The first year · Lesson 13
Like Makes Like
Frazer’s two laws of magic, and the first of his examples of homoeopathic magic
Loch Aline is a sea loch on the west coast of Scotland. A minister named James Macdonald fished there as a boy. When the fish would not bite, he and his friends pretended to throw one boy overboard and haul him out like a fish. Then, they said, the trout began to nibble. I am Nell Cobbett, and I collect stories like that one. Our guide for the last four lessons of the year is Sir James Frazer, a Scottish scholar who gathered thousands of them in his book The Golden Bough. He asked a big question: what idea lies under all these charms? Today you get his answer.
The reading
- Chapter III: Sympathetic Magic, paragraphs 1–28 The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (abridged edition), pp. 11–23 · about 7,462 words, 37 min Section 1, “The Principles of Magic,” where Frazer sets out his two laws, and the first part of section 2, “Homoeopathic or Imitative Magic,” up to the hunters’ families who keep rules at home.
About 37 minutes in all. Each link opens the book at the first paragraph.
Before you read
- This is a long reading: about 7,450 words, pages 11 to 23. Take it in two sittings. In the first, read section 1 and section 2 up to the healer in Perche, France (page 16). In the second, start with the hunters and fishermen (page 17) and read to the end. Section 1 is only two pages, but the next three lessons stand on it. Read it twice.
- Frazer wrote in 1922, and he uses the words of his time. He calls many peoples “savages” or “primitive,” and speaks of the “rude hunter” and an “undeveloped mind.” Scholars used words like these then. They ranked the world’s peoples from low to high, and that ranking was wrong. We quote Frazer, but we don’t use his words as our own. Many names are spelled the old way, too. His “Ojebway” are the people now called Ojibwe.
- Frazer piles up examples from all over the world and from every age. Don’t try to remember them all. For each one, ask which law it follows. Is it “like makes like,” or “once together, always together”? Frazer often tells you. The quiz asks about a few of the examples and the reasons he gives.
- Behind every example is a real person with a real worry: a sick child, an empty net, a husband far away. Frazer got most of them from other people’s reports, and he sometimes pokes fun. Read them as his reports, not as plain fact. And read them as history, never as charms to try.
In a nutshell
Section 1: The Principles of Magic
Frazer starts by asking what thinking lies under magic. He finds two rules, and he calls them laws. Magic built on the first law he calls homoeopathic or imitative magic. Magic built on the second he calls contagious magic. The magician, he says, believes these laws run the whole of nature, not just his charms. So Frazer calls magic a false science as well as a failed art. Both laws, he says, are mistakes in how we link ideas. The magician does not think about any of this. He just acts, and it is the scholar’s job to find the logic. Frazer puts both kinds under one name, sympathetic magic, because both say things act on each other at a distance through a hidden link. Here are the two laws in plain words.
- The Law of Similarity
- Like makes like. An effect looks like its cause, so you can make a thing happen by copying it. This gives homoeopathic, or imitative, magic.
- The Law of Contact, or Contagion
- Things that once touched go on acting on each other after they are apart. What you do to a lock of hair happens to its owner. This gives contagious magic.
Section 2: Homoeopathic or Imitative Magic (first part)
Now come the examples, and there are many. Frazer begins with the best-known use of like makes like: hurting an enemy by hurting an image of him. He shows it in ancient lands and in his own day. Then he turns to kinder uses. People acted out a birth to help a child be born, or to adopt a son. Others copied a cure, or sent an illness away into things of the same colour. Next come hunters and fishermen, who copy the catch they hope for. Then Frazer makes a new point. Magic has rules about what not to do, as well as what to do. These rules are taboos, and he says they follow the same two laws. Last, he shows magic at a distance: rules kept at home by the families of men away hunting or travelling. The reading stops in the middle of these, and the next lesson goes on with more.
Highlights
The former principle may be called the Law of Similarity, the latter the Law of Contact or Contagion.
The two names this lesson and the next three are built on. Remember Agrippa’s rule that each planet rules what is like it? Frazer would call that the Law of Similarity.
it is a false science as well as an abortive art.
Frazer’s verdict on magic. He takes it seriously as a way of reasoning about the world, but a wrong one. Many later scholars thought this missed something. A rite can also be a way to hope, to grieve, or to hold a group together.
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.
The two laws again, this time as two mistakes. Look alike, so be the same. Touch once, so touch forever. Frazer adds that the two kinds are often mixed in a single charm.
The positive precepts are charms: the negative precepts are taboos.
A charm says “do this.” A taboo says “don’t do this.” Frazer says they are two sides of the same idea. That is why his chapter on magic is full of things people were careful not to do.
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.
Here Frazer is sharp about his own day. In 1922 many people in Britain believed in telepathy. He teases them that the peoples he calls savages believed it first, and acted on it more consistently.
Words to know
- Sympathetic magic
- Frazer’s name for all magic that works, it is believed, through a hidden link between things.
- Homoeopathic or imitative magic
- Magic that follows the Law of Similarity, like makes like. Frazer borrows the word from a kind of medicine.
- Contagious magic
- Magic that follows the Law of Contact. Things that once touched stay linked.
- Taboo
- A rule against doing something, for fear that harm will follow. Frazer calls it negative magic.
- Precept
- A rule for how to act.
- Totem
- An animal or plant that a group, or clan, is linked with and named after.
- Effigy
- A figure or doll made to stand for a person or animal.
- Association of ideas
- The way one idea calls up another in the mind, because they look alike or were met together.
The real story
Our notes, not the book's.
Sir James George Frazer was born in Glasgow in 1854 and died in 1941. He was a scholar of Greek and Latin, and he spent most of his working life at Trinity College, Cambridge. He did not go out and live among the peoples he wrote about. He worked from old books, and from the reports of missionaries and travellers. Lesson 15 looks at what later scholars made of that way of working. The Golden Bough grew from two volumes in 1890 to twelve, and this one-volume short version of 1922 is the one most readers know. Read it as one clever man’s theory, written from far away. It is still worth it, for the two laws, whose names scholars still use, and for its great record of human hopes and fears.
Quiz
Answer from the notes or the reading, in any order; you can change an answer at any time. Each answer says why, with a link to the page.