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Carnelian intaglio with a fish, Roman, 1st century AD

Mary Cassatt (American, 1844–1926), After the Bullfight, 1873. Oil on canvas, 110.5 × 93.4 cm. Signed recto, bottom-left, in paint: "M.S.C. / Seville / 1873".

African Vodun. Art, Psychology, and Power (Chicago, 1995) was the most complete English-language account of African vodun objects when it was published, based on a summer of fieldwork in Abomey, Benin and nearby towns. It discusses the religious artifacts of the Fon people and their neighbors in Benin and Togo, called bocio or bocheaw(empowered bodies) and the associated vodun beliefs and practices. Blier says the bocio are mainly “counter aesthetic”, the opposite of what the Fon would consider pleasing or beautiful. They are designed to attract and hold powerful forces through which the owner can achieve goals such as controlling others, attaining well-being, harming enemies or protecting against destructive forces sent out by enemies. 

Typically the bocio are wood carvings enhanced with medicines that are packed inside them or attached in packets, and with paint and objects such as horns, beads or chains. Often they are bound, clothed or pegged to hold in the magical powers. The bocio objects are linked to gods, forest spirits or the dead, or to animals or plants that have properties associated with these beings.[7]Bocio are activated or empowered by assemblage, speech, saliva, heat in the form of pepper and alcohol, knotting and offering to the higher power or deity. Some have pointed bases so they can be driven into the earth, the source of power for the trickster deity Legba. These can only be activated once. Others may have plinth bases and may be activated more than once.[8]