The first year · Lesson 15
Once Touched
Frazer’s second branch of sympathetic magic, the magic of things that were once joined
A farm worker in Suffolk walks into a doctor’s room with a sore, swollen hand. He ran a thorn into it while cutting a hedge. The doctor tells him it is festering. The man is puzzled. He greased the thorn well after he pulled it out, so the hand should be fine. Frazer tells this story in today’s reading. You know his two laws by now, and last time we followed the first one, the magic of likeness. Today is the second, the Law of Contact. Things that once touched, people believed, stay linked for good. Every story here began with someone who was hurt or scared.
The reading
- Chapter III: Sympathetic Magic, paragraphs 53–68 The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (abridged edition), pp. 37–45 · about 4,674 words, 23 min Section 3, “Contagious Magic”: Frazer’s rule for the second branch of sympathetic magic, then his examples, from cast teeth to footprints.
About 23 minutes in all. Each link opens the book at the first paragraph.
Before you read
- Today’s reading is section 3 of Chapter III, about nine pages. The first paragraph gives the rule. The rest is examples, sorted by the kind of link. First come parts of the body that come away from it, like teeth and the navel-string. Then come wounds and the weapons that made them. Last come clothes, footprints and other marks a body leaves.
- A reminder about Frazer’s words. He wrote in 1922, and he calls many peoples “savages” or “natives” and country people “rustics.” Those words carry the old idea that some peoples were lower on a ladder. We don’t share it, and we don’t use his words as our own. When the notes say “Frazer reports,” that is because his stories came to him second hand.
- Notice that Frazer puts English and German farm folk right next to people in Australia and the Pacific. He does it on purpose. He thinks the same way of reasoning turns up everywhere. Also watch him sort his examples. Now and then he stops to say that one is really the other branch, homoeopathic magic. The quiz asks about one of those moments.
- Some passages are about birth, wounds and death, and some are about trying to harm people. Read them as reports of what people once believed. Frazer also promises more on hair, nails and the “external soul” later in the book. Those chapters are not part of our first year.
In a nutshell
The rule, and parts of the body
Frazer begins with the rule of contagious magic. Things that were once joined stay linked, even when they are far apart. So what is done to one is felt by the other. Like homoeopathic magic, he says, it rests on a mistake: two ideas get joined in the mind, and people think the things are joined in the world. His first example is the oldest and most common one: hair and nails. Then he turns to teeth. He gives customs from Australia, Africa, England, Germany and the Pacific about what must be done with a tooth that has come out. Next come the navel-string and the afterbirth. In many places, he reports, these were kept or buried with care, since a child’s luck or skill was thought to hang on them. Some peoples even called the afterbirth the child’s brother or sister. Frazer guesses this may be one root of a belief he will explore later, that a soul can be kept outside the body.
The wound and the weapon
Next comes the link between a wound and the thing that made it. Frazer starts with the Roman writer Pliny. Then he gives customs from the Pacific, and then the English thinker Francis Bacon. Bacon wrote about an ointment put on the weapon, not on the wound. Frazer then shows the same idea alive among farm workers in England and Germany in his own day. In Central Australia, he reports, a mother kept strict rules to help her son’s wound heal. He ends with a German custom that, he says, has crossed over into the other branch of sympathetic magic.
Blood, clothes, footprints and other marks
Frazer thinks the weapon link comes from the blood on it. So he turns to blood, and then to clothes, which he calls a stranger idea. In his examples, a piece of clothing is burned, roasted or beaten to make its owner suffer. Then come footprints, which he calls “world-wide.” He gives uses from Australia and Europe, and from ancient Greece. Some are meant to harm, one is a love charm, and one sealed a treaty. Hunters use the same idea on the tracks of animals. Last, he says even the mark a body leaves where it lay can be used. That, he says, explains an old rule credited to Pythagoras, the Greek thinker.
Highlights
things which have once been conjoined must remain ever afterwards, even when quite dissevered from each other, in such a sympathetic relation that whatever is done to the one must similarly affect the other.
The Law of Contact in one sentence. “Conjoined” means joined, and “dissevered” means cut apart. Every example in the reading hangs on this line.
the logical basis of Contagious Magic, like that of Homoeopathic Magic, is a mistaken association of ideas
Frazer’s verdict on both branches. People link two ideas in the mind, then think the things are linked in the world. He is a scholar explaining magic, not a believer.
the anointing of the weapon that maketh the wound will heal the wound itself.
Frazer is quoting Francis Bacon, the English thinker who died in 1626. This cure was called the weapon-salve, and learned men argued about it for years. Bacon wrote that he was not yet “fully inclined to believe it.” Frazer uses him to show the idea was not only found among farm folk.
it is a world-wide superstition that by injuring footprints you injure the feet that made them.
A footprint is not cut from the body like a tooth. But it was made by touch, and for Frazer that is enough. This opens the last part of the reading.
in rising from bed you should smooth away the impression left by your body on the bed-clothes.
An old Greek rule, said to come from Pythagoras. Frazer reads it as a guard against contagious magic. It is a good example of his method: he takes a puzzling old rule and finds the belief behind it.
Words to know
- Contagious magic
- Frazer’s name for magic based on the Law of Contact. “Contagious” comes from a Latin word for touching.
- Sympathetic
- Feeling together. In “sympathetic magic,” two things are thought to feel what happens to each other.
- Navel-string and afterbirth
- The navel-string is the cord that joins a baby to its mother before birth. The afterbirth (placenta) is the organ that comes out after the baby.
- External soul
- The belief that a person’s soul, or part of it, can be kept outside the body in some object. Frazer explores it later in the book.
- Initiation
- A ceremony that makes someone a full member of a group, such as when a boy becomes a man.
- Ether
- A substance that scientists of the 1800s thought filled all of space. Frazer compares magic’s unseen link to it.
- Spoor and quarry
- The spoor is an animal’s track. The quarry is the animal being hunted.
- Anoint
- To rub with oil or ointment.
The real story
Our notes, not the book's.
Frazer did his work in his study at Cambridge. He gathered reports by letter and from books written by missionaries, travellers and officials, and he never lived among the peoples he wrote about. The next generation of anthropologists did. In 1922, the year of this edition, Bronisław Malinowski published his book on the Trobriand Islands, based on years spent living there. Scholars like him said that Frazer’s method pulled customs out of their setting. A charm makes sense only next to the rest of a people’s life, and a list of reports from all over the world loses that. Most also doubted Frazer’s ladder from magic to religion to science. Yet his two laws, similarity and contact, are still taught and still quoted, and the book shaped writers such as T. S. Eliot. Read it for what it is: a huge, careful collection, and a clear first map of how magic was thought to work.
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.