"The second principle of magic: things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed"
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Frazer’s “second principle of magic” sounds like a lab note, but it’s really an x-ray of how human beings smuggle feeling into physics. He’s naming what he calls “contagious magic”: the belief that contact leaves an invisible residue, so a lock of hair, a footprint, a garment can function as a remote-control lever on the person who touched it. The line works because it borrows the calm authority of causality (“continue to act”) while describing a causality that can’t be tested. It’s a sentence built to flatter reason even as it catalogs unreason.
The subtext is sharper than the museum-case tone suggests. Frazer isn’t merely documenting exotic superstition; he’s mapping a mental habit: our hunger for continuity when separation hurts or uncertainty grows. Contact becomes proof of connection, and connection becomes a kind of guarantee. The logic is emotionally efficient: if the world is porous, then loss is never final, harm can be directed, protection can be stored.
Context matters. In The Golden Bough, Frazer arranged “magic” as a stage in cultural evolution, a proto-science that mimics scientific law with bad data. That framing carries Victorian confidence - and its blind spots. Yet the principle refuses to stay in the past. Modern life runs on sanitized versions of it: celebrity relics, heirlooms, “energy” talk, even the way we treat a message thread as if it still contains the person. Frazer meant to classify a mistaken worldview; he ended up describing a durable one, where intimacy behaves like a force and objects become evidence that we were once real to each other.
The subtext is sharper than the museum-case tone suggests. Frazer isn’t merely documenting exotic superstition; he’s mapping a mental habit: our hunger for continuity when separation hurts or uncertainty grows. Contact becomes proof of connection, and connection becomes a kind of guarantee. The logic is emotionally efficient: if the world is porous, then loss is never final, harm can be directed, protection can be stored.
Context matters. In The Golden Bough, Frazer arranged “magic” as a stage in cultural evolution, a proto-science that mimics scientific law with bad data. That framing carries Victorian confidence - and its blind spots. Yet the principle refuses to stay in the past. Modern life runs on sanitized versions of it: celebrity relics, heirlooms, “energy” talk, even the way we treat a message thread as if it still contains the person. Frazer meant to classify a mistaken worldview; he ended up describing a durable one, where intimacy behaves like a force and objects become evidence that we were once real to each other.
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| Topic | Deep |
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