Sympathetic Magic
The practice of magic is a rich and evolving area, ranging from simple visualization work through more elaborate practices involving cords or candles up to high ritual working where a group works together to raise power for some purpose.
One area of magic that has almost certainly been around and practiced as long as humans have been around is Sympathetic magic. Sympathetic magic has two main branches. These were described by Sir James George Frazer (1854-1941) in the book The Golden Bough as Law of Similarity and the Law of Contact or Contagion. The law of contagion suggests that two objects once in contact will in some manner retain a link even after they have been separated.
Of course many dismiss Magic and see a belief that there could possibly be a strange and undetectable connection between two things simply because at one time they were in contact with each other as obvious nonsense. After all science simply doesn’t allow for such things, for one thing to have an impact on the behaviour of another there has to be a link, something that will carry the information from one place, one thing, to another. Even when thinking of atoms for example scientists will talk in terms of force carriers. Even gravity is thought to be carried by a strange particle called a graviton, though they have had very limited, that is to say no, success in actually detecting such a particle a I write.
So goes the thinking, ‘Sympathetic magic simply cant be worth even investigating as there is no way that something done to one object could possibly effect another remote object because we would be able to detect the carrier of the influence, and we cant!’
Well as Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington who was a Professor of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge said,
“Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”
And in that he was definitely correct.
The world of Quantum physics is a world where the strange is an everyday occurrence. One area of this field of study was predicted by Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, and several papers by Erwin Schrödinger who predicted that when two particles are “entangled” one particle of an entangled pair “knows” what measurement has been performed on the other, and with what outcome, even though there is no known means for such information to be communicated between the particles, which at the time of measurement may be separated by arbitrarily, that is to say extremely, large distances.
In recent years scientists have been entangling larger and larger objects in more and more controlled ways and separating them by larger and larger distances, but still the method of communication, the way the two things manage to effect each other, remains a mystery.
Now I wouldn’t want to suggest that this phenomena is the mechanism behind Sympathetic magic, but it does give us food for thought, it does show that the universe isn’t adverse to the concept behind at least one branch of sympathetic magic and of course begins to show that things, people, rocks, planets and butterflies, are not the discrete, individual, isolated and wholly autonomous objects that many would like us to think but are existing in a reality where intimate and extensive links exist between them at every level.