rabiespunk girlthing

the image of the voodoo doll as a magic doll you stab to hurt people actually comes from a practice by english pagan witches of making poppets. the poppet would be made in the shape of someone you hate and filled with their hair and then stabbed with big needles repeatedly. and the poppets got conflated with voodoo dolls later on.

voodoo dolls were actually a way of keeping records when black people were prevented from reading or writing. a voodoo priest who would serve as a communities doctor would make a doll that looks like the patient, and stick a pin in it where the patient was experiencing symptoms, this would let the doctor keep track of who was having what issues. for example if a patient has a headache, the voodoo priest puts a pin in the dolls head. the priest gives the patient a treatment, when the patient comes back the priest knows which doll is theirs because it looks like them, and they know they're dealing with a headache because the doll has a pin in it's head. when the symptoms resolve the pin is removed, until then the doctor has a reminder that this is an ongoing issue for a specific patient.

I wrote this because when I saw it this post had a TL;DW that conflated the information about poppets and the information about voodoo dolls, creating new and original misinformation about voodoo dolls that comes from confusing them with poppets so like don't reblog that one maybe.

also someone else in the chain included this freeze frame so you can read it