The first year · Lesson 14
Like Produces Like
Frazer’s tour of imitative magic, from the war-path to the tides
Picture a Huichol woman in Mexico, about to start her weaving. Her husband holds a big snake in a forked stick. She strokes its back from end to end, then strokes her own forehead and eyes. She wants her patterns to be as fine as the snake’s. Last time you met Frazer’s two laws. Today we stay with the first one, like produces like, and follow it all over the world. It is a long reading, close to 8,000 words, so take it in two sittings.
The reading
- Chapter III: Sympathetic Magic, paragraphs 29–52 The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (abridged edition), pp. 24–36 · about 7,895 words, 39 min The rest of section 2, “Homoeopathic or Imitative Magic”: Frazer’s examples of the Law of Similarity, from friends far apart to plants, animals, stones, the tides and the shapes of towns.
About 39 minutes in all. Each link opens the book at the first paragraph.
Before you read
- Two sittings work well. Stop near the end of page 29, after Frazer says that “action and reaction are equal and opposite.” The second half starts with the dead on page 30. Each half is about twenty minutes.
- A short reminder. Frazer wrote in 1922, and he uses the words of his time, like “savage,” “primitive” and “rude.” Those are his words, not ours. The people in his stories were as clever as anyone. They just started from different ideas about how the world works.
- This part is one long list of examples, sorted by what the magic works on. First come friends far away, then plants, the dead, animals, stones, the sea and the shapes of things. Look for the first sentence of a new group. It names the kind of magic, and the examples follow. The quiz asks about some of them.
- Some examples are grim, like the thieves’ charms made from the dead. Frazer reports them; he never says they work. Read them as a record of what people feared and hoped. Watch his tone, too. He is often dry, and sometimes he pokes fun.
In a nutshell
Friends far away (pages 24 to 28)
Frazer picks up where lesson 13 stopped. People who are far apart were thought to stay linked. So the families at home kept rules while the men were away. The men might be gathering goods in the forest, sailing to a far port, or fighting a war. Some rules say what not to do. Others are acts, like dances and mock battles, that copy the result the family wants. Frazer is gentle here. He says the aim was loving, even when the means look strange to us. He also notes, sadly, that the rules did not keep the men safe.
Plants and people (pages 28 to 29)
Next, magic to make crops grow. People act out the growth they want, so the plants will copy it. Frazer then says a person’s own state can pass into a plant, for good or bad. That belief leads to rules about what not to do near crops. He calls such rules negative magic, or taboo. Last, he turns it around. A plant can pass its own nature into a person, too, by being eaten or used.
The dead, animals and stones (pages 30 to 34)
The dead cannot see, hear or speak. So, Frazer says, things from the dead were used to make the living sleep or keep still. Thieves are the main users in his stories. Animals come next. People hoped to get an animal’s gift, such as speed, a sharp eye or toughness, by wearing it or eating it. Then stones. All stones are heavy and firm, so they were used to make things last. Some stones were special because of their shape or colour. Here Frazer stops for a big claim about magic and religion. He ends the group with the precious stones of the Greeks and with a star that never moves.
Tides, towns and fake disasters (pages 34 to 36)
Frazer turns to the sea. He gathers beliefs about the tides from many coasts, England’s among them. Then he goes to China, where clothes and even the shape of a town were thought to shape a person’s fate. The section ends in Madagascar. There, he says, a bad fate could be used up by acting it out in a small way.
Highlights
a mistaken ingenuity has applied the principle of homoeopathic or imitative magic
Frazer’s whole view in four words: “a mistaken ingenuity.” Ingenuity means cleverness. He thinks the reasoning is clever but starts from a wrong idea. Watch for this mix of respect and doubt all through the chapter.
All such customs of abstention or rules of avoidance are examples of negative magic or taboo.
A taboo is a “don’t” rule. Frazer says many of them are magic run backwards. You avoid an act so its likeness won’t harm the crop. English borrowed the word “taboo” from Tonga, in the Pacific, in Captain Cook’s time.
In magic, as I believe in physics, action and reaction are equal and opposite.
A joke borrowed from Newton’s laws of motion. His point is that the link runs both ways. A person can pass a quality into a plant, and a plant can pass one into a person.
For there are strong grounds for thinking that, in the evolution of thought, magic has preceded religion.
Frazer’s biggest idea in one line. He thinks people believed in magic first, and only later in gods who must be pleased. He promises to come back to it, and so will we. Many scholars now doubt that belief grew in such neat steps.
The effect is to circumvent destiny by substituting a mock calamity for a real one.
To circumvent is to get around. A small, pretend disaster takes the place of the real one that fate had planned. It is imitative magic used as a shield. Look out for it in the stories from Madagascar.
Words to know
- Homoeopathic or imitative magic
- Frazer’s name for magic built on likeness. You copy the result you want, and it is meant to follow.
- Sympathetic connexion
- A hidden link that is thought to join people or things, even when they are far apart.
- Negative magic, taboo
- Rules about what not to do, so that a bad likeness does not cause harm.
- Amulet
- A small thing worn or carried for protection or luck.
- Ebb and flow
- The tide going out (ebb) and coming in (flow, or flood).
- Geomancy
- Here, the Chinese art of judging the luck of a place by its shape and the land around it.
- Intercalary month
- An extra month added to some years, to keep a calendar in step with the seasons.
- Omen
- A sign that is thought to tell what will happen.
The real story
Our notes, not the book's.
You have met this rule before. In Chapter XV of Book I, Agrippa says that “every thing moves, and turns it self to its like.” He used it to find the hidden virtues of things. In lesson 12 it put heavy lead under heavy Saturn. Frazer calls the same rule “like produces like,” and some of his examples match Agrippa’s. Both tell of the wakeful nightingale that keeps a person awake, and both lean on Greek and Roman writers. The difference is where each man stands. Agrippa stood inside the old view of the world. For him the rule was a law of nature, and the power came down from God through the stars. Frazer stood outside it. He thought the rule was a mistake of the mind: two things look alike, so people think one must act on the other. Here the books and the facts part, since likeness alone does not make one thing act on another. Still, reading the two side by side is worth it. You see one old idea from the inside and from the outside, and after that you notice it everywhere.
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.