Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/801

 THE ROLE OF MAGIC 787

of compelling the powers of nature, but as a part of that complex process we call "religion."

What is magic? Most of us have no very keen appreciation of the occult arts of our ancestors ; and even where we can recall the figures of those simple beings who still feel the terror of the evil eye, our impressions are dim and confused. Such confused impressions, in fact, correspond with the phenomena; for that black web of Frazer's rhetoric was woven by no logically con- structed mechanism, ruled by intelligence and controlled by will ; it is in reality nothing but stray strands knotted by convulsive movements — stray strands that oftenest break in the dawp of reason and are lost, but here and there pass on into our moral restraints and political institutions, sexual or religious or social taboos. We are all familiar with Frazer's classification of these phenomena. He has summed it up in his Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship as follows :

The principles of thought upon which magic is based appear to resolve themselves into two: first that like produces like, or that an effect resembles its cause; and, second, that things which have once been in contact continue to act on each other even after the contact has been severed. The former principle may be called the Law of Similarity, the latter the Law of Contact or Contagion. From the first of these principles — namely, the Law of Similarity — ^the magician infers that he can produce any effect he desires merely by imitating it: from the second — namely, the Law of Contact or Contagion — he concludes that whatever he does to a material object will affect equally the person with whom the object was once in contact, whether it formed part of his body or not. Charms based on the Law of Similarity may be called Homeopathic or Imitative Magic, Charms based on the Law of Contact or Contagion may be called Contagious Magic.''

A common example of homeopathic magic is the burning or spearing of the effigy or likeness of an enemy; a simpler one would be the use of yellow turnips to cure jaundice. The pages of anthropological reports are crowded with this sort of mis- application of analogy. Contagious magic is more subtle. The lover who fastens a lock of his hair to the object of his affections,

^ Op. cit., p. 37.