Stick That Voodoo Doll Up Your ….

Stick That Voodoo Doll Up Your …. May 14, 2016

Voodoo Dolls on sale at the airport in New Orleans. Photo by Lilith Dorsey, all rights reserved.
Voodoo Dolls on sale at the airport in New Orleans. Photo by Lilith Dorsey, all rights reserved.

There are a whole bunch of stupid prejudices and ideas that get attached to the Voodoo religion. The Voodoo Doll is clearly one of the worst. To begin with, this item is a relatively modern invention, like within the past couple of hundred years. They are associated with poppet dolls that were made in Britain for healing and sympathetic magic….yada yada. I’ve said this many times before. These healing dolls somehow began to be associated with hexing practices in Hoodoo and Voodoo. There was sometimes a custom of soul dolls to represent the spirit of someone who had passed used in different communities in Africa, but this again was not for hexing purposes but more as a tool to help the individual and their family transition to a new level.

In my post reviewing Denise Alvarado’s Voodoo Doll Spellbook, I state :
“Voodoo Dolls,” are the stuff of Hollywood legend. In the book Ms. Alvarado makes this clear from the very start saying ” Hollywood and the media are not the only ones to blame…. the presentation of the evil Voodoo doll began with the enslavement of African people and subsequent attempts to dehumanize them.” New Orleans Voodoo has long been the target of such demonization on many levels.”

Collection of African Dolls on display at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. Photo by Lilith Dorsey, 2014 all rights reserved.
Collection of African Dolls on display at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. Photo by Lilith Dorsey, 2014 all rights reserved.

Yet the myth persists. Hopefully, I’ll never get another question about how to stick pins in someone’s genitals Tweet: Hopefully, I’ll never get another question abt how 2 stick pins in someone’s genitals http://bit.ly/2e5HoKp(not that people don’t deserve it, I can think of a few right now.) And maybe I’ll never get another comment about zombies, but I seriously doubt that too. The realistic fact of the matter is that  the New Orleans Voodoo and Haitian Vodou religion were born out of extreme circumstances, and a such developed extreme defenses. All right, if there were such things as Voodoo Dolls, one for staying away from Social Media pictured above is an amusing and useful idea. This however, isn’t what the ancient Voodoo religion is about. For more about this and other persistent myths please see 5 Voodoo Stereotypes That Won’t Die. Help Me Kill Them. And if you have benefited from what you read here, please remember to share, share, share and help us out !


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