I was very interested in this book which I read a couple of years ago by Marcel Mauss, who is one of those founders — in every academic discipline there are always a few founders who appear in the first paragraph of every book. When you look at the laws of sympathetic magic, Marcel Mauss is right there. That’s how I knew this was an interesting area to be in.
Source: Sympathetic Magic · Podcast: Peppercorns and Mana (Oct 2025)
The explicit scholarly lineage: Frazer (Golden Bough, 1890) first named the Laws. Mauss (1902) connected them to Mana and gift exchange. Lévi-Strauss articulated the Law of Association. Rozin & Nemeroff (University of Pennsylvania) brought empirical rigour — the eight properties of contagion, the source-target-medium model. The author’s innovation: applying this entire lineage to Disinfolklore detection. Contagion IS Mana — the subtle energy that physically fuses with organic beings, including human minds processing memes.
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