A cognitive account of manipulative sympathetic magic

ABSTRACT

Frazer’s theory of sympathetic magic has been extremely influential in both anthropology and comparative religion, yet the manipulative aspect has not been adequately theorized. In this paper, I formalize sympathetic magical action and offer a naturalistic explanation of manipulative sympathetic magic by attributing it to a combination of environmental regularities (i.e., things that are similar and/or physically proximate tend to co-vary) and human causal cognition (i.e., the tendency to mistake correlation as causation), and supply ample ethnographic and historical evidence for my arguments. In doing so I also specify the variables involved and re-classify sympathetic magic into four distinct types for analytic convenience.

KEYWORDS:

• Sympathetic magic
• causal cognition
• spatial autocorrelation
• evolutionary psychology

Acknowledgements

I thank Manvir Singh for his continued encouragement, Joseph Henrich for providing helpful comments, and Tiffany Hwang for carefully proofreading the final draft of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Although Tylor (1871) had already described magic practice in traditional, small scale societies and alluded to some general principles, he never formally proposes sympathetic magic the way Frazer did.

2 Today, we know that he was almost certainly wrong about the magic-religion-science developmental stages of human social and cultural evolution based on ethnographic and archeological knowledge accumulated over the past century.

3 Though it is possible that some of the “sympathetic magic” usage during the 20th century occurred in the context of criticizing it for not being a useful analytic category, it is highly unlikely that such uses of the term could account for such a consistently high frequency of its occurrence.

4 It should be pointed out that the phenomenon of quantum entanglement in physics resembles manipulative sympathetic magic principles, where change in one particle may induce change in a different particle at some considerable distance (Popkin, 2018). However, quantum entanglement was discovered rather late in human history, and it was unlikely that such phenomena (often unobservable to the naked eye) would have influenced the cognitive evolution of our species.

5 Note that to my knowledge this is the only example of experimental evidence showing manipulative sympathetic magic in contemporary western societies. However, the fact we usually do not observe such biases in contemporary modern societies does not mean these biases do not exist; rather, they may be triggered in particular social and cultural context and under the appropriate conditions lead to the development of concrete beliefs and practices. As I alluded to in the main text, The prevalent mechanistic worldview in modern societies may have profoundly influenced our intuitions regarding what’s possible (manipulative sympathetic magic would be deemed largely impossible); additionally, people’s everyday inferences are rarely affected by manipulative sympathetic magical intuitions (similarity and contagion) alone, but rather almost always a result of multiple psychological, social, and cultural factors.

6 In fact, of course, such covariation is caused by unobserved variables (pathogens).

7 There are very few informants who think that in performing this ritual the illness is transmitted to the chicken as well (therefore the patient is healed after such transfer). However, most people seem to think that it only diagnoses rather than cures, and additional healing procedures (usually in the form of propitiating the aggressive ancestral spirits and sending them away) need to be performed to cure the patient.

8 For a discussion on the adaptationist-byproduct debate on the evolution of religion, see Sosis (2009).

9 Presumably, “essence link” could be defined this way, but this would not add to our understanding of the phenomenon.

10 Both gong and shang are notes of traditional Chinese pentatonic scales.

11 Note that unlike the previous two examples of cosmic harmony where different events/entities are linked via a mechanistic pattern (under the implicit assumption of the fundamental patterns in the physical universe), the yawning case is based on social perception of empathy that is also observed in other primates (Anderson et al., 2004).

12 More precisely, the present paper only accounts for evolved intuition regarding sympathetic magical actions: i.e., why we find similarity and contagion as attractive causal principles. For other work that looks at the evolved aspect of magical thinking, see Legare and Souza (2012), Singh (2017), and Boyer (2020).

13 Keith Thomas, the celebrated historian of medieval magic comments that “ … once their initial premises are accepted, no subsequent discovery will shake the believer’s faith, for he can explain it away in terms of the existing system. Neither will his convictions be weakened by the failure of some accepted ritual to accomplish its desired end, for this too can be accounted for … The reaction against magic could thus never come from the cumulative resentment of disappointed clients. It had to arise from outside of the system altogether” (Thomas, 1971/2003, pp. 767–768).