—like the practice of science—does not necessarily entail passionate emotion, though of course it does and must entail interest of some kind, mysticism, like art, cannot exist without it. We must feel, and feel acutely, before we want to act on this hard and heroic scale. ”

“ The boy who despised discipline and sought to extort her secrets from nature by magic, was destined to become the philanthropist who dreamed of revolutionizing society by eloquence, and the poet who invented in "Prometheus Unbound" forms of grandeur too colossal to be animated with dramatic life. ”

“ A Titan of the spirit, he would mount the very heavens, and snatch from the universe its inmost secrets. And so, despairing of finding truth by ordinary means, he has recourse to supernatural methods. Opening his book of magic, he sees the symbol of the Macrocosmos; and at once the scales fall from his eyes; he is confronted directly by the secret forces of nature working together in glorious harmony. At last, for a moment, joy wells up in his heart; he asks himself whether he has not become a god. ”

“ Every one who has been to the place will attest the beneficial effect of this rite, and so deeply rooted is the belief in the influence of magic in the minds of these people that even those who may have wished to free themselves from what they almost admit to be a superstition, say that they are led back by the incontrovertible evidence they see of its effects on the persons against whom it is employed. ”

“ And in that soul the magic second glows and lingers, stretching into minutes, hours, days—aye, days and days, till, if the magic hold, the calm years crowd on one by one; and yet it all is but a second—that magic moment that comes on the tide of time—that came to me and was caught up in my life's whirl as I fell, dropping there between sky and earth. ”

“ Once when a man with a wound in his mouth, which bled constantly, came to the missionaries to be treated, his faithful wife took great pains to collect all the blood and cast it into the sea.​ [749] Strained and unnatural as this idea may seem to us, it is perhaps less so than the belief that magic sympathy is maintained between a person and his clothes, so that whatever is done to the clothes will be felt by the man himself, even though he may be far away at the time. ”

“ False analogy, the doctrine of sympathies, the belief in spirits that had and in spirits that had not been men, these things, with perhaps an inkling of hypnotism, produced the faith in magic. Magic once believed in the world became a topsy-turvy place, in which metamorphoses and necromancy and actual conversation with the beasts became probable in man's fiction and possible in man's life. ”

“ He practiced the arts of magic no more, but his life was happy, and not only because he had found his own again, but chiefly because, when his bitterest foes who had done him deadly wrong lay at his mercy, he took no vengeance on them, but nobly forgave them. ”

“ But the cruelty of creation was not content with setting her loose in the world of created things with the gift of beauty and holiness in her hand. It had veiled her also with the mysterious magic that was simple enough and directly compelling enough to rouse the beast of jealousy, the beast of mastery, in the hearts of men. ”

“ Mystery-cults and sacraments, the lineal descendants of magic, all contain rites charged with suggestion, with symbols, with gestures, with half-understood formularies, with all the apparatus of appeal to emotion and will—the more unintelligible they are the better they serve their purpose of inhibiting thought. Thus ritual deadens the intellect and stimulates will, desire, emotion. "Les operations magiques... sont le resultat d'une science et d'une habitude qui exaltent la volonte humaine au-dessus de ses limites habituelles." ”

“ In time the fallacy of this belief becomes apparent to him: he discovers that there are things he cannot do, pleasures which he is unable of himself to procure, pains which even the most potent magician is powerless to avoid. The unattainable good, the inevitable ill, are now ascribed by him to the action of invisible powers, whose favour is joy and life, whose anger is misery and death. Thus magic tends to be displaced by religion, and the sorcerer by the priest. ”