Dear Diary: sympathetic magic

Sun, sun, go to hell; bring to us a rainy spell; sun, sun, go to hell; bring to us a rainy spell...
With the straw bonnet perched upon his head, and the black chevrons painted about his eyes, and the straw kilt spinning about his waist, and the bone of an indeterminate animal clutched in his hand, Albert has never looked so cool. In time to his rhyme, shaman Steven shakes the pebble-filled beer can.
‘Sun, sun, go to hell,’ he intones together with Albert. Steven too wanted to don a straw kilt and bonnet. But the store “Corn Dollies and Other Follies” had run out of stock before Steven arrived. “Got to wait for this year’s harvest to be woven into men’s desires,’ the forlorn proprietor told him. So, the shaman had to settle for a pair of tartan Bermuda shorts and Marcia’s old gardening hat. And that worthy was herself skipping about in a black bodystocking, imprinted with white skeleton markings, left over from last Halloween, no doubt.
‘What do you want to wear that for?’ I asked, when I saw it.
‘It’ll bring us closer to the spirit world: isn’t that what we want?’
As for the origin of Albert’s animal bone, don’t ask.
Plan A had been for us gals to rush through a lush meadow, clad in broderie anglaise and chanting the name of an innocuous flower, just as in a certain Marc Jacobs perfume ad. But the continuing drought means a dearth of lush meadows. So Marcia dons her skeleton kit and I sit cross-legged on the scorched grass, a dish of the scarce commodity placed at the crux of my limbs. Albert’s chanting continues, us all hoping that between us, we can generate enough spirit energy to bring the heavens down to earth.
Sun, sun, go to hell; bring to us a rainy spell...
Personally, I blame James Frazer, (1854 to 1941) you know, that Victorian geezer who devoted his life to detailing tribal and local customs the world over. In his book, The Golden Bough, Frazer writes much on the meaning of sympathetic magic. Basically this involves creating a simile or likeness of a desired happening and placing it significantly to bring about the desired effect, thus my dish of water. For example, if you wished a newly-wed couple to conceive a child, you presented them with a doll on their wedding night. North American Indians drew a likeness of someone they did not like in sand or clay and then pricked with a stick or some other sharp instrument the area of the drawing, arm, head or leg, in the belief that the subject would suffer injury in that area. And among some tribes, if that year’s crop failed then the king was tossed off his throne or even killed. Here, do not smile unless you have NEVER torn up a picture of someone that you did not like or told an adversary to ‘get lost’ or ‘drop dead’. Back in the present, the chanting and prancing continues until a pair of eyes looks over the hedge.
‘What are you doing here?’ demands a male voice. Albert stops in his tracks.
‘We are doing this for you,’ he says, ‘to make the crops grow and to feed your cattle, else you will go out of business.’
But the man interrupts him.
‘I have just bought this property and I am going to build upon it and you people are trespassing. GET OUT. Now.’
Sheepishly, we leave the field and I empty my dish of water in the hedge as we do so. Well, it’s precipitation of a sort. Later, we cut our losses. You see, if the rain dance had worked, we were going to use it to enchant a magic money tree. And it hasn’t rained yet.

I’ve got my eye on Synecdoche

We use synecdoche daily, hourly, many of us never even knowing the name of this quirky, life-enhancing art. We have all referred to champagne as ‘bubbly’, and the colours of fruits like oranges and lemons are the names of the fruits themselves and the juices derived there from. We routinely talk about the head when referring to the principal teacher of a school. Or taking a matter to the top. Or going shopping with plastic. Or shaking our heads sadly for a friend who is not on wheels It is all delightfully post modern, yet synecdoche has been enriching our speech for centuries. At the time of the French Revolution, the peasantry was referred to as the sans culottes, meaning that they didn’t wear the same kind of trousers as the men of the upper classes. In England, sharp-witted cartoonists drew hordes of rampaging French males with only long-tailed shirts to cover their nether bits. Revolutionaries were referred to as bonnets rouges, because of the characteristic red hats they wore.
In the nineteenth century, synecdoche came into its own through the pen of Charles Dickens. His novels are overflowing with verbal images like the Black-eyed, Aged Parent, and the Mercuries (footmen). Dickens himself was often – and still is – referred to as The Inimitable. And ordinary folk are often referred to as – jokingly, I trust – the
Great Unwashed. Right now, I am going to put on the kettle and then spend the evening with my feet up, before going to bed.