An account of Clara Walker, a former slave from Arkansas, describes her getting help from a rootworker who made a mud effigy of her master and ran a thron through the back of it, causing severe back pain in him (Chireau, Black Magic…) Not all piercing spells used metal points. The needles and pins were said to be the cause of so many pains”( “Conjuring…”, JAF, p.145).Ī number of ‘Shut-up’ spells-tricks that involve tying the tongue of a gossip or potential witness against you in court-involve taking a slit tongue from an animal like a cow or sheep, packing it with hot peppers, vinegar, and/or salt along with the name paper of the target, and pinning it up with a number of pins and needles (usually nine, but not infrequently more). He took them up, put salt on them, and threw them in the river. Curing magical maladies often involved finding pins used in spellwork and disposing of them in a ritual way: “He went at once to the hearth, took up a brick, and found sticking in a cloth six pins and needles. Probably the most One of the more gruesome application of pin-and-needle magic had little to do with the magical effects of these tools, and all too much to do with their physical dangers: “One instance is given of ‘toad heads, scorpion heads, hair, nine pins and needles baked in a cake and given to a child who became deathly sick’” (“Conjuring and Conjure-Doctors in the Southern United States,” Journal of American Folklore, p. ![]() An old-world carry-over (likely from England, but found in Southern communities where conjure is common) says that burying a pin taken from the clothes of a living person with a dead person will cause the target to die within a year (William G. Zora Neale Hurston recorded a sinister curse which involved taking nine new pins and nine new needles and boiling them in a nefarious formula called “Damnation Water” in order to cross one’s enemy (Hurston, Hoodoo in America). Of course pins and other sharp objects can be used to cause magical harm even without the use of a doll (which makes sense according to the Doctrine of Signatures, which has tremendous influence on much folk magic). Denise Alvarado has a book which examines these dolls in detail, including a look at corn dollies, fetishes, Greek kolossoi, and other similar magical poppets. Other cultures have certainly used small effigies of human beings to cause hurt or help, as well. The doll’s owner would drive a spike into it to “provoke the forces within them” and then the owners would be able to command the spirit to perform certain tasks (Chireau, Black Magic: Religion & the African American Conjuring Tradition). There are some African roots to the voodoo doll phenomenon, including the minkisi minkondi, which were little wooden dolls from Kongo where spirits were thought to live. ![]() ![]() I’ll probably try to do a separate entry on doll magic another time, but it’s worth a mention here, too, I think. Films and television frequently portray only harmful magic being done through these dolls, but a witch or conjurer can also use them to cast love spells, healing spells, or even health and wellness spells. These poppets are stuffed with botanicals, curious, dirt, rags, and/or personal items from the intended target and then manipulated to control him or her. Probably one of the first things to come to mind when looking at sharp-and-pointy things is the popular “voodoo doll,” which is essentially a European-style poppet. This will probably overlap a bit with my entry on iron, but I’ll attempt to cover more new ground than old. What I’ll be looking at today are folkloric occurrences of piercing devices as magical tools. Really, this entry should be called “pins & needles & spikes & nails & all other kinds of spiky things,” but that would have been an overly long title, so I’m standing by my choice.
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