Page:Shinto, the Way of the Gods - Aston - 1905.djvu/340

Imitative or Sympathetic Magic.—These Korean examples illustrate the principle of imitative or sympathetic magic thus described by Mr. J. G. Frazer^[1]:—

"Manifold as are the applications of this crude philosophy—for a philosophy it is as well as an art—the fundamental principles on which it is based would seem to be reducible to two; first, that like produces like, or that an effect resembles its cause; and second, that things which have once been in contact, but have ceased to be so, continue to act on each other as if the contact still persisted. From the first of these principles the savage infers that he can produce any desired effect merely by imitating it; from the second he concludes that he can influence at pleasure and at any distance any person of whom, or anything of which, he possesses a particle. Magic of the latter sort, resting as it does on the belief in a certain secret sympathy which unites indissolubly things that have once been connected with each other, may appropriately be termed sympathetic in the strict sense of the term. Magic of the former kind, in which the supposed cause resembles or simulates the supposed effect, may conveniently be described as imitative or mimetic."

The sympathetic or imitative principle is not very conspicuous in the instances of vulgar (that is, non-professional) magic quoted by Bakin. It is, however, illustrated by other Japanese customs. There is a round stone in a shrine in Sagami which brings rain when water is poured over it. The stone is supposed to be the shintai of an Aburi no Kami (rain-fall-God),to whom the shrine is dedicated. Here we have a combination of religion with magic.^[2] Whistling in order to raise the wind^[3] is a purely non-religious piece of imitative

1. 'The Golden Bough,' second edition, p. 9.
2. I cannot offer any explanation of the magic used by women and children in order to bring fine weather. They hang upside down to the eaves or on the branch of a tree human figures cut in paper, and called Teri-teri-bōsu (shine-shine-priest).
3. See above, p. 115.