Sympathetic Magic

Sympathetic magic works on the principle that acting on one thing produces a matching effect in another, either because the two resemble each other or because they were once in contact. Ancient Near Eastern ritual practice relied on it constantly. Mesopotamian incantation priests peeled an onion so that a man's guilt would come apart the same way, Egyptian temple staff burned drawings of the chaos serpent Apophis in order to destroy the serpent itself, and Assyrian vassals swore loyalty over a wax figure set alight and a clay one dropped in water so that their own bodies would burn and sink if they broke the oath. The same logic runs through the Hebrew Bible in the bronze snake raised on a pole to cure snakebite, the peeled branches Jacob sets in front of the flocks so the lambs are born streaked, the wood Elisha throws into the Jordan to lift a sunken iron ax head, and the rituals that settle suspected unfaithfulness by having someone drink dust mixed with water. Later Jewish and Christian traditions kept these scenes and reasoned from them, treating the outcomes as evidence of prophetic authority rather than as ritual technique.