Frazer categorically refutes the existence of this secret sympathy (“magic is a false science as well as an abortive art”) and explains – like Tylor (see Chapter 11) – mankind's widespread and continuous belief in “magic” as a false “association of ideas”. The text begins with Frazer's classical definition of “magic” that distinguishes two main principles – namely, the Law of Similarity and the Law of Contagion: “From the first of these principles the magician infers that he can produce any effect he desires merely by imitating it from the second he infers that whatever he does to a material object will affect equally the person with whom the object was once in contact.” Frazer assigns both principles to the superordinate concept of “sympathetic magic” as both “assume that things act on each other at a distance through a secret sympathy”. The excerpt presented here is taken from the “abridged” (one-volume) edition of The Golden Bough (1922). Magick isnt a series of words, actions, and materials that bend natural laws and warp mundane reality.

Before moving west to pursue television and film work he toured the United States for two years with the first professional cast of the American Shakespeare Company. Buy Principles of Magick by Jeffrey Pierce at Mighty Ape Australia.

Frazer, a fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, for almost all his life, has written extensively on a huge variety of topics his most important work, however, is The Golden Bough, first published in two volumes in 1890, swelling up to twelve volumes in the third edition published between 19 (furthermore, a supplementary volume entitled Aftermath was published in 1936). Jeffrey was born in Denver, Colorado and raised in Arlington, Virginia.

Around the 1880s, strongly influenced by Tylor (see Chapter 11), Frazer adopted the evolutionist agenda and subsequently focused on comparative religion, myth and anthropology. Principles of Magick: A traditionally trained shaman's teachings on the mystic arts by Jeffrey Pierce and a great selection of related books, art and collectibles available now at .uk. 1941) studied Classics and graduated in 1878 with a dissertation on The Growth of Plato's Ideal Theory.