So I want you to imagine, imagine you are an
ancient king. Okay, setting the scene. Right,
you're working the ceremonial garments, you've
got the elevated throne, and your people are
looking up at you with this absolute terrifying
reverence. They think you're everything. Exactly.
But there is a massive, massive problem. The
harvest has failed. Completely. The rivers are
drying up, the mud is cracking into those jagged
little puzzle pieces, and the sun is just beating
down on your village day after brutal day. A
total disaster for an agrarian society. Yeah.
And the craziest part is, your people. They aren't
gathering in the town square to, like, pray to
you for rain. No, they're definitely not praying.
No. They are gathering to drag you out of your
palace and literally execute you. It's a rough
gig. It is. Because they genuinely believe that
you simply forgot how to pull a mechanical lever
that makes the rainfall from the sky. Welcome
to the Deep Dive. We are so thrilled you're joining
us today because we are unpacking what has to
be one of the most monumental, just mind -bending
theories of human intellectual evolution ever
put to paper. It really is a massive shift in
perspective. It totally is. We're exploring the
extensive index of James George Fraser's seminal
work, The Golden Bough. Specifically, we've been
poring over that 12th volume, you know, The Index
and Bibliography, which is basically this incredible
treasure map to Fraser's whole intellectual universe.
Right. It outlines his entire thesis in this
really condensed, fascinating way. Exactly. And
the core mission, the question we are putting
in front of you today, is this. How did our ancestors
go from believing they could literally, physically
manipulate the universe with their bare hands
to humbling themselves and bowing before invisible
deities? Well, to answer that, we really have
to completely dismantle how we currently view
the world, right? Yeah, totally. Because Fraser
posits this very specific and I should say highly
controversial blueprint of human thought. He
maps out this grand trajectory that passes through
three distinct massive eras. The big three. Exactly.
It begins with magic, transitions through religion,
and ultimately moves towards science. And today
we're going to look really closely at the intricate,
incredibly messy, and deeply antagonistic relationship
between those first two stages. The magic and
the religion parts. Right. Fraser doesn't see
magic and religion as isolated concepts just
sort of existing in a vacuum. He identifies them
as a sequential evolution of how humans try to
understand, navigate, and ultimately control
their reality. So if we're going to dive into
that evolution, I feel like we have to start
with the premise that just completely shatters
all our modern assumptions. It definitely flips
the script. Because, I mean, we assume religion
is the oldest human institution, you know. We
assume that the very first time an early human
looked up at a thunderstorm, they immediately
thought, oh, there is a big guy in the sky throwing
lightning. That's the common assumption, yeah.
That personifying nature came first. But the
text argues the exact opposite. It says that
magic is actually older than religion. Before
there were any gods to pray to at all, humanity
existed entirely in what Frazier calls the age
of magic. Yeah. And in this ancient era, the
whole concept of a conscious personal deity running
the universe, it simply hadn't formed in the
human mind yet. They weren't even thinking in
those days. Exactly. Instead, humans operated
under the assumption that the world was governed
by impersonal, immutable forces. Impersonal being
the key word there. Right. These forces weren't
judging you. They weren't listening to your prayers
or answering them. They were just phenomena that
could be directly controlled, provided you possessed
the correct formula. So it's like early humans
were treating the universe like a giant machine,
right? With hidden levers. That's a really good
way to put it. If you want a specific outcome,
You don't ask the machine for a favor. I mean,
you don't negotiate with a vending machine, right?
You just pull the correct lever. If I pull the
rain lever, the rain gear turns and water falls.
That mechanical analogy is absolutely central
to Fraser's thesis. Magic, according to the text,
operates on a strict physical basis. He describes
it as being driven by, and this is his phrase,
misapplications of the association of ideas.
OK, break that down for us. What does that actually
mean in practice? Well, The human brain is fundamentally
an association machine. We are biologically wired
to recognize patterns. When two things happen
in sequence, our brains immediately try to link
them with a causal arrow. Exactly. Magic is basically
primitive humanity's attempt to systematize those
associations into a working science of survival.
They just got the associations entirely completely
wrong. Very wrong. Which brings us to how they
actually pull these levers, because the text
breaks this early magic down into two massive
branches. Right, the first being homeopathic
magic. Or imitative magic, yeah. And the underlying
logic here is, honestly... It's brilliantly simple.
It produces like, if I want an effect, I just
have to imitate that effect. It's imitation as
compulsion. Exactly. So put yourself in the shoes
of someone standing in that dry dying field we
talked about in the intro. You don't know anything
about atmospheric pressure or evaporation or
meteorology. You just know what rain looks like
and what it sounds like. So you look for the
associated phenomena. And the index is practically
overflowing with vivid global examples of this.
It really is. Like, what were some of the wilder
ones we saw? Well, we see extensive references
to rainmaking ceremonies that rely entirely on
imitation. People would mimic the gathering of
dark clouds by wearing very dark, heavy clothing,
or they'd burn specific smoking materials to
imitate cloud cover. They're literally playing
dress up as a storm. Exactly. And they would
imitate the wildlife associated with wet weather,
too. If rain causes frogs to croak and ducks
to splash and puddles, the homeopathic logic
reverses that causal arrow. Right, so instead
of rain making the frogs croak. The belief is
that if you can force a frog to croak, or if
you just perfectly imitate that croak yourself,
the universe has absolutely no choice but to
produce the associated rain. The imitation compels
the reality. It's a completely reverse engineered
reality. Right. It extends to everything, right?
Not just the weather. Oh, absolutely. Like, if
you want to injure an enemy from a distance,
you don't just throw a rock blindly into the
dark. You make a magical image of them. The text
talks a lot about fashioning wax figures. A classic
voodoo doll concept, essentially. Yeah, exactly.
You manipulate the imitation. Maybe you pierce
the wax figure with a bone needle. And it produces
like, the universe applies that physical manipulation
to your actual physical enemy. And we also see
this used for positive outcomes, like trying
to win love. Right. You create an imitation of
the person you're pining for. You bind the figure
to yourself with a string or something, and the
universe is supposed to mirror. that binding
in reality. The internal consistency of this
logic is what makes it so pervasive. It dictated
entirely how early humans interacted with the
animal kingdom too, particularly regarding the
acquisition of traits. Oh, the eating of the
animal parts? This was wild. Yes. The sources
note that diviners, warriors, and leaders would
consume very specific parts of animals to gain
their physical or perceived mystical attributes.
They would eat the hearts of crows or moles or
ox. Because a hawk has incredible, piercing vision.
So the logic is, if you consume the core of the
hawk, you are literally consuming the essence
of that vision. Exactly. And furthermore, this
mindset creates a deeply rigid set of rules for
how people, especially leaders, could live their
lives. The taboos. Right. Consider the historical
examples regarding ancient kings who were strictly
forbidden from shaving their hair or even cutting
their nails for an entire year. Wait, a whole
year. That sounds incredibly unsanitary. It was,
but the reasoning was purely magical. Hair is
a potent symbol of continuous growth, strength,
and vitality. By the laws of homeopathic association,
to cut the king's hair would be to sever the
king's power. Which would then magically drain
the vitality of the entire kingdom. Precisely.
The imitation of cutting equals the reality of
weakening. Man, that sets up a wildly stressful
existence for the king. which we are definitely
going to dig into more. But first, we have to
look at the second branch of this primitive operating
system. Contagious magic. Right. If homeopathic
magic is about similarity, contagious magic is
all about contact. The rule is, and this is a
quote, things which have once been in physical
contact with each other continue to act on each
other at a distance, permanently, even after
the physical connection is completely broken.
Contagious magic relies on this idea of a hidden
sympathetic bond. A sympathetic bond. Okay, so
how does that play out? Well, the physical separation
of two objects does not sever the metaphysical
tether between them. And this fundamentally altered
how early humans approached medicine and injury.
The text highlights this phenomenon that appears
in wildly distinct cultures, from rural England
all the way to the islands of Melanesia. It's
everywhere. It really is. It documents the sympathetic
relationship between a wound and the weapon that
caused it. Okay, let's really visualize this
for the listener, because it highlights just
how alien this mindset is to us today. Right,
so imagine a warrior gets stabbed with a rusty
spear. In our modern scientific framework, all
our attention obviously goes to the wound, right?
We clean it, we stitch it, we bandage the arm.
Biological cause and effect. Exactly. But under
contagious magic, the weapon and the wound were
in... intimate physical contact. So they are
forever linked. The tether is established. Yeah.
So the healer doesn't agonize over the bleeding
arm. The healer takes the actual rusty spear,
meticulously cleans the blade, applies soothing
medicinal salves to the iron of the spear, and
carefully wraps the weapon in bandages. They
are treating the source of the contagion to heal
the effect. It's a stunning display of treating
the metaphysical bond rather than the biological
reality. And this bond of contact creates a pervasive
of kind of low level paranoia in everyday life,
especially regarding a person's physical choices.
The index is absolutely saturated with references
to the magic of footprints. OK, wait, hold on.
Because I can almost kind of wrap my head around
the spear thing. I mean, it literally has the
victim's blood on it. There's a tangible biological
transfer there. A physical connection, yes. But
a footprint. Yes. It is literally just. displaced
dirt. How on earth did they justify a permanent
magical connection to a hole in the mud? Well,
you have to remember it is not just displaced
boat to a mind operating under contagious magic,
it is a physical impression of the self. Oh,
I see. The foot touched the earth, and the earth
retained the exact shape of that foot. Therefore,
the earth at that specific location has absorbed
a literal fraction of the person's essence. Wow.
Yeah. The text documents practices where you
could actually cripple or injure an enemy by
striking their footprint with a weapon. You just
stab the dirt. You stab the dirt. Or by dropping
sharp glass or poison thorns to into the impression
left in the soil. The belief is that the injury
to the footprint travels right up that invisible
sympathetic tether and physically strikes the
person's foot no matter how far away they are.
Which means you are constantly leaving vulnerabilities
behind you wherever you walk. That is terrifying.
It would be incredibly stressful, yes. And it's
not just footprints either. The fear surrounding
discarded body parts is intense in these cultures.
Very intense. The text explicitly mentions the
deep anxiety over what happens to like cut hair
or cast baby teeth. And particularly the navel
string and the afterbirth. Yes. The afterbirth
is a major focal point in many cultures. Right.
Like in parts of Africa and China, the text says
the afterbirth is not just biological waste.
It is intimately bound up with a person's ultimate
destiny. Because it was in ultimate contact with
the person. Exactly. If a malicious sorcerer
gets a hold of your cast teeth or your hair clippings,
they don't even need to bother. making a wax
figure of you. They have a piece of your actual
essence. And this brings us to a really critical
realization about the mindset of early humanity.
They were not acting out of random chaotic superstition.
They were just being crazy. No, not at all. They
were acting out of a deeply rigid, highly structured
belief in a universally connected system. So
they actually had the right idea about a mechanical
universe governed by cause and effect. Yes. The
foundational logic is there. They just had a
fundamentally flawed operating manual. They thought
the lever was connected to the rain gear, but
really it was just a stick stuck in the mud.
That is precisely what Fraser identifies as the
fatal flaw of magic. Magic postulates a strict
natural order and immutable laws. The universe
is not run by capricious entities who might suddenly
change their minds. It's an automaton. Exactly.
Magic simply misidentifies what the laws actually
are. It assumes that similarity and contact are
the foundational laws of physics. So if you are
living in a society that believes this mechanical
operating manual is absolutely 100 % real. The
next logical step is figuring out who gets to
hold the manual, right? Right. The social hierarchy
begins to form around this knowledge. Because
if you are the one person in the tribe who knows
the exact chant to make the frog croak, or you
know the exact salve to put on the rusty spear,
you aren't just like a helpful local mechanic.
You hold the keys to reality. And this initiates
a massive shift in human social organization.
The text heavily maps the rise of what Frazier
calls the public magician. Right, because before
this, magic was private. Exactly. Everyone was
doing their own footprint magic, hoarding their
own hair clippings, trying to protect themselves.
But as society grows and becomes more complex,
we see the emergence of what is arguably the
oldest professional class in human history. The
professional sorcerer. Yes. The division of labor
is a hallmark of civilization. Not everyone needs
to farm. not everyone needs to hunt. So a community
will intentionally support an individual whose
sole specialization is attempting to control
nature for the public good. So you dedicate your
entire life to perfecting the homeopathic rituals.
You become the public magician. And honestly,
this isn't some selfless civil service position.
No, it's highly lucrative. Oh, incredibly. These
magicians begin to accumulate extraordinary wealth.
People are constantly paying them for protection,
for rain, for successful hunts. And with that
kind of wealth comes profound political power.
They consolidate authority. Yeah, they evolved
from just being the village eccentric into chiefs
and eventually right into kings. The transition
from sorcerer to sovereign is heavily documented
in the sources. The text specifically details
how African rainmakers rose to absolute chieftainship.
Which makes total sense. What do you think about
it? It does. In an agrarian society where a single
month of drought means mass starvation for the
entire community, the individual who ostensibly
controls the weather is undeniably the most important
person in the hierarchy. Their political authority
is entirely derived from their perceived magical
competence. We call them magician kings. But
let's go back to that scenario we opened the
whole deep dive with. The king in the drought.
Yes. You are the magician king. You rode this
wave of homeopathic rain making right to the
top, right to the throne. You were wearing the
crown, and then a drought hits. And it doesn't
break. Right. It lasts a week. Then a month.
The crops turn to absolute dust. Your entire
claim to power is that you control the levers
of the universe. So you can't just release a
press statement saying, sorry folks, we're experiencing
unseasonable weather patterns. We cannot blame
the climate, because according to the social
contract, you are the climate. Exactly. And the
text notes the grim reality of this arrangement.
These kings were held strictly accountable to
their magical claims. In places like Savage Island
or ancient Egypt, kings were severely punished,
they were exiled, and routinely put to death
if they failed to end a drought or a famine.
The logic of the people is brutal, but honestly,
it's entirely consistent. It is perfectly logical
within their framework. If the machine of the
universe has stopped providing, the machine operator
is either intentionally malicious or utterly
incompetent. Yeah. In either scenario, the operator
must be violently removed and replaced. The psychological
toll of that must have been just staggering.
I mean, you were living in a constant state of
performance anxiety where a dry spell means your
literal execution. It's an incredible amount
of pressure. And as these societies evolve, the
text points out this really fascinating adaptation
to that pressure. Fraser distinguishes between
two different types of man gods that emerge during
this timeline. Right. There's an evolutionary
split. The first is what we have been discussing
up to this point. The magical type of man god.
The engineer. Yes. This is the sorcerer, the
engineer. His power resides entirely in his technique,
his knowledge of the spells, and his mastery
of those hidden lovers. If the rain fails, it
is a direct failure of his technique. But as
the centuries progress, we see the emergence
of the inspired or religious type of man -god.
And this is just a brilliant political pivot.
Because the inspired man -god isn't the engineer,
they are a vessel. Precisely. This new type of
leader claims that the power does not originate
from within their own mastery of nature. Instead,
they say they are possessed, inspired, or chosen
by a higher external entity. They are merely
a conduit. And this subtly but profoundly shifts
the blame. If the rain doesn't come, it isn't
because the king performed the ritual poorly.
It is because the higher entity is displeased
with the people or has its own inscrutable reasons.
Hey, don't look at me guys. The sky spirit said
no. It protects the sovereign. It completely
protects them. And that exact shift from the
arrogant engineer claiming to control the universe
to the humble vessel channeling a higher power
brings us right to the brink of what has to be
the greatest intellectual crisis in human history.
Because eventually the fatal flaw of magic becomes
impossible to ignore. The text refers to this
as the detection of the fallacy of magic. Right.
And this realization doesn't just happen overnight.
Oh, no. It takes millennia. The human mind is
incredibly adept at protecting its core beliefs.
When a frog dance is followed by a thunderstorm,
the belief is cemented. The system works. On
formation bias. Exactly. But when a frog dance
is followed by a month of drought, the magician
will inevitably invent a thousand excuses. Oh,
yeah. Like, ah, I sneezed during the third chant,
or someone in the village was harboring negative
energy, or, my favorite, a rival tribe is using
countermagic. to block our rain lever. There
is always an out. There is always a reason the
magic failed that preserves the underlying theory
of magic itself. But generation after generation,
century after century, this creeping, undeniable
realization begins to set in among the most observant
minds of early humanity. The thinkers, the philosophers
of the tribe. Right. They watch these kings get
executed. They watch crops fail despite absolutely
perfect ritual adherence. And they realize that
the levers they have been pulling, they aren't
attached to any gears. They are disconnected
from reality. The homeopathic imitations and
the contagious bonds are not actually compelling
nature to do anything at all. The mechanical
universe theory completely crumbles. And imagine
the existential terror of that moment. You thought
you had the steering wheel to reality and suddenly
you realize you were just sitting in a box, hurtling
through a dark, chaotic void with absolutely
no control. It would be a profound psychological
shock. It is out of this profound disillusionment,
this terrifying crisis of faith, that the age
of religion is finally born. Yes. As the belief
in human magic declines, the belief in external
deities grows to fill that void. And the text
offers a very specific definition of religion
for this framework. How does Fraser define it?
It states that religion contains both a theoretical
and a practical element, and crucially, and this
is important, it is fundamentally opposed in
principle to magic. This is where the paradigm
entirely flips for humanity. Complete 180. Humans
realize they aren't the CEOs of the universe.
The machine doesn't care about their levers.
So the human mind desperate for some kind of
order, makes a massive new assumption. If the
universe isn't a machine, it must be a kingdom.
A kingdom ruled by someone else. Right. There
must be invisible CEOs, gods, spirits, demons
who are actually running the show. The theoretical
element of religion is this projection of conscious
personal agencies onto the natural world. Instead
of impersonal forces of physics, the storm is
driven by an angry sky god. The harvest is controlled
by a temperamental Earth mother. Exactly. The
practical element of religion is how humans respond
to this new theory. Religion replaces the concept
of compulsion with propitiation. Propitiation.
Yeah. Appeasement. Begging. Basically, instead
of pulling a lever, you are writing an email
asking for a massive favor. That's a very modern
way to look at it, but yes. You humanize the
universe. You think to yourself, well, I get
angry when people disrespect me, and I like it
when people give me gifts. The sky didn't rain
today, so the sky must be angry at me. I need
to give the sky a gift. And so the methods of
interaction change entirely. You abandon the
imitative dances meant to force the clouds. Instead,
you offer human sacrifice. You engage in prayer.
You bring the first fruits of your harvest to
an altar. Or you perform animal sacrifices, slaughtering
an ox to appease the rain god. The underlying
assumption here is one of utter humility. You
are officially admitting your own powerlessness
and throwing yourself completely on the mercy
of a conscious, albeit invisible entity. It's
just a complete collapse of the human ego. I
mean, we go from, I command the elements with
my mind to please great spirit, spare our miserable
lives. It's a humbling transition. But this transition
isn't clean, right? It's not like the calendar
flipped and suddenly everyone traded their wax
voodoo dolls for prayer beads. Yeah. Human history
is incredibly, incredibly messy. It is a protracted
period of deep confusion, strange combinations,
and eventually bitter conflict. The messy middle.
Yes. The transition from magic to religion took
millennia. The historical antagonism between
the two, where religion actively hunts down magic,
is actually a comparatively late development.
For centuries, they were thoroughly and bizarrely
combined. The text gives us some really wild
examples of this overlap. Look at ancient Egypt,
for instance. A prime example. You have this
massive religious structure with temples and
complex gods, but you still have these magicians
operating within that system who claim they can
actually, literally, compel the deities. They
aren't just praying. No. They are threatening
the gods. It's like saying, hey, I'm humbly asking
you for rain, but if you won't give it to me,
I know the secret ancient magic word that will
physically force your hand. The Egyptian magicians
represent a perfect hybrid of the two eros. They
acknowledge the conscious deities of religion,
but they apply the mechanical compulsion of magic
to control them. It's wild. Furthermore, the
gods themselves were often conceptualized as
ultimate sorcerers. They didn't just rule by
divine fiat, they ruled because they possessed
superior magical knowledge. Even the gods use
magic. Exactly. The text also notes how the worship
of the dead in places like Melanesia and even
throughout modern Europe was heavily blended
with magic. People would pray to their ancestors
for guidance, but simultaneously use magical
charms to bind those same spirits or force them
to act. It's humanity just hedging its bets,
you know? I'll pray to the river god just in
case, but I'm also going to do the frog dance
because why risk it? Use every tool available.
Right. But eventually this coexistence breaks
down and a massive turf war erupts. And if you
look at the sociology of it, it's entirely about
power and authority. Religion becomes inherently
hostile to magic. The hostility is inevitable
when you examine the figures leading these two
camps. Consider the priest. The priest derives
his entire societal status from his role as an
intermediary. He stands before the people and
openly admits he has no inherent power. He is
merely a servant begging the gods on their behalf.
His authority requires the populace to accept
their own powerlessness. Right. He needs them
to be dependent. Then consider the magician.
The magician stands in the exact same village
and claims to control the forces of nature independently
without needing the god's permission at all.
The magician is a walking, talking existential
threat to the priest's monopoly on reality. I
mean, picture it. The priest tells the village,
we must humble ourselves, wear sackcloth and
fast for three days so the gods might pity us
and cure this plague. And the magician is standing
in the back of the crowd shouting, or you could
just give me a lock of the sick guy's hair and
a wax doll and I'll have the problem solved by
midnight. The magician represents a rebellious,
dangerous arrogance in the eyes of the new religious
order. To the priest, the magician's claim to
independent power is not just foolish, it is
profound blasphemy. It undermines the whole system.
It undermines the absolute authority of the divine.
This ideological clash necessitates a historical
campaign of eradication. The old ways, the mechanical
levers, had to be violently stamped out to consolidate
the new religious worldview. And the text doesn't
shy away from how dark this eradication gets.
It heavily references the Christian Church's
treatment of witches as this ultimate expression
of religion trying to annihilate magic. The witch
hunts. Yeah. But there is a detail in the index
that is so highly specific and honestly so deeply
ironic it's almost hard to believe. It talks
about Sfringer, this famous and utterly ruthless
inquisitor. Yes. Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sbringer.
They were instrumental in the European witch
hunts. They wrote the Malleus Maleficarum. Right.
And the text highlights a really specific interrogatory
practice of his. When Springer was preparing
to interrogate or torture an accused witch or
wizard, he mandated that the prisoner's head,
and often their entire body, be completely shaved
of all hair. Every single hair. And you'd think,
OK, maybe that's for hygiene in a medieval dungeon
or just a psychological intimidation tactic to
strip them of their dignity. That would be the
logical assumption. But no, the text explains
why he did it. Springer did it because he genuinely
believed that a sorcerer's magical strength was
physically bound up in their hair. It is the
exact same homeopathic magic we discussed earlier
regarding the ancient kings who couldn't cut
their hair. Yes, the Inquisitor, the ultimate
representative of pure submissive religion. is
utilizing ancient contagious and homeopathic
magical logic to defeat a magician. He believes
the hair is a physical lever of power. It's mind
-blowing. He is literally using magic to fight
magic. Yeah. All while claiming to be entirely
reliant on God. It perfectly demonstrates just
how deeply ingrained the magical mindset was,
even in the very people dedicating their lives
to destroying it. And eradication wasn't limited
to just the violence of the Inquisitions. The
religious authorities also engaged in a massive
systemic campaign of cultural assimilation. They
absorbed them. Yes. They realized they could
not entirely stopped the populace from engaging
in ancient magical rites, so they aggressively
rebranded them. The text documents how the church
deliberately timed its great festivals to displace
and absorb heathen magical ones. It was a hostile
corporate takeover of the calendar. Very much
so. The text lists them out. Christmas wasn't
just randomly assigned to December. It was strategically
placed to overlay the Mithraic winter solstice
festival. Right. The ancient celebration of the
rebirth of the physical sun was rebranded as
the birth of the religious son of God. And Easter
was directly superimposed over ancient vernal
festivals that celebrated the cyclical death
and homeopathic resurrection of the vegetation
gods. Exactly. And the midsummer festivals, which
were ancient, deeply magical fire festivals,
meant to homeopathically encourage the sun's
heat and contagiously purify the crops they were
merged with St. John's Day. Because the priests
couldn't stop the European peasants from lighting
the mass of bonfires anyway, right? Right. So
they simply declared that the bonfires were now
lit in honor of St. John. Problem solved. But
despite all of this, despite the burnings at
the stake, the head shaving, the calendar rebranding,
the absolute societal dominance of the priest
over the sorcerer, the deep dive reveals a shocking
conclusion from Frazier. The persistence of magic.
Magic never actually died. It is perhaps the
most profound sociological statement derived
from Frazier's index. The text suggests a reality
that makes modern religious institutions deeply
uncomfortable. Oh, they hate this idea. The belief
in magic and witchcraft is fundamentally more
permanent, more deeply rooted in the human psyche
than the great historical religions. That is
a massive statement. It is. Empires rise and
fall. Pantheons are completely replaced. Theological
doctrines are re - written over and over, but
the underlying primal belief in sympathetic magic
remains stubbornly quietly entrenched. The index
shows how European peasants, for centuries after
they had been officially baptized and considered
themselves devout Christians, were continually
actively using magic in their daily lives. And
they never stopped. They were lighting those
midsummer fires. They were carrying holed flints
in their pockets to ward off evil spirits. They
were ringing church bells during thunderstorms.
And they weren't ringing them to call the village
to prayer. No. They were using the sheer sonic
force of the consecrated bell as a literal magical
weapon to physically drive away the witches they
believed were causing the lightning. Or consider
the reliance on botanical magic. The text references
the meticulous gathering of specific herbs like
St. John's wort, mugwort, or fern seed. These
were not gathered randomly. They were harvested
on highly specific, magically potent nights like
Walpurgis night or Halloween, specifically to
serve as protective wards against demons. And
these peasants experienced no cognitive dissonance
about this. They attended mass. They took communion.
They prayed to God for their eternal souls. But
when a physical threat appeared when the crops
were failing or a cow suddenly fell ill, they
reverted instantly to the old levers. They practiced
magic. They trusted the priest to get them into
heaven, but they trusted the mugwort to save
the cow. The old operating system was always
running in the background. Always. So let's step
back and look at this grand timeline Frazier
lays out. We have magic, the flawed machine of
cause and effect. Then we have religion, the
era of bowing to the invisible CEOs. But Frazier
says there's a third stage. Yes. How does science
fit into this? To understand the final destination
of human intellectual evolution, the text references
the philosopher Hegel's thoughts on the matter.
concluding that the grand movement of thought
flows from magic to religion to science. And
here is the crucial deeply counterintuitive insight
Frazier offers. Okay, lay it on us. Magic, despite
its fatal flaws, despite the bizarre rituals
and the wax dolls and eating hawk hearts, is
what actually paved the way for modern science.
Hold on. Because I am looking at this timeline.
You have a guy eating a mole's heart to see in
the dark and doing a homeopathic dance to make
a cloud weep. And you were telling me that is
the intellectual grandfather of the scientific
method. That is what the text argues. That feels
like a massive leap. Honestly, religion feels
closer to science because at least Theology requires
structured philosophical debate and complex written
doctrine. It feels like a leap until you examine
the epistemology, the underlying theory of knowledge.
Religion fundamentally interrupts the search
for natural laws. How so? Religion says that
the universe is governed by conscious entities
who possess free will. If a God has free will,
the universe is inherently unpredictable. Water
boils today because God allows it. Tomorrow,
if God is angry, water might freeze when you
heat it. Oh, wow. Yeah. Religion relies on miracles,
which are, by definition, suspensions of the
natural order. OK. I see exactly where you're
going with this. If a miracle is possible, physics
isn't a rule. It's just a suggestion. Exactly.
Magic, on the other hand, strictly denies the
miracle. Magic taught humanity to look for a
consistent natural order. It posited that the
universe was governed by immutable laws. Cause
and effect. Yes. If you perform action A, result
B will happen every single time, without exception.
It stripped away the unpredictable whims of the
personal gods. Religion said, the universe is
a kingdom. Pray for mercy. Magic said, the universe
is a machine. Figure out how it works. Magic
just had the wrong rules. Exactly. They were
operating on the assumption that the fundamental
laws of physics were like produces like and things
once in contact stay in contact instead of you
know gravity electromagnetism or thermodynamics.
But that underlying bedrock assumption that there
are blind discoverable rules governing reality
is the exact same foundation that all modern
science rests upon. That is incredible. Science
takes the fundamental premise of magic a universe
of consistent impersonal laws and finally replaces
the flawed associations of the primitive mind.
with empirical observation, mathematics, and
rigorous testing. So magic was the intellectual
chrysalis from which science eventually emerged.
It just required a long, painful, necessary incubation
period during the age of religion to refine human
thought. Man, so what does this all mean for
you listening to this deep dive? I mean that
magic wasn't just foolish superstition or chaotic
nonsense. It was humanity's very first rough
draft of physics. That's the perfect way to phrase
it. It was our ancient ancestors looking out
at a terrifyingly random violent world and bravely
attempting to impose order on it. They were trying
to figure out the rules of the game so they could
survive. It represents the absolute dawn of the
analytical human mind, however misguided its
initial desperate conclusions were. This has
been just a massive journey through the source
material. We started with the physical levers
of contagious and homeopathic magic, where treating
a bleeding arm meant you carefully bandaged the
rusty sword that stabbed you. And we saw the
rise of the very first public professionals,
the magicians. Right, accumulating power until
they became magician kings, carrying the literal
crushing weight of the weather on their shoulders.
We observed the humbling birth of religion when
those magical levers undeniably failed, leading
to an era of propitiation, where humanity projected
its own emotions into the heavens and begged
invisible entities for survival. And we tracked
the messy violent turf wars between the intermediary
priests and the independent sorcerers. Only to
discover that the old magical instincts never
really left us. They just hid behind church bells,
midsummer herbs, secretly keeping the concept
of a rule -bound universe alive until the scientific
revolution could finally take the reins. Which
leaves us with a final lingering question to
explore on your own. Oh, I love these. Fraser
shows us that magic was based on a mistaken association
of ideas that felt completely 100 % rational
to the people practicing it. The healer thought
treating the weapon instead of the wound was
just obvious, empirical reality. It was simply
how the world worked. Right. So as we sit securely
in our modern age of science, armed with our
data sets, our algorithms, and our peer -reviewed
methodologies, what deeply held, perfectly rational
associations in our current worldview might future
generations look back on as our very own version
of sympathetic magic? Man, that is a thought
that is going to stick with me. Will historians
in 500 years look at our current theories of
economics or sociology or even psychology the
exact same way we look at guy eating a hawk's
heart to improve his eyesight? It's entirely
possible. Will they see us pulling invisible
levers completely confident that we know how
the machine works while we're entirely missing
the actual gears? It really makes you look at
the entirety of human understanding with a lot
more humility. It certainly does. Well, thank
you for joining us on this deep dive into the
source material. We hope exploring Fraser's timeline
gave you some clarity on how we got here, and
we encourage you to keep questioning the hidden
roots of your own beliefs. We'll catch you next
time.