Law of Similarity in Spellwork

The Law of Similarity is one of the oldest identified structural principles in magick, stating that things which resemble each other share a connection through which influence can pass. In practice, this means that working with a likeness of something, an image, a model, a symbol, or a plant or object that shares relevant qualities with the intended target, creates a channel between the representation and the thing represented through which intention and energy can flow.

The most direct statement of the principle is the folk formula “like affects like.” A wax figure shaped to resemble a person and treated in a specific way affects the person through the link of resemblance. A candle the color of money, burned with the intention of increasing wealth, draws on the similarity between the candle’s color and the quality of abundance. A drawing of a healthy heart, treated as an object of healing intention, connects through its resemblance to the practitioner’s own or another’s heart. The principle is simple; its applications are enormous.

History and origins

James Frazer, in The Golden Bough (1890), named the Law of Similarity and the Law of Contagion as the two fundamental principles he believed underlay all magickal practice across cultures. Frazer’s framework was evolutionary and dismissive: he treated these laws as mistaken causal reasoning, a primitive misunderstanding of how the world actually works. His analysis has been extensively criticized by anthropologists for its reductiveness and its hierarchical ranking of cultures, but his identification of the two principles has remained influential because they do genuinely describe structural patterns in magickal practice across an enormous range of traditions.

Similar ideas appear far earlier than Frazer, however. Ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian magick used images, figurines, and written names to act upon their subjects across distance. The ancient Greek concept of sympatheia, the idea that all things in the cosmos are connected through shared qualities, provides a philosophical foundation for the Law of Similarity within a cosmological framework. The Hermetic dictum “as above, so below” expresses a version of the same principle: the structure of one level of reality mirrors the structure of another, creating channels for influence between them.

In folk practice across Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia, the Law of Similarity operates through countless specific applications: dolls and poppets in European and African American practice, rain dances that imitate rain to summon it, the use of heart-shaped stones for love magick, the burning of dragon’s blood for its fire-like intensity, and the planting of seeds under a waxing moon to harness the moon’s growing quality for the crops.

In practice

The Law of Similarity is most visibly operative in four major categories of spellwork.

Color magick assigns qualities to colors based on their resemblance to things with those qualities: red for blood, passion, fire, and vitality; green for growing things, money, and abundance; blue for water, peace, and communication; black for darkness, absorption, and banishing; white for purity and new beginnings. Using a color in a working invokes the quality it resembles.

Poppets and figure magick create a physical representation of a person, animal, or situation, and then act on that representation to affect the original. The poppet need not be highly realistic; the practitioner’s focused intention to link the figure to its subject is the operative connection, supported by the physical resemblance and often reinforced by personal items from the subject (Law of Contagion).

Candle magick shapes or colors candles to represent the intended outcome and then burns them to activate the intention. Carving names, symbols, or wishes into a candle creates inscriptive similarity between the candle and the desired reality. Anointing the candle with an oil whose properties support the intention adds another layer of correspondence.

Sigil magick creates a symbol that is understood to represent and therefore connect to a desired outcome. The sigil is then charged and released, with the symbol maintaining the link between the working and its target.

A method you can use

For a straightforward application of the Law of Similarity, try a candle working for a specific intention. Choose a candle in the color that most closely corresponds to what you want: green or gold for prosperity, pink or red for love, blue or purple for clarity and wisdom, white for general positive outcome.

On the candle, carve or write a single clear statement of your intention: “My work prospers and rewards me well.” Anoint the candle with an oil whose correspondence supports the intention (cinnamon or bergamot for prosperity, rose for love). As you light the candle, state your intention aloud and visualize the outcome clearly and specifically. The flame acts on the candle and, through similarity, on the real situation. Let the candle burn completely if it is small, or burn it in sessions if it is large.

The law as principle and as practice

It is worth holding the Law of Similarity as both a working principle and an open question. As a working principle, it reliably guides the selection of materials and the design of workings, and practitioners who apply it with skill and intention generally find it produces results. As a question about mechanism, it invites genuine curiosity: what is the nature of the connection between a representation and its subject? Is it a quality of consciousness, a feature of the physical universe, or a property of the symbolic domain that human minds inhabit? These questions are genuinely interesting, and engaging with them thoughtfully is part of developing as a practitioner.

In myth and popular culture

The Law of Similarity is so foundational to magical practice across cultures that it appears in some of the earliest recorded magical texts. The Greek Magical Papyri, collections of ritual instructions from Greco-Roman Egypt dating from the second century BCE through the fifth century CE, describe numerous workings that use representations, figurines, and inscribed images to affect their subjects through resemblance. These papyri preserve a cross-cultural synthesis of Egyptian, Greek, and Near Eastern magical traditions, all of which independently made use of the similarity principle.

In literature and folklore, the sticking of pins in a wax figure became a stock image of sympathetic maleficium (harmful magic) in European witch trial records, appearing in trial testimony from Britain, France, and beyond from the fourteenth century onward. The persistence of this image in witch trial documentation, whatever its literal truth in any specific case, reflects how deeply the law of similarity as image magic was embedded in both popular imagination and legal fear during that period.

Modern fantasy literature frequently deploys the Law of Similarity as a recognizable magical trope. In J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, the mandrake root, which screams when pulled and whose cry affects those who hear it, draws on the doctrine of signatures and sympathetic principles. Sympathetic magic systems are also central to the world-building of novels including Guy Gavriel Kay’s “Tigana” and various works in the modern urban fantasy genre, where the academic anthropological framework often informs the fictional magic systems.

Myths and facts

Several misunderstandings about the Law of Similarity appear in both popular and occult literature.

• A common belief holds that the Law of Similarity is a primitive or superstitious mode of thinking replaced by science. Anthropologist James Frazer used this framing in The Golden Bough, but contemporary scholarship treats sympathetic magical thinking as a distinct cognitive mode that persists alongside scientific reasoning in modern people; psychological research on contagion and similarity effects in ordinary decision-making supports this view.
• Some practitioners believe that a sufficiently realistic representation automatically creates a strong sympathetic link. The tradition consistently emphasizes that deliberate intentional designation, the magician’s focused decision that this object represents that person or outcome, is the operative act; realism in the representation supports but does not replace this intentional step.
• The Law of Similarity is sometimes described as a universal law governing physical reality in the manner of gravity or electromagnetism. Whether it describes a genuine causal mechanism in physical reality, a feature of consciousness, or both is an open philosophical question; treating it as established physical science misrepresents both the law and the science.
• Candle color magic is sometimes dismissed as decorative rather than as a genuine application of the similarity principle. For practitioners who work within the color correspondence framework consciously and intentionally, the color functions as a genuine link between the candle and the quality it represents; whether one finds that link meaningful depends on the framework one accepts rather than on the color itself having inherent power.
• Some sources treat the Law of Similarity and the doctrine of signatures as identical. The doctrine of signatures holds that the physical appearance of a plant signals its healing use (a heart-shaped leaf for heart medicine, a yellow sap for bile-related complaints); this overlaps with the similarity principle but is a specific naturalistic system rather than a general magical law.