Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941) laid out his theory of magic in The Golden Bough (first published 1890; the abridged single-volume edition most readers use appeared in 1922). His core claim: magic is a proto-science—a mistaken attempt to control the world by assuming that events are linked by fixed, repeatable laws. He famously called it "a spurious system," "a false science," and "the bastard art."
The one underlying assumption: Sympathetic Magic
All magic, for Frazer, rests on the "law of sympathy"—the belief that "things act on each other at a distance through a secret sympathy." Whatever the magician does to one thing secretly affects another connected to it. From this he derived two sub-types:
1. Homeopathic (imitative) magic — the "law of similarity"
- "Like produces like." A magician "can produce any effect he desires merely by imitating it."
- Examples: sticking pins in an effigy to harm an enemy; burning or burying a puppet to kill someone; pouring water on dry soil to summon rain; a hunter mimicking a bird's cry and holding its effigy to lure it.
- Its error, in Frazer's view: "assuming that things which resemble each other are the same."
2. Contagious magic — the "law of contact"
- Once two things touch, they remain connected forever: "whatever he does to a material object will equally affect the person with whom the object was once in contact."
- Examples: harming someone via their hair, nail clippings, teeth, umbilical cord, or placenta—the classic voodoo-doll logic, where the effigy contains the victim's real hair or nail parings.
- Its error: "assuming that things which have once been in contact with each other are always in contact."
In practice the two are usually combined: contagious magic almost always involves an imitative element.
Psychological basis & the two levels
Frazer traced both principles to association of ideas: homeopathic magic = association by similarity; contagious magic = association by contiguity (nearness/contact). He also distinguished:
- Theoretical magic – the assumed universal rules governing sequences of events (a primitive "natural law").
- Practical magic – the precepts people actually follow to get results.
He also separated positive magic ("do this so that X happens") from negative magic, i.e. taboos ("do not do this, lest X happen").
Magic → Religion → Science
Frazer placed magic in an evolutionary ladder: when humans discovered magic failed to command nature, they turned to appeasing invisible powers—religion (which he saw as religion being the "civilized offspring of primitive magic")—and eventually to genuine science. The "primitive magician," he argued, treats magic as "always an art, never a science," incapable of grasping actual laws of nature.
Legacy and criticism
His two principles of sympathetic magic remain his most enduring theoretical contribution, shaping anthropology, folklore studies, literature (e.g., Eliot, Frazer's influence on modernist myth-criticism), and Western esotericism—while the broader evolutionist scheme and the "sacred king" thesis are now largely rejected by scholars.
