ABSTRACT
Contagious magic through actual physical contact——direct or indirect——is based on the concept of isomorphism: the notion that part is equivalent to the whole; even a very brief contact is capable of transmitting substantial effects, and any part. Magical thinking for James Frazer was based on an association of ideas concerning the life, death and rebirth of the cycles of nature, and he coined the term sympathetic magic to describe a psychic process underlying this association. For Frazer, the human mind that thinks magically employs two different misapplications of sympathetic magic: homeopathic magic was founded on the association of ideas by similarity, whereas contagious magic was based on the association of ideas by contiguity——the assumption that things that have once been in contact with each other are always in contact.
