On Magic, re WG: "You'll want your cause and effect..."---GR

[Ian Livingston]

Anyone who has lived much around chickens knows
that roosters crow all goddamn night, and
therefore cause the darkness, not the light.

On Fri, Apr 1, 2011 at 1:54 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Magic often utilizes symbols that are thought to be intrinsically efficacious.
> Anthropologists, such as Sir James Frazer (1854–1938), have characterized the
> implementation of symbols into two primary categories: the “principle of
> similarity,” and the “principle of contagion.” Frazer further categorized these
> principles as falling under “sympathetic magic,” and “contagious magic.” Frazer
> asserted that these concepts were “general or generic laws of thought, which
> were misapplied in magic.”[10]
>
> {Seems some others have thought that Frazer might have too narrow a concept of
> 'laws of thought'....MK}
> [edit] The Principle of Similarity
> The principle of similarity, also known as the “association of ideas,” which
> falls under the category of “sympathetic magic,” is the thought that if a
> certain result follows a certain action, then that action must be responsible
> for the result. Therefore, if one is to perform this action again, the same
> result can again be expected. One classic example of this mode of thought is
> that of the rooster and the sunrise. When a rooster crows, it is a response to
> the rising of the sun. Based on sympathetic magic, one might interpret these
> series of events differently. The law of similarity would suggest that since the
> sunrise follows the crowing of the rooster, the rooster must have caused the sun
> to rise.[11] Causality is inferred where it should not have been. Therefore, a
> practitioner might believe that if he is able to cause the rooster to crow, he
> will be able to control the timing of the sunrise.
>



-- 
"Less than any man have I  excuse for prejudice; and I feel for all
creeds the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the
trust in reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments
of darkness groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates
than the simplest urchin in the streets." -- Will Durant