The Laws of Association

Occult Psychology Extended from Sympathetic Magic

I. CONTAGIOUS SIMILARITY

Students of modern occult history will know that Edwin Tylor (1879), James Frazer (1895), and Marcel Mauss (1902) proposed several “laws of sympathetic magic.”

One was the law of contagion. This principle says: once in contact, always in contact. I.e., when objects make physical contact, their "essences” may be permanently transferred. Contiguity allows the properties of one substance to be acted upon via the other substance. Thus, a tiny bit of your gorgeous hair contains some of your intrinsic identity (or general information pattern) simply because it was touching you, growing out of you, etc., and I can therefore affect you by performing actions upon a lock of that gorgeous hair.

Although this describes a sensemaking style that today we identify as explicitly pre-rational and pre-modern, it also has certain resonances with holography (the part contains the whole) and quantum entanglement (two physical systems in resonance with each other continue to operate as a single information system regardless of their conventional distance apart).

Another magical principle was the law of similarity, which holds that “like begets like.” I.e. causes formally resemble their effects. Appearance equals subtle reality. According to the logic of the World of Forms, a vegetable that looks like a phallus or vulva has a higher-than-normal likelihood of being an aphrodesiac. Etc. Or if you remember the “voodoo doll” from Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom, it is presumed to affect him magically BECAUSE it resembles him.

Again, this “law” is clearly characteristic of preformal cognition in the Piagetian sense, and a premodern episteme in Foucault’s sense, but some philosophical pushback against its presumed primitivism is possible.

Famously, Rupert Sheldrake has argued for a notion of morphogenetic causation in a cosmos of probability fields. Shapes have real effects in that scenario. Others have argued that the human brain’s perception of similarities is non-arbitrary. Our subconscious intelligence invents similarity precisely in order to register actual potencies and connections too complex for the conscious mind to track clearly.

Regardless of whether we treat these two “laws” as merely primitive or as potentially transrational, nonetheless, we can discern that they are both principles of association.