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.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 1st, 2009 at 6:57 pm and is filed under Halloween. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.