Book of Shadows

Sympathetic Magic

Sympathetic magic is using a symbol to represent the thing you want to affect with your magic. Whatever you do to the symbol, you do to the target. The Hollywood version of sympathetic magic is "voodoo dolls"— pricking the doll with a pin will hurt the person it represents in that particular place. Obviously, this is over-dramatized. Most sympathetic magic is not so malicious, but the basic idea is the same. The object and the thing it represents are "in sympathy"; they are aligned. Whatever you do to the symbol, you do to the target. A more benign version of the "voodoo doll" would be stuffing the doll with herbs to heal a person, or performing a banishment by burying the doll and letting it decompose along with whatever you want to banish. I don't use poppets (dolls) myself, because I've seen too many movies, but sympathetic magic doesn't have to involve poppets.

Sympathetic magic is a useful idea because often, your target is something non-physical, or something you can't otherwise interact with directly. It's always much easier to work with tools or symbols than it is to work directly with something non-physical. You could banish negative thoughts directly, but it's easier to tie them to something physical by writing them down and then burning the paper. As the paper burns, so does the negativity. A lot of spells are based in sympathetic magic. Many spells involve affecting a physical object to achieve a non-physical result. Correspondences are related to this. For example, different-colored candles represent different desires (like green for money, red for love, black for banishment, etc.) and as the candle burns down, your spell is cast. Wearing different stones or crystals can attract luck or success or [fill in the blank] to you. Putting symbols of gods on your altar (such as a small statue of an owl to represent Athena) will help draw them to you. Can you do magic without any of these things? Of course. But it's a lot easier to use them!