I looked online for hours and couldn’t find it. It’s trick where the magician has 2 matchboxes, 1 with an open drawer. And when they close the open one, the other drawer slides out.
Now, you may have heard of it, and even if you don't recognize the name, the following may be familiar. But I think there will be some who won't recognize it, and if even if you do, I just want to vouch for it.
In the Name of the Wind, Rothfuss uses sympathetic magic. The basic idea is that similarities form a sort of spiritual connection that can be exploited, such as lifting one coin and thereby lifting an identical one. There's three rules. 1, similarity breeds power, like controls like. 2, energy is not created in this situation, you would feel the weight of two coins. 3, I don't remember. Doesn't matter though, you ge the idea.
Similarity is subjective, and you can bend the definition how you want for your world. Some examples of similar objects; identical copies, objects from the same material, one object that was split in two, etc. You can also stretch it, saying that since everything is made of the same constituent particles, everything has some form of similarity.
How this is used is up to you. In Rothfuss' version, you must fully believe the objects are just one item for it to work, but you can apply whatever you want. Maybe you need to mark the objects in question, or have them blessed or something, it's up to you.
You could extend this to more than just matter manipulation. Maybe you can bond with certain creatures if your personalities are close enough, or you can teleport things.
You could even apply the opposite and the reverse. Let's say, instead of similarity giving power, you can use some form of power to make objects similar. Or when you have two opposite objects, you can apply opposite effects, like making one colder as the other warms, or fixing one while you break the other.
I don't have a closing paragraph, that's just it.
I’m hoping that some wonderful person might be able to identify a fic that I remember almost nothing about……It was one of the very first SSHG fics I read and it may even have been on Wattpad before I discovered FanFiction.Net. All I remember is that it was one of those classic ‘still-student Hermione is rescued from imminent rape/torture/death by (reluctant?) Professor Snape’ works and I’m pretty sure there is a Death-Eater (Christmas?) gathering at a country home owned either by Snape or the Lestranges at which SS/HG perform some sympathetic magic almost unintentionally. I would love to find this so I can see what it was about it that captivated me as I am pretty sure this was the catalyst for my SSHG shipping 🥰🥰.
Catacomb Culture tattoos.
Beauty and The Beast: Wizarding Edition
rollcall.bandcamp.com/yum
466j-efkw
I like to use poppets and this study gave me some interesting thoughts on it.
Abstract: Two laws of sympathetic magic were described by Frazer and Mauss at the beginning of this century to account for magical belief systems in traditional cultures. In this study, we show that these laws fit well with a variety of behaviors in American culture, in responses to disgusting, dangerous, or valued objects. The first law, contagion, holds that "once in contact, always in contact." That is, there can be a permanent transfer of properties from one object (usually animate) to another by brief contact. For example, in this study we show that drinks that have briefly contacted a sterilized, dead cockroach become undesirable, or that laundered shirts previously worn by a disliked person are less desirable than those previously worn by a liked or neutral person. The second law, similarity, holds that "the image equals the object," and that action taken on an object affects similar objects. In this study, we demonstrate this law by showing, for example, that people reject acceptable foods (e.g., fudge) shaped into a form that represents a disgusting object (dog feces), or that people are less accurate at throwing darts at pictures of the faces of people they like. With these and other measures, we found a great deal of evidence for the operation of the laws of sympathetic magic in all 50 of the subjects we studied. The laws of sympathetic magic correspond to the two basic laws of association (contiguity and similarity}. We discuss the parallel and report a disgust conditioning study to develop this parallel.
In brief I love it, but it’s not my favorite Typhoon album. I guarantee it will grow on me and my feelings will change by next week/month/year.
Sympathetic Magic is both the classic Typhoon sound yet also something entirely new. It’s an evolution for them, but with strong vestigial evidence of their entire career to date. There are echoes of Hunger and Thirst, A New Type of House, White Lighter, and Offerings but also entirely new sounds and structures.
We are all lucky to have this album and I and truly grateful to Kyle Morton and the rest of Typhoon for giving us this surprise gift. It hasn’t hit me like White Lighter or Offerings did on initial listen, but they’re not trying to create a chamber pop album but rather a more subdued exploration of how our relationships and interactions form our self-identity and existence.
The only obvious thing about this album is that it was written during 2020. And the most surprising thing is that Kyle Morton might actually be an optimist if we look closely enough.
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Kyle Morton is an absolute master at setting the tone of an album with the first track. “Wake” from Offerings being the best example to date. “Sine Qua Nonentity” (had to look it up myself) is a somewhat-eerie first step on the journey of Sympathetic Magic. The tape effects and strings build an ambiance but his vocals and the subtle driving guitar are a reassuring safety net for the listener as they journey with the song’s subject into her existential questioning.
The song kinda peters out, so to me it functions mostly as setting the stage for “Empire Builder”, which to me is the stand-out star of the album. Although this track arrived in 2021 “Empire Builder” truly is an apt song for 2020: the inevitability of doom and gloom but a glimmer of hope. There’s a lot of imagery of being alone in the song, it’s a nice touch having the whole band sing the last verse together. Sonically it has the sound and feel of many tracks from White Lighter (which probably explains why I’m so drawn to it) and it’s built on a very consistent steady beat like the train Kyle describes in the first few verses. Love a good chug-chug-chugging along beat!
“Motion and Thought” is somewhat the opposite, a very loose song structure where the guitar, vocals, strings, and other sounds float somewhat aimlessly around. I think it’s used to good effect to echo the nebulousness of the song: being stuck in limbo between thinking and doing. It reminds me
... keep reading on reddit ➡
A couple months ago, I decided to start reading stories from my first book, my second book, my upcoming third book, and then passages from some of my favorite books that inspired my writing.
The series name is not fancy, and neither is the production value, but I'm less concerned with that and more concerned with presenting the stories. It took me a couple episodes to figure out a better place/methodology for recording, and now 15 episodes are up online.
For those interested, I tend to write mostly surrealist sci-fi, dark traditional stories, and a lot of experimental stuff. Heavily infuenced by the likes of Blake Butler, Ben Marcus, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, Mark Z. Danielewski, Margaret Atwood, and others.
Please enjoy this clunky first episode (with more to come later)! :P
CRITIQUES ALWAYS WELCOME.
I've always been fascinated by cave paintings but I've always been puzzled as to why just about every mention of them in textbooks that I've read claim that the likely reason for them being painted is because of religious significance or because they thought depicted an animal may give them power over it. Does this interpretation come from comparing to present-day ethnographies?
I understand that inaccessibility of some of the sites could lead one to suppose that the site held some sort of special significance to whoever painted it, but from what i understand Cro Magnon man had the exact same mind as present humans. As a teenager i can personally attest to doing stupid things like climbing up into the precariously positioned eaves of abandoned buildings to write "I love big boobz" or whatever just because i felt the need to express it and not because i was trying to increase my chances of a bounty of boobs on my next boob hunt. I specifically mention teenage boys because some of the paintings made of human hands are thought to be of a juvenile/teenage hand. Similarly, the venus figurines have been given spiritual interpretation as well. Could stashes of statues of idealized female forms have been something akin to pornography?
I'm very pleased to announce that the new edition of the Stellar Beacon 'zine is out! It features:
Sympathetic Magic A guide for a Fate magic system based on symbols and relationships between things and concepts. With rules for quick magical actions that characters can undertake in Conflicts to powerful rituals that can take campaign arcs to complete. (Fate can always use more magical systems, and I'm hoping some people will like an option that leans in to narrative permissions, but is a bit more fleshed out than a "just use aspects" social media reply can be, and which also considers how not to harm the game with "one magic skill to rule them all")
No Preparation Fate Accelerated One-Shots Jochem van 't Hull shares his tested method for a fun, zero-prep Fate adventures-even if your players have never played the game before!
First Contract: Petram Explore what happens when the first outsiders in over a century visit a thriving world of religious experimentalists, in this adventure for the space opera game powered by Fate: Return to the Stars.
Missive from a Woman in a Room in a City in a Country in a World Not Her Own An essay by India’s first Hugo nominee, Mimi Mondal. (honestly, worth getting the 'zine to read this alone)
Forging Fortunes Novelist S.T. Gibson shows you how you can employ the tarot as a tool for world building and storytelling.
Making Your Own Trouble Check to see if your Fate character has strong double sided aspects that can be compelled!
As always, I'm interesting in pitches from writers, as well hearing what readers are interested in!
To celebrate the new 'zine, and because we could all use some optimistic science fiction about heroes reconnecting humanity, I'm putting Return to the Stars on sale, half off, the best price ever.
Voodoo and many other religions use fear and hate to manipulate people into an world of paranoid delusion where everyone that isn't a member of your clique (church) is plotting against you.
The new voodoo doll is the White Male straw-man. "All you bad mojo be come from dat White Devil!" Don't worry about all the facts or even the humanist values that are misused to present that assessment. Just fear and hate the power of the Diablo Blanco! He will curse us if we do not bind his soul and cast him out of the villiage!
Please send all donations to Baron Samedi care of the Democratic party so we can burn some sage in the white house and clear out all these bad ism vibes!
I've recently been listening to a remix of that old "Pokémon are demons" speech given by a preacher and a thought occurred to me - couldn't a magician game developer use the game itself as a vehicle for sympathetic magic or even other kinds of magic as well?
I'm not looking to train spirits in the dark realm here, but I am curious to see if video games could be a vehicle for positive change and personal empowerment via magical means rather than simply through story and personal impact.
(not sure if other people have said this before, happy to delete this post if I'm copying someone if they link to the post.)
So most of us probably recognize that Rothfuss didn't invent his magic system out of nothing. Nevertheless, I was surprised to hear about a similar kind of magic in church today (of all places).
Apparently, the prophet Elisha was a sympathist. Here's the story: "4 So he went with them. When they came to the Jordan, they cut down trees. 5 But as one was felling a log, his ax head fell into the water; he cried out, “Alas, master! It was borrowed.” 6 Then the man of God said, “Where did it fall?” When he showed him the place, he cut off a stick, and threw it in there, and made the iron float. 7 He said, “Pick it up.” So he reached out his hand and took it." (2 Kings 6:4-7)
This isn't exactly what Rothfuss describes, but it is pretty similar. As I understand it, the stick is linked to the handle of the ax, which is, in turn, linked to the ax head. The ax head is sympathetically linked to the stick, so when he throws the stick in the water, the ax head does what the stick does: it floats.
TIL ancient Israelites told stories about sympathetic magic.
"Like begets like"
This form of magick is probably the oldest form of magick that has been recorded. If I remember correctly, Sympathy was used in attempts to create better outcomes for hunting and gathering. Hunters would draw pictures of them on successful hunts using a paint made from animal blood, do ritual dances adorned with bones of the prey and reenacting a kill, etc.
I've read the Kingkiller Chronicles, a fantasy series by Patrick Rothfuss, which I would highly recommend to those interested in fantasy novels. In this series, the spellcasters, called Arcanists, had the ability to manipulate an object by binding it to another object and manipulating it. This could also apply to energy (i.e. lighting a match by binding the match to a campfire). This made me start thinking about the application of this fantasy version to real life.
I understand that having some object tied to a subject of the spell can help focus intent, also voodoo dolls, if I'm not misinformed, are pretty much the epitome of sympathetic magic; I was focused however on crystal magick. Let's say one charms a cluster of crystal with some protection spell.
- If one then breaks apart the cluster, does a spell to bind the energies together, then places each fragment of the cluster around their house, would this act as an effective way to create a circle of protection around someone's house?
- What about a spell to transfer energy between two crystals from the same cluster so a witch could act as a siphon to a newer witch who is being overwhelmed by negative energy?
- What are ways that you have used sympathetic magick with or without realizing it?
- Do you feel this would be more beneficial to connect crystals of a cluster together for spellwork instead of believing they all come from the earth which is where the connection lies in your mind?
- Is it possible to create a sympathetic link, actively, to another witch and steal their energy for your own spellwork? (As opposed to psychic vampires who would passively steal one's energy [if psychic vampires are even a thing, I've never really looked into it])
- Would you ever feel a need, or feel it would be appropriate?
- What has been your favorite representation of sympathetic magick, whether it be in media or your personal practice?
Thank you all for reading, and especially thank you if you responded. Feel free to ask more questions or spread more knowledge, I'm sure there are plenty who would like to learn about this
