For literary versions, see horcruxes in the Harry Potter books; the Dungeons & Dragons term lich has become common in recent fantasy literature.
[4] 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,[5] while a 15th-century crown princess of Joseon Korea is recorded as having cut her husband's lovers' shoes into pieces and burnt them.
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.
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 2005, Francis Thackeray published a paper in the journal Antiquity, in which he recognised that there was a strong case for the principle of sympathetic magic in southern Africa in prehistory.
A prehistoric rock painting at Melikane in Lesotho shows what appear to be men (shamans) bending forward like animals, with two sticks to represent the front legs of an antelope.
In 2005, in the journal Antiquity, Francis Thackeray suggests that there is even a photograph of such rituals, recorded in 1934 at Logageng in the southern Kalahari, South Africa.
In the Brandberg in Namibia, in the so-called "White Lady" panel recorded by the Abbé Henri Breuil and Harald Pager, there are "symbolic wounds" on the belly of a gemsbok-like therianthrope (catalogued as T1), which might relate to the principle of sympathetic hunting magic and trance, as suggested by Thackeray in 2013.
Many people also evaluated a Holiday Inn as less than ideal, if they knew that the same hotel was to be transformed into a facility for AIDS patients (future exposure).