Law of Contagion

The Law of Contagion states that things, which have once been in contact with each other, continue to act on each other at a distance even after physical contact has been severed.

Magic, which has been practiced and believed in for thousands of years, is based upon laws, which the practitioners believe in or understand. These laws are not legislative laws but are recognized as the governing structure on the reason that magic behaves as it does.

The law of contagion is a magical law that suggests that once two people or objects have been in contact a magical link persists between them unless or until a formal exorcism or other act of banishing breaks the non-material bond. The first description of the law of contagion appeared in 'The Golden Bough' by James George Frazer.

Philip Emmons Isaac Bonewits noted parallels in quantum physics. According to this, the law contagion has both dangers and benefits:

• Dangers, for example, include a sorcerer or witch might acquire a lock of hair, nail clipping or scrap of clothing in order to facilitate a curse. Voodoo dolls resemble the victim and often incorporate hair or clothing from them. In cultures that practice sorcery individuals often exercise care that their hair or nails do not end up in the hands of sorcerers.
• Benefits, for example, include that the holiness of a saint, god or other venerated figure confers benefits to relics, as do temples and churches, by virtue of their having religious rituals conducted within them. Psychics and mediums commonly utilize an object once owned by a missing or deceased subject as their "focus" for psychometry or clairvoyance or during seances.

Unconscious belief in the law of contagion exist even among people who do not profess a belief in magic, psychological experiments have shown a reluctance on the part of the public to, say, try on a sweater worn by a serial murderer. As does superstition, amulet, evil eye, luck, omen, talismans, myth and rituals.

The contagion heuristic is a psychological heuristic leading people to avoid contact with people or objects viewed as "contaminated" by previous contact with someone or something viewed as bad, or less often, to seek contact with objects that have been in contact with people or things considered good. For example, we tend to view food that has touched the ground as contaminated by the ground, and therefore unfit to eat, or we view a person who has touched a diseased person as likely to carry the disease (regardless of the actual contagiousness of the disease).

The contagion heuristic includes "magical thinking", such as viewing a sweater worn by a criminal as bearing his negative essence and capable of transmitting it to another wearer. The perception of essence-transfer extends to rituals to purify items viewed as spiritually contaminated, such as having a monk wear the criminal's sweater to counteract his essence.

Inattention is like the Freudian defense mechanism of denial, except that it may be much more passive. We simply do not think much about the interpersonal history of most objects we deal with. When we receive change in the store, we do not think of the long string of humans, no doubt some unsavory, who handled it previously; likewise for the interpersonal history of a public bathroom doorknob or a seat on a train. The domains of inattention vary across individuals and across cultures. For example, the contamination produced by the bottoms of shoes bringing outside filth into the home is salient for most Japanese, but not attended to by most Americans.

Ritual is typically in religious systems, problems of contagion may be handled by establishing rituals to decontaminate and setting limits on the range of contamination. Such rules seem most prevalent in Judaism and Hinduism. A particularly clear example of a ritual boundary is the 1/60th rule of Kashrut, relating to contamination of kosher foods by non-kosher entities (Nemeroff & Rozin, 1992). According to this rule, if contamination occurs by accident and the contaminant is less than 1/60th of the total volume of the contaminated entity, the food remains kosher.

Sacred contagion is a belief that spiritual properties within an object, place, or person may be passed to another object, place, or person, usually by direct contact or physical proximity. While the concept of sacred contagion has existed in numerous cultures since before recorded history, the term "sacred contagion" originated with French sociologist émile Durkheim, who introduced it in his book, 'The Elementary Forms of Religious Life'.

The Book of Leviticus, in Chapters 11 through 15, specifies which animals are considered spiritually clean and unclean, and defines women during menstruation and men after a nocturnal emission as unclean. The text also gives many examples of sacred contagion brought about by contact with these spiritually unclean people and things. For example, chapter 15 states that spiritual uncleanliness exists not only in the menstruating woman but also the bed she sleeps in, as well as any object placed upon that bed, and any person who touches an object placed upon that bed. We see not only the passing of uncleanliness through spiritual contagion, but also that the uncleanliness may be further passed, from person to object and back to person indefinitely.

Anthropologist Mary Douglas, whose work is heavily influenced by David émile Durkheim, wrote an extensive modern work on the topic of sacred contagion entitled 'Purity and Danger - An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo', she states that:

"We cannot understand sacred contagion unless we distinguish a class of cultures in which pollution ideas flourish from another class of cultures, including our own, in which they do not."

Douglas and Durkheim both rejected the idea that concepts of purity and impurity, such as those found in Leviticus, were an attempt to use religion to explain hygiene, an otherwise impossible task in the scientific terms of the time, several millennium before the concept of germs. Instead, according to Douglas and Durkheim, spiritual cleanliness and physical cleanliness are wholly separate and must be considered on their own terms.

The Law of Contagion implies that all these circumstances would in fact tie the receiver to the donor in a very intimate way. The personal vibrational signature would be retained within the item that was donated be it a kidney, a heart, bone, blood or other body part. Perhaps the receiver could even access memories and emotions of the donor.

While it is understood that we are all connected to each other and can access this same information through Spirit(s), there is at least an imagined ‘safe guard’ that some things pertaining to one and one’s life experience would not be shared unless approved of.

Something to think about!