Sympathetic magic, also known as imitative magic, is a type of magic based on imitation or correspondence.

James George Frazer coined the term "sympathetic magic" in The Golden Bough (1889); Richard Andree, however, anticipated Frazer, writing of sympathy-enchantment (German: Sympathie-Zauber) in his 1878 Ethnographische Parallelen und Vergleiche. Frazer subcategorised sympathetic magic into two varieties: that relying on similarity, and that relying on contact or "contagion":

If we analyze the principles of thought on which magic is based, they will probably be found to resolve themselves into two: first, that like produces like, or that an effect resembles its cause; and, second, that things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed. The former principle may be called the Law of Similarity, the latter the Law of Contact or Contagion. From the first of these principles, namely the Law of Similarity, the magician infers that he can produce any effect he desires merely by imitating it: from the second he infers that whatever he does to a material object will affect equally the person with whom the object was once in contact, whether it formed part of his body or not.

Imitation involves using effigies, fetishes, or poppets to affect the environment of people, or people themselves. Voodoo dolls are an example of fetishes used in this way: the practitioner uses a lock of hair on the doll to create a link (also known as a "taglock") between the doll and the donor of this lock of hair. In this way, that which happens to the doll will also happen to the person.

Correspondence is based on the idea that one can influence something based on its relationship or resemblance to another thing. Many popular beliefs regarding properties of plants, fruits, and vegetables have evolved in the folk-medicine of different societies owing to sympathetic magic. This include beliefs that certain herbs with yellow sap can cure jaundice, that walnuts could strengthen the brain because of the nuts' resemblance to brain, that red beet juice is good for the blood, that phallic-shaped roots will cure male impotence, etc; many of these fall under the Doctrine of Signatures.

Many traditional societies believed that an effect on one object can cause an analogous effect on another object, without an apparent causal link between the two objects. For instance, many folktales feature a villain whose "life" exists in another object, and who can only be killed if that other object is destroyed, as in the Russian folktale of Koschei the Deathless. For literary versions, see horcruxes in the Harry Potter books, or The Picture of Dorian Gray; the Dungeons & Dragons term lich has become common in recent fantasy literature. Mircea Eliade wrote that in Uganda, a barren woman is thought to cause a barren garden, and her husband can seek a divorce on purely economic grounds.

Many societies have been documented as believing that, instead of requiring an image of an individual, influence can be exerted using something that they have touched or used. Consequently, the inhabitants of Tanna, Vanuatu, in the 1970s were cautious when throwing away food or losing a fingernail, as they believed these small scraps of personal items could be used to cast a spell causing fevers. Similarly, an 18th-century compendium of Russian folk magic describes how someone could be influenced through sprinkling cursed salt on a path frequently used by the victim, while a 15th-century crown princess of Joseon Korea is recorded as having cut her husband's lovers' shoes into pieces and burnt them.

Sympathetic magic has been considered in relation to Paleolithic cave paintings such as those in North Africa and at Lascaux in France. The theory, which is partially based on studies of more modern hunter-gatherer societies, is that the paintings were made by magic practitioners who could potentially be described as shamans. The shamans would retreat into the darkness of the caves, enter into a trance state and then paint images of their visions, perhaps with some notion of drawing power out of the cave walls themselves. This goes some way towards explaining the remoteness of some of the paintings (which often occur in deep or small caves) and the variety of subject matter (from prey animals to predators and human hand-prints). In his book Primitive Mythology, Joseph Campbell stated that the paintings "were associated with the magic of the hunt". For him, this sympathetic magic was akin to a participation mystique, where the paintings, drawn in a sanctuary of "timeless principle", were acted upon by rite.