sympathetic magic

American  

noun

1. magic predicated on the belief that one thing or event can affect another at a distance as a consequence of a sympathetic connection between them.

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sympathetic magic British  

noun

1. a type of magic in which it is sought to produce a large-scale effect, often at a distance, by performing some small-scale ceremony resembling it, such as the pouring of water on an altar to induce rainfall

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Etymology

Origin of sympathetic magic

First recorded in 1900–05

Example Sentences

Until this point, sympathetic magic had been a term psychologists used to account for magical belief systems in traditional cultures, such as hunter-gatherer societies.

From New York Times • Dec. 27, 2021

Revenge or redemption or some form of sympathetic magic in which we roll back the clock and none of the bad stuff happened and we are all OK again?

From Salon • Jan. 1, 2020

A believer in sympathetic magic, Mills gathers dog-eared objects and forgotten rituals to summon a world of mixtapes and Judy Blume and Three Mile Island and skateboarders who grab their boards behind their front leg.

From The New Yorker • Jan. 1, 2017

She handles Victorian materials, uses Victorian tools, wears and repairs Victorian clothes, in the hope that a kind of sympathetic magic will collapse the distance between the 19th century and the 21st.

From The Guardian • Jul. 12, 2013

Was it not a dangerous word, too closely connected to Hobbes and to dubious stories about sympathetic magic told by Digby—someone whom John Evelyn, another early member, could dismiss as an arrant mountebank?

From "The Invention of Science" by David Wootton