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A cave painting from Lascaux, France.

Sympathetic magic, also known as imitative magic, is a type of magic based on imitation or correspondence. Imitation involves using effigies to affect the environment of people, or occasionally people themselves. Correspondence is based on the idea that one can influence something based on its relationship to another thing.

Sympathetic magic seems to be a major component of ancient or mythical thought: many traditional societies believe that an effect on one object can cause an analogous effect on another object, without an apparent causal link between the two objects. For instance, many folktales feature a villain whose "life" exists in another object, and who can only be killed if that other object is destroyed. (One example is the Russian folktale of Koschei the Deathless.) In Uganda, a barren woman is thought to cause a barren garden, and her husband can seek a divorce on purely economic grounds (Eliade 385). In The Golden Bough, Sir James Frazer argues that belief in sympathetic magic was the most primitive stage in human thought, followed by religion and then, later, by science. Although Frazer's theories no longer have significant support in the scientific community, sympathetic magic is clearly a widespread ancient belief.

The term is most commonly used in archaeology in relation to Palaeolithic cave paintings such as those in North Africa and at Lascaux in France. The theory is one of prehistoric human behavior, and is based on studies of more modern hunter-gatherer societies. The idea is that the paintings were made by Cro-Magnon shaman. The shaman would retreat into the darkness of the caves, enter into a trance state and then paint images of their visions, perhaps with some notion of drawing power out of the cave walls themselves. This goes some way towards explaining the remoteness of some of the paintings (which often occur in deep or small caves) and the variety of subject matter (from prey animals to predators and human hand-prints). In his book Primitive Mythology, Joseph Campbell stated that the paintings "...were associated with the magic of the hunt." For him, this sympathetic magic was akin to a participation mystique, where the paintings, drawn in a sanctuary of "timeless principle", were acted upon by rite.

In 1933, Leo Frobenius, discussing cave paintings in North Africa, pointed out that many of the paintings did not seem to be mere depictions of animals and people. To him, it seemed as if it was an acting out of the hunt before the hunt began, as well as a consecration of the animal to be killed. In this way, the pictures served to secure a successful hunt. While others interpreted the cave images as depictions of hunting accidents or of ceremonies, Frobenius believed it was much more likely that "...what was undertaken [in the paintings] was a consecration of the animal effected not through any real confrontation of man and beast but by a depiction of a concept of the mind."

However, as with all prehistory, it is impossible to be certain due to the relative lack of material evidence and the many pitfalls associated with trying to understand the prehistoric mindset with a modern mind.

• Campbell, Joseph (1991). The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology. Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-019443-6. 
• Eliade, Mircea (1976). in Wendell C. Beane and William G. Doty: Myths, Rites, Symbols: A Mircea Eliade Reader (in English). New York: Harper & Row, p. 385. 
• Frobenius, Leo (1993). Kulturgeschichte Afrikas. Prolegomena zu einer historischen Gestaltlehre (A Cultural History of Africa) (in German). Zurich: Phaidon-Verlag, pp. 131-132. 

• Sympathetic magic discussed in The Golden Bough, hosted at Project Gutenberg
• Rainmaking as sympathetic magic, in The Golden Bough
• Sympathetic magic discussed in The Skeptic's Dictionary
• SkepticWiki article on sympathetic magic