Laws of Magic: The Law Of Correspondence

The Law of Correspondence

This law assumes that one can influence something based on its relationship or resemblance to another thing. It's the magical law that describes Sympathetic Magic and also influences many other forms of magical workings. It can be further broken down into two counterparts: The Law of Contagion, and The Law of Similarity. 

Sympathetic magic was first mentioned in Richard Andree's Ethnographische Parallelen und Vergleiche, in 1878, and then later broken down into the two sub categories by James George Frazer in 1889 in The Golden Bough. Although these are the first intellectual writings that have been recorded on the subject, sympathetic magic has been in practice sense the dawn of time. It's also the most widely practiced form of magic, and has influences in many other forms of magic and can be seen in almost all witchcraft traditions.
One of the ways we see this law manifest itself is through the popular saying "As above, so below". The idea was first captured in the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, and basically means what happens on one plane of existence also happens on others (what happens in the physical realm mirrors what happens in the spiritual realm, and vice versa). It also represents the understanding that the microcosm reflects the macrocosm, and vice versa. So with the law of correspondence we can use the associations and workings of a spell and assume they will cause the physical reality of the target to reflect them. Following this magical logic we can find value in almost any object for use in spell work. The object's magical uses would mimic its uses and properties in the natural world. 
Many traditional societies believe that there can also exist a non-material link between two things that are seemingly unrelated. For example, there are many folklore tales from around the world that feature an evil villain whose soul is contained within an object and to kill the villain one must destroy the object. Exactly like Voldemort's Horcruxes in the Harry Potter series. 
There are many forms of magic which operate under the presumption of authority of the law of correspondence, which is to say sympathetic magic can be found throughout almost all witchcraft traditions - but mostly it is found, in its truest form, in the different forms of folk magic. 

Magic that uses the law of correspondence:
-Poppets
-Voodoo dolls
-Spells using a picture of someone
-Candle spells, where certain color candles are used to represent the desired affect
-Spells that use the natural state of a thing to represent a desired affect (ie. a lemon to sour, a freezer to freeze, honey to sweeten, mirror to reflect)
​- And many more