Summary
First, a summary for those who did not decide to read the Frazer. It is a little long but I wanted everyone to have a quick reference for what he is saying, since his actual claims are scattered in the reading amongst endless strings of examples. (The 85 pages of the PDF are a little deceptive.)
For Frazer, magic is a practice and a way of thinking based on mistaken principles of thought which are held by the practitioner and believer in magic. These principles are given the character of laws of nature, universal and mechanical analogously to the laws of modern scientific thought, but (very importantly!) wrong. Magic is thus a sort of “false science” as well as a non-functional art.
The basic principle of magic is “sympathy”, i.e. action at a distance between things that are not evidently (to us) connected. Frazer repeatedly and somewhat bizarrely says that this action is supposed to be transmitted through an invisible, physical medium or “ether”. Sympathy takes two forms: the principle of similarity and the principle of contagion.
Similarity states that like affects like, and gives us imitative magic. Imitative magic has positive and negative forms. (As you can see, Frazer likes to create nested dichotomies.) The positive form consists of things (to use simple toy examples) like sprinkling water to bring rain or untying knots to ease birth: an action taken in the expectation that it will alter the world in a way that is analogous. The negative form Frazer identifies with the idea of “taboo”. It is the avoidance of an action which would bring about an undesirable result through the same principle of similarity.
Contagion states that what was once connected to something remains connected. It is, according to Frazer, frequently found mixed with imitative magic. For example, if I collect your hair and fingernail clippings, make a wax doll containing them in your likeness, and then decapitate the doll in order to kill you, I am practicing contagious magic with the aid of imitative magic.
Frazer makes one last distinction as well, between private and public magic. Private magic is obviously undertaken for private ends, public magic for the good of the community. (It’s worth noting that magic can be used for, it seems, just about anything; the definition is wholly in terms of the supposed mechanism, not the ends.)
Who does magic in Frazer’s view? Above all, it is “primitive” people, but more broadly “ignorant and dull-witted people everywhere”. The “primitive magician” never reflects upon their art, thanks to having an “undeveloped mind”. Magic is likened to “the principle of make-believe, so dear to children”. When intelligent people perform magic, they see through its falsehood and use it to gain position by deceiving their less intelligent fellows.
Magic is in fact an early stage in the development of human thought. It precedes the development of religion, from which it is fundamentally distinct. Religion is characterized, unlike magic, by the putative presence of spirits and the like. Whenever Frazer sees an offering or sacrifice integrated into a “magical” practice, he supposes this is a later “religious” element that has been grafted on. Magic itself does not involve anything but the human actors, the inanimate world, and the laws of similarity and contagion.
Discussion and questions
If you read all that, it is probably pretty clear to you that Frazer’s theory of magic doesn’t hold up. Its applicability to the material we are working with is also poor (as it is to some of his own examples, even!), especially thanks to his definitive cutting off of “magic” from “religion”. I think that Frazer would probably not recognize a curse tablet as magic, nor most of the contents of the magical papyri. Nevertheless, I think it is clear that similarity and contagion are not totally worthless concepts; they do actually seem to show up fairly regularly in “magical” practices. But the way Frazer applies this information is pernicious and leaves us wondering what we are supposed to do with this.
Frazer’s treatment of similarity and contagion, and of magic in general, is strongly focused on “how” magic works. “How” is one of the questions we will be thinking about too. Now, on a literal level, the question of “how does this work” is a fruitless one, because most magical practices don’t work (no offense to any believers in the audience).
The natural next question is “how did the people who did this think it worked?” Frazer approaches this question by observing frequent patterns in the forms of the practices he classes as magical and then making an inference about the mental contents of the practitioners. Frazer’s procedure for thinking about “how” is an “obvious” one, but it also obviously leads him astray. So what is going wrong there and how should we be thinking about “how” magic works?
There doesn’t seem to be anything intrinsically wrong with Frazer’s starting point, which is exegesis and pattern-matching on the basis of the materials themselves. In fact, there are plenty of patterns to be found. The fact that so many “magical” practices are open to exegesis in terms of similarity and contagion (or the power of words and names, or “mana”, or the agency of invisible beings…) is certainly very interesting (though we should be more careful than Frazer about this!). We can also find patterns in more specific bodies of material, such as curse tablets.
But what do these patterns actually signify? Frazer’s answer is that the patterns directly reflect how the practitioners, as a whole, think these practices work. One fundamental problem here is that there is in fact no need for someone who performs a “magical” act to have any particular theory of how it works. So long as this person is convinced that it does work, or at least thinks that it is worth a try, the mechanism need not be relevant. In fact, somebody might do “magical” things for reasons entirely irrelevant to whether they work, e.g. modern youths using a ouija board. So patterns in the practices don’t necessarily tell us anything about the mindsets of their practitioners.
Now, some people did record ideas on how magic worked. Maybe we can check what Iamblichus has to say. But he is obviously writing with an agenda and trying to shoehorn everything into his own Neoplatonic framework. His reading of how something works could be totally (and deliberately) contrary to someone else’s. Iamblichus is fascinating in his own right, of course. But is he exactly what we are looking for?
So if a practice doesn’t “actually work”, if the views of “ordinary practitioners” are not really accessible and might not be useful if they were, and if the limited ancient theories we do have access to are inevitably just one guy’s opinion, what do we do? Can we even ask “how”, or should we limit ourselves just to “reading” the artifacts and the practices they attest without imputing a definite mechanism?
Furthermore, does the argument I’m making here even hold up? I personally would be pleased if it did not hold up. I want to know how magic works…
But if what I have been saying does hold up, what does that mean for attempts to define magic? There is a decent subset of historical attempts at definition that rely on “how”. Frazer’s sympathetic magic is one example. There’s also “mana”, and the old idea that magic works by compelling spiritual beings or is otherwise deterministic as opposed to the less mechanical domain of religion. Obviously these views have other problems, but should “how” be excluded from attempts at definition in general?