world to the other. Here we find no trace of the systematic
order or severe method that distinguish the work of the scholar of
Alexandria. Of course, the doctrines of astrology are just as chimerical as
those of magic, but they are deduced with an amount of logic, entirely
wanting in works of sorcery, that compels reasoning intellects to accept
them. Recipes borrowed from medicine and popular superstition, primitive
practices rejected or abandoned by the sacerdotal rituals, beliefs
repudiated by a progressive moral religion, plagiarisms and forgeries of
literary or liturgic texts, incantations in which the gods of all barbarous
nations are invoked in unintelligible gibberish, odd and disconcerting
ceremonies--all these form a chaos in which the imagination loses itself, a
potpourri in which an arbitrary syncretism seems to have attempted to
create an inextricable confusion.

However, if we observe more closely how magic operates, we find that it
starts out from the same principles and acts along the same line of
reasoning {183} as astrology. Born during the same period in the primitive
civilizations of the Orient, both were based on a number of common
ideas.[59] Magic, like astrology, proceeded from the principle of universal
sympathy, yet it did not consider the relation existing between the stars
traversing the heavens, and physical or moral phenomena, but the relation
between whatever bodies there are. It started out from the preconceived
idea that an obscure but constant relation exists between certain things,
certain words, certain persons. This connection was established without
hesitation between dead material things and living beings, because the
primitive races ascribed a soul and existence similar to those of man, to
everything surrounding them. The distinction between the three kingdoms of
nature was unknown to them; they were "animists." The life of a person
might, therefore, be linked to that of a thing, a tree, or an animal, in
such a manner that one died if the other did, and that any damage suffered
by one was also sustained by its inseparable associate. Sometimes the
relation was founded on clearly intelligible grounds, like a resemblance
between the thing and the being, as where, to kill an enemy, one pierced a
waxen figure supposed to represent him. Or a contact, even merely passing
by, was believed to have created indestructible affinities, for instance
where the garments of an absent person were opera