Halloween

Designed in collaboration with Melissa Jayne Madara

The concept of sympathetic magic originates in antiquity, operating via sympatheia— literally meaning “fellow-feeling"—a perspective of cosmic interrelation, detailed by Plato to describe a “physical world ... animated by a World-Soul which renders it a unified and unique living being". Plotinus also discusses this concept at length in the Enneads (270 CE), describing the principle of cosmic sympathy by saying that “nothing is so distant in space that it is not close enough to the nature of the one living thing to be sympathetic." The “one living thing" he refers to here is the Anima Mundi, the “world-soul," understood in the ancient world as the unifying force of animation and consciousness throughout the entire cosmos. This concept of an animated universe, with both the material and immaterial aspects woven together in causal relationship, was not only the basis for understanding the natural universe—such as the relationship between the moon and the tides or the empathy of humans—but also for understanding why occult phenomena like divination, prophecy, and sorcery are able to take place, echoing the favored Hermetic axiom, “as above, so below."