Magic

History of Magic

The principles of magical thinking were first identified by James Frazer in The Golden Bough, his extensive, 12-volume compilation of magical beliefs and practices from cultures worldwide. Frazer concluded that two underlying principles, either alone or in combination, explained the entirety of those beliefs and practices, and he referred to them as the “sympathetic magical laws of contagion and similarity.” Frazer construed these laws as universals of the human mind based in associative thinking; simply stated, thinking is magical when associations between ideas are mistaken for real-world connections.

According to the law of contagion, once contact has occurred between two people or objects, a lasting or permanent sympathetic bond is established between them (summarized as “once in contact, always in contact”). This bond occurs through transmission or exchange of soul-stuff or essence. Even after physical separation, a sympathetic bond remains through the shared essence, which allows for the voodoo practice of using a lock of hair or used item of clothing to exert influence over the individual from whom it was taken.

In magic, based on the law of similarity, an image stands in for the object it represents, as when an effigy is used, or the image is used to attract, bring about, or drive out the event it represents. Examples include the doctrine of signatures as a basis for plant medicine, wherein a plant that superficially resembles a symptom or body part is assumed to have healing properties that match that symptom or body part (e.g., walnuts for ailments of the head because of their physical resemblance to the brain).

The study of magical thinking in human psychology and life-span development has an uneven history as a subject of scientific inquiry. Taking his lead from Frazer’s work, Sigmund Freud became interested in magical thinking, describing it as characteristic of the unconscious mind and primary process thinking and exploring its role in dreams and psychopathology (both neurosis and [Page 1318]psychosis). Subsequently, Jean Piaget mapped a developmental course for magical thinking in children and examined its presumptive decline over the course of maturation. Both considered magic primitive in its lack of differentiation between one’s inner psychological world of ideas and the external world of cause and effect. Except for isolated studies of assessment instruments for magical thinking as a means of identifying psychosis proneness, and clinical descriptions of magical thinking in children, magic within psychology was considered an inherently unscientific concept. However, anthropologists continued to explore it as a social institution, construing magic as serving functions ranging from flawed attempts to gain control under conditions of uncertainty (Bronislaw Malinowski) to purely expressive, metaphysical, or symbolic goals (Stanley Tambiah) to essentially stylistic or idiomatic differences, rather than substantive differences, from Western scientific thinking (Robin Horton).

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