This thread has been driving me nuts since yesterday because I was sure it reminded me of something Wittgenstein wrote, but couldn't remember where. It was Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough. Here's the passage I was thinking of:

One would like to say: This and that incident have taken place; laugh, if you can.

The religious actions, or the religious life, of the priest-king are no different in kind from any genuinely religious action of today, for example, a confession of sins. This, too, admits of being ‘explained’ and not explained.

Burning in effigy. Kissing the picture of one’s beloved. That is obviously not based on the belief that it will have some specific effect on the object which the picture represents. It aims at satisfaction and achieves it. Or rather: it aims at nothing at all; we just behave this way and then we feel satisfied.

One could also kiss the name of one’s beloved, and here it would be clear that the name was being used as a substitute.

The same savage, who stabs the picture of his enemy apparently in order to kill him, really builds his hut out of wood and carves his arrow skillfully and not in effigy.

The idea that one can summon an inanimate object to oneself as one can summon a person. Here the principle is that of personification.

And magic is always based on the idea of symbolism and language.

The representation of a wish is, eo ipso, the representation of its realization. But magic brings a wish to representation; it expresses a wish.