Rhetorics of law and ritual: A semiotic comparison of the law of talion and sympathetic magic

Many punishments, including the law of talion, which prescribes "an eye for an eye", are structured by the same analogical principles of similarity an d contiguity that Tylor and Frazer identified in sympathetic magic. As with magic, analogical punishments have frequently been consigned to a "primiti ve" past, even by such important theorists as Durkheim and Foucault. Howeve r, the appearance of analogical thinking in modern times, which Jonathan Z. Smith has shown in the case of Frazer, calls into question such evolutioni st accounts. Bentham's "modern" philosophy of punishment also reveals a dep endence on analogy and the convergence of punishment and magic as forms of ritual and rhetoric. Unlike evolutionist accounts, semiotics and ritual the ory suggest an explanation for the wide and enduring use of analogy in ritu als. Such analogies serve the rhetorical function of reinforcing the natura lizing arbitrary social laws, whether these are prescriptions of magic or l aws of punishment.