Sympathetic magic

Most prehistoric shamans were concerned with using magic to help with the success of the hunt. They painted pictures on the walls of caves of the types of animals that the hunters desired. It is believed that this practice was a type of sympathetic magic, based on the idea that like attracts like. By painting a picture of a deer or a bison, the prehistoric shaman hoped to draw the actual animal to the hunter. Perhaps he or she believed that the picture captured the animal s soul and that the body would follow. 

Sympathetic-magic-based traditional Chinese and Japanese medicine is usually worse than useless, as illustrated by the 100% infant mortality (n = 9) inflicted on the family of Emperor Meiji, until its practitioners were displaced by Western-trained doctors in the 1880s (D. Keane, Emperor of Japan Meiji and His World, 1852-1912, Columbia University Press, 2002). 

In the past, most people believed in sorcery, sympathetic magic, and witchcraft. Men have a powerful need to perceive the causes of natural disasters, epidemics, personal misfortunes, and death. Magic and witchcraft supply a primitive theory for explaining such occurrences, and appropriate methods for coping with them. 

The suggestion of a parallelism and a potential reciprocity between jewels and people was reinforced by the idea that jewels could act directly on bodies, effectively by a sort of sympathetic magic. This is an idea evocatively captured by Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray, when we read how Dorian s aesthetic sensibilities led him to collect jewels ... 

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