Search Wikipedia for Kingkiller Chronicles, scroll down to “sympathy” and you’ll see this description:
A combination of voodoo and quantum entanglement
Though that’s descriptive of what sympathy looks like, it doesn’t get at sympathy’s mechanics very well. I know I sound like a broken gramophone playing a warped wax record, but we get at this fantasy stuff through the old books, not voodoo and quantum entanglement despite the presence of mommets and nosebleeds.
Check out a copy of The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion by Sir James George Frazer from your local library, preferably a print version, and flip to the table of contents. It looks something like this:
Chap.
- The King of the Wood……………1
- Priestly Kings………………..……..9
- Sympathetic Magic……….……….11
I turn to the page eleven and read this:
If we analyze the principles of thought on which magic is based, they will probably be found to resolve themselves into two: first, that like produces like or that an effect resembles its cause; and second, that things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed.
Frazer calls the first The Law of Similarity and the second The Law of Contact or Contagion. From the former, the magician produces any effect he wants by emulating it. From the latter, he believes that whatever he pulls off on a given item will influence the person who once had contact with it, regardless of whether it came from his body. What’s Abenthy have to say about all of this?
The law of sympathy is one of the most basic parts of magic. It states that the more similar two objects are, the greater the sympathetic link. The greater the link, the more easily they influence each other.
In other words, things act on one another at a distance through a sort of… well… sympathy. The Law of Sympathy included byt the Law of Similarity and the Law of Contact. Sympathists assumed a sort of ether or fifth element transmitted the effects through the void of space. Ironically, alchemists often called the product of the great work “the fifth element.” I’m unsure whether there’s crossover between the arts. Regardless, Frazer finds the concept absurd as a science calling it a half-science and a “misapplication of the association of ideas.”
