STAB, MANGLE, POP!!!! JUST STICK WITH IT, YA’ll!

A SHORT HISTORY OF VOODOO DOLLS

by A. Pustanio, Photos by Karen Beals

It’s safe to assume that everyone has heard about voodoo dolls and thinks they’ve pretty much grasped the concept. After all, what could be more simple? A little cloth cut to look like a person, a little stuffing (preferably some rotting Spanish moss), some twine, a Sharpie marker to make the features, and a big box of shiny new pins can provide hours of nasty, furtive fun to the discontented or just mischief-minded among us.

Or, perhaps you’ve encountered them dressed in Mardi Gras hues, complete with feathers and primitive features, glued to magnets and grinning from the refrigerator door as a little memento of a visit to New Orleans.

But is this all that’s behind the mystique and seduction of these popular little creatures? Mostly harmless and merely decorative?

Creating little effigies and figures in the form of human beings, gods, animals, etc., is as old as the history of mankind. Some of the earliest surviving forms of cultural art (the art created to entertain the masses, kind of like our arts and crafts of today) were little effigies of people involved in day-to-day activities: water bearers with buckets, farmers with pitchforks, etc. Many of these were probably children’s playthings, but others were created for more empiric purposes such as the adornment of personal altars or to accompany soldiers in battle as tiny memorials of dead cohorts or mementos of living family members.

But perhaps as long as the craft of creating these positive, reinforcing effigies has been around, a darker side has existed and a darker, more malevolent use has been found for them.

Enter the poppet. Not just a children’s doll, the poppet, in the European tradition, was truly the first “multi-task” toy.

Buckland defines a poppet as, “A figure made to represent a person…used in magical ritual. Made of cloth, wax, clay, or any other substance, it may or may not look exactly like the person it represents.” He goes on to state that cloth poppets have “always been popular in magic, especially for healing purposes.” The type of magic he is referring to is, of course, sympathetic magic, and in this regard the poppet would be created in a sort of gingerbread man format and is stuffed with healing herbs appropriate to combat the illness or malaise affecting the person it is intended to help. Often slivers of fingernail or hair from the individual will be added and the poppet will then be consecrated as the living counterpart of the person in need of healing. The practitioner will then utter the consecrating spell, “Creature of cloth, thou art (name), and all that I do unto thee be done unto (name),” or something similar.

It is a fact in human relationships that everybody doesn’t always get along, and this may have been a particularly poignant reality of daily life in ancient times when just surviving was next to impossible. This feeling of desperation, often coupled with a feeling of helplessness, and further exacerbated by frequent, deplorable victimization at the hands of more powerful tribes or individuals, led to the realization among our distant ancestors that, “Hey, life can suck sometimes!”

These harsh realities led early mankind to rely on groups of more powerful and wise individuals to explain the sometimes glaring inconsistencies of human life. These individuals might be anything from priests and shamans, to midwives and apothecaries, but all had in common the same thing: knowledge of the mysterious, intricate workings of the unseen side of the natural world. And not all confined their craft to healing and helping. From the very beginning there were those who were perfectly willing to facilitate injury and revenge; or who were, at the very least, willing to show one how to bring about these things on one’s own behalf. To say they taught by example is an understatement.

According to Buckland, “As early as 1100 BCE, a treasury official and the women of the harem of Pharaoh Ramses II worked together to make a wax image of the Pharaoh to bring about his death.” From this account, its obvious to see that the sympathetic connection for evil as well as for good was almost instantaneous in the minds of people inclined to use such methods.

Poppets appear throughout the history of European paganism and witchcraft and on more than one occasion the magical connection apparently worked quite well. Historical chronicles are full of accounts of people becoming injured or ill as a result of malevolent magic taken out on a poppet consecrated for the purpose of harm. Still others have apparently died, though whether as a result of injuries to the poppet or simple fright at the knowledge that black magic was being worked against them can’t be determined.

What this serves to illustrate, though, is the potent link that exists in the human psyche connecting poppets, or dolls, with harm. The fact that the use of poppets and dolls is so widespread also indicates that no culture is immune to this shared memory. Even among the most insular cultures, the use of poppets or dolls for magic is well known. For example, the Gypsies create their straw fetish dolls in a similar traditional way, and these are known to be used for “good” as well as evil magic.

Poppets figured in many witchcraft cases over the centuries and ultimately European traditions carried over into the New World where Puritan ideals served to forever associate the poppet with malicious intent. Thus, when poppets stuck through with pins and hog bristles were found in the home of Bridget Bishop, a woman accused as a witch during the Salem Witch Trials, it was damning evidence.

So if the use of poppets for negative purposes isn’t a new thing, what sets the traditional voodoo doll apart and gives it such an enduring air of evil?

Voodoo dolls, as we know them, are virtually foreign to the Vodoun traditions of Haiti, the island country most closely associated with the practice of Voodoo as a religion. It is true that Vodoun Bokors, or black voodoo priests, practicing a form of African fetish magic brought to the New World with the African Diaspora, have been known to employ dolls and effigies to work evil on intended victims. But even these “dolls” bear only slight resemblance to the dolls that most people associate with the practice of Voodoo.

The fact of the matter is that the tradition of creating and using Voodoo dolls for evil purposes, of sticking them with pins and subjecting them to all kinds of indecencies, is a particular claim to fame of what is called “New Orleans Voodoo.”

A New Orleans Marie Laveau The Voodoo Queen Of New Orleans statue, pictured holding a New Orleans Voodoo doll and Gris-Gris Bag. ©2006 Ricardo Pustanio

As most everyone knows, the voodoo tradition was brought to the New Orleans region by African slaves, often via Haiti and other islands in the eastern Caribbean. Voodoo’s arrival in the Louisiana region caused it to interlope on other traditions already in place, such as Native American and Atchafalaya Gypsy nature and rootwork practices. Ultimately, African Voodoo’s assimilation into these practices resulted in a potent regional hoodoo tradition that persists to this day.

Popular among slaves, some speculate that making voodoo dolls and sticking them with pins was one method by which the slave could exert some control over the master: from the very start white plantation owners, mostly of European descent, feared this and its obvious connection to the more familiar poppet magic of their cultures. More often than not, however, the voodoo doll was employed as a weapon against other believers in voodoo, or vodusi, who did not hesitate to use it and immediately recognized its consequences. Primitive dolls, often bound with twine or cat-gut and stuck through with everything from pins to fish bones, have been unearthed on several plantations in South Louisiana, evidence that the concept of vicarious punishment through use of an image doll was firmly in place among the African slave populations of 18th and 19th century Louisiana.

But the idea of using voodoo dolls and other forms of hexes such as gris-gris and mojo, reached its zenith during the reign of the infamous Voodoo Queen of New Orleans, none other than Marie Laveau.

Equally famous for her hairdressing skills as for her practice of Voodoo, Marie Laveau rose to fame in New Orleans during the latter half of the 19th century when her reputation as a powerful voodoo mambo (or priestess) grew by leaps and bounds. She was constantly being sought out by rich and poor alike to lend her aid in all sorts of requests, some well intentioned and others not so. Most came to her with simple requests to make a certain person fall in love or to secure the healthy delivery of a baby or an inheritance. But just as often, there were those who asked her to use her power to punish and avenge when they felt they had been wronged in one way or another.

The lore of 19th century voodoo is filled with the tales of victims of this vengeful magic who awoke after a fitful night’s sleep to find bones, graveyard dust and the inevitable voodoo doll laying on their porch steps – placed there in the darkness by Marie Laveaux herself. The tales would otherwise be a footnote in New Orleans history were it not for the fact that, according to reliable sources, nearly all the voodoo Marie Laveau performed actually worked. Often, the mere suggestion that the Voodoo Queen had “worked” a person would be enough to cause physical or emotional collapse; this, according to some accounts, was often followed by actual death. The power possessed by Marie Laveau is still at work in the Voodoo practiced in New Orleans today, and the tradition of the Voodoo Doll is still alive and well.

Some proponents of Voodoo as a religion attempt to distance themselves from the voodoo doll cursing tradition and there are many examples of dolls created for more positive purposes such as healing and spiritual enlightenment. These practitioners claim that use of voodoo dolls for vengeance and punishment is a form of Bokor (Black) Voodoo that has contributed to the bad reputation the religion has had to bear over the centuries.

But it remains a fact that most, if not all, people who seek out a Voodoo practitioner for the creation and manipulation of a Voodoo doll is usually bent on vengeance, at a minimum, or often genuine, irreversible harm. There is something viscerally satisfying about pricking and puncturing an effigy of your worst enemy; the natural expansion of this concept lends itself easily to the act of greater harm and the consequent feeling of control one can obtain from this.

Though in recent years there have been no actual reports of a person dying because a voodoo doll was employed against them, it is still not high on the list of things a local from New Orleans wants to see on his or her doorstep any given morning. No one finding this will have any doubt as to the intent of the person(s) who left it there!

So how does a simple creature of cloth, wax or clay become imbued with such power to create havoc and harm?

More than just consecrating the doll as the image of a certain person, a lot of the “magic” of making voodoo dolls, especially “black” voodoo dolls, comes from the person creating it. Traditionally, the maker is instructed to concentrate all her thought and effort into the making of the doll, envisioning during the construction all the evil that can possibly be heaped on the victim. Some practitioners will spend days in the creation and “charging” of their doll, keeping it in sight and venting their anger and frustration at the doll until, when the time comes, the doll is finally given the name of the intended victim and the ritual abuse of the voodoo doll can begin. This process, according to experts in the field, rarely fails, unless the will of the creator falters at some point. The resulting humiliation or punishment of the victim may then be less potent than otherwise intended.

A form of positive (though still manipulative) magic for which the voodoo doll is excellently suited is the traditional magic “binding.” In this instance, the practitioner ritually binds the voodoo doll, charged and named for the individual in question, from doing harm or evil toward others. Thus bound, the ill-intentioned efforts of that person will come to nothing; the person whom the practitioner has protected will experience no harm at the hands of a person thus bound. Conversely, a person can be bound with evil intent and although this is often used in Bokor Voodoo the tradition is an ancient one. European grimoires are full of rituals detailing the use of poppets and dolls for bringing evil to selected individual; many of these rituals even go so far as instructing the practitioner to bury the doll in a kind of symbolic funeral. Once this is done, the person whom the doll represented will be seen to waste away and, ultimately, die. This kind of ritual is not uncommon among those who use voodoo dolls for evil purposes.

Today there are literally hundreds of kinds of voodoo dolls available. Many are the traditional primitive sort, produced by local voodoo workers for sale to the public. These dolls can usually be identified by their similarities to each other, and often come with a packet of pins and instructions. Most people who purchase these dolls will keep them around as a curio, usually as a reminder of a fun trip to the Land of Voodoo, New Orleans. Although there is a tendency to laugh at this trade, to true practitioners of Voodoo there is a real danger inherent in these mass-produced dolls.

“Just don’t name it unless you really intend to use it.” This is the warning given by most reputable mambos or priestesses who provide such items to the public. Obviously, how a voodoo doll is used depends on the person who owns it, but there have been instances where even the most garish-looking tourist trinket voodoo doll has ultimately caused harm – however minor – after arriving at its destination. The lesson here should be obvious.

Other voodoo dolls available to the public are more specialized and are usually purchased by collectors or persons who are not unacquainted with the caveats that go along with owning such artwork.

Many popular voodoo dolls are created in honor of a particular Lwa, one of the powerful spirits of the Vodoun religion, and though there are many styles, most renditions remain true to the aspects of the particular Lwa they depict. Probably the most popular of these Lwa dolls is Gede, the great Death Lwa, who is represented in various skeletal forms with colors and accoutrements easily recognized by his devotees. Other popular Lwas are Manman Brigit, Erzulie Freda, Papa Legba, and Lasirien, with her aquatic motif.

Other dolls available are rendered in synch with devotion to a particular Lwa but are designed to invoke the power of the Lwa in the owner’s life. These devotional dolls are created more for actual use than for display, and since most are one of a kind, created from an intimate consultation with a practicing mambo or priest, the dolls are highly prized and extremely personal. These dolls are also kept very secure because any ill-intentioned person possessing such a creation can produce no end of aggravation and harm to the devotee it represents.

As you can see, voodoo dolls come in a myriad of styles and sizes and can be created for any number of purposes. It is important to remember that the voodoo doll as we know it today represents centuries of magical tradition and as such it should never be treated lightly, even when it doesn’t seem to take itself very seriously (such as the tacky, tourist voodoo magnets mentioned above). Always treat your doll with respect and approach it with the knowledge that it is a creature of craft, your craft or that of another, and as such it has – whether you acknowledge it or not – a life all its own.

There is a practice in Haiti of nailing crude poppets with a discarded shoe on trees near the cemetery to act as messengers to the otherworld, which is very different in function from how poppets are portrayed as being used by "voodoo worshippers" in popular media and imagination, ie. for purposes of sympathetic magic towards another person.

Another use of dolls in authentic Vodou practice is the incorporation of plastic doll babies in altars and objects used to represent or honor the spirits, or in pwen, which recalls the aforementioned use of bocio and nkisi figures in Africa.

One New Orleans artist Ricardo Pustanio particularly known for his unusual sacred constructions of voodoo dolls and voodoo doll wedding dolls. His Lavish creations are higly sought after and extremely collectable.

CHOOSING YOUR VOODOO DOLL Modern members of Marie Laveau’s secret voodoo sosyete are said to follow long-standing traditions in choosing voodoo dolls for their personal use. These traditions, which have been handed down orally and preserved among the most devout followers of the original Voodoo Queen of New Orleans, are looked upon as a loose set of guidelines to follow in choosing from among a variety of dolls charged with a myriad of intents and purposes. FIND OUT MORE VISIT HERE NOW!

 

LIVING DOLLS
Tales from a truly creepy toy chest. Haunted dolls are anything but pleasant company!

Story by A Pustanio Photos by Gina B. Wright

There is probably no one reading this who has not had a disturbing experience at one time or another involving that most simple and supposedly benign object, a child’s doll.