I know there's a long history of people falsely attributing magical properties to magnets, even to this day. Paracelsus, for example, thought that you could use magnets to do things like draw diseases out of the body, and manipulate the flow of body fluids like blood. This follows the logic of sympathetic magic, because magnetism was a force known to attract and potentially redirect things. Back then we didn't know that blood contained iron, which is weakly attracted to magnets. But even today, with the most powerful magnets we have such as MRIs, the effect on blood is almost immeasurable, and magnets can't cause blood to be moved inside your body. Permanent magnets like the ones someone might sell you in a copper bracelet to improve your blood circulation and heal your arthritis and whatever other quackery, basically have zero effect on their own. I've seen them work for people first hand though, and quite well, through placebo effect.
When it comes to their practical use in magic, like with a lodestone, you give them the attribution of attraction and repulsion through their nature of doing so with metal. The same way that corn kernels could be seen through sympathetic magic to correspond to prosperity by their association with a big harvest of a staple food crop. Add in a green bag to keep them in (green representing healthy growth, fertility, or money etc.) and you have yourself a very simple magic charm. Maybe toss in some corn-kernel sized iron pyrite, stick some tiny nails through the corn so they stick to the magnet too, and throw it all in a yellow bag to represent the sun, or gold, etc. It's not very complicated, it's all about associating similar things together.
Another interesting magical use of magnets I remember comes from psionics and the author Charles "Uncle Chuckie" Cosimano. In one of his books he talked about making a psionic helmet to connect to his other psionic/radionic machines, and he lined the inside of it with some of that magnetic strip tape. I would imagine it was a similar sympathetic thinking, the magnet would attract the users thoughts into the cables and into the other machines, etc. And when you do something like this, it works. Not because the magnet has such a power, but because you, the magician, make it so through your will.
Also TMS is very cool and very interesting. I once started designing a pseudo-TMS device which was basically a psionic helmet with magnets aimed at certain areas of the brain and headphones to play binaural beats to effect brainwaves. Never built the thing though. Nowdays there are devices on the market which are supposed to do something similar, such as NeoRhythm, but I've never tried any of them.
When it comes to their practical use in magic, like with a lodestone, you give them the attribution of attraction and repulsion through their nature of doing so with metal. The same way that corn kernels could be seen through sympathetic magic to correspond to prosperity by their association with a big harvest of a staple food crop. Add in a green bag to keep them in (green representing healthy growth, fertility, or money etc.) and you have yourself a very simple magic charm. Maybe toss in some corn-kernel sized iron pyrite, stick some tiny nails through the corn so they stick to the magnet too, and throw it all in a yellow bag to represent the sun, or gold, etc. It's not very complicated, it's all about associating similar things together.
Another interesting magical use of magnets I remember comes from psionics and the author Charles "Uncle Chuckie" Cosimano. In one of his books he talked about making a psionic helmet to connect to his other psionic/radionic machines, and he lined the inside of it with some of that magnetic strip tape. I would imagine it was a similar sympathetic thinking, the magnet would attract the users thoughts into the cables and into the other machines, etc. And when you do something like this, it works. Not because the magnet has such a power, but because you, the magician, make it so through your will.
Also TMS is very cool and very interesting. I once started designing a pseudo-TMS device which was basically a psionic helmet with magnets aimed at certain areas of the brain and headphones to play binaural beats to effect brainwaves. Never built the thing though. Nowdays there are devices on the market which are supposed to do something similar, such as NeoRhythm, but I've never tried any of them.