On "Voodoo" Dolls & Other Things

Today is All Souls Day in the Roman Catholic Church. It is also the Mexican Dia de los Muertos, and the first day of Fet Gede or the Vodou Feast of the Sacred Dead, which is what I want to write about. But before I do, I want to talk about something I saw on Halloween, which was supposed to be yesterday’s entry. Oh well, I get sidetracked sometimes.

So I switched on the Today show on Halloween, mostly to see what kind of goofy get ups the cast were wearing this year (the Munsters, with Al Roker as Grandpa Munster), and there was a segment called “The Supernatural: Fact vs. Fiction”. Natalie Morales (Eddie Munster) was interviewing a ghost hunter (I didn’t get her name), and she couldn’t have been more discomfited. The fact or fiction statements were really pretty worn thin, I mean who doesn’t know that the Amityville Horror sprung from a true-life crime? It was as if the writers for the show tried to pick the most inoffensive, chewed over material they could find so as not to in any way disturb anyone. I mean honestly, Lizzie Borden? I was chanting about her in my nursery rhymes.

When the ghost hunter whipped out a device she uses to measure paranormal activity, Morales had such an “Oh Brother!” look on her face, I can’t imagine the ghost hunter didn’t see it. There were some stumbling, bumbling moments of explaining what the device, which admittedly looked pretty useless and fake, actually did (something about measuring electrical activity). It was as if Morales either had come into the segment with a deep suspicion of anything that could not be explained by science or her chosen religion, or she didn’t want to look like a kook believing in such things. Or maybe she just wanted to appear the skeptical journalist just doing her job.

Morales would throw out a statement, and the ghost hunter, who didn’t look like she knew one thing about any of the topics, would answer whether that statement was true or false it (she actually waited for the teleprompter before answering the questions to make sure she was correct). What made me take notice, was the last question:

6. True or false: Traditional Voodoo involves sticking pins in dolls to induce pain in real people.

Ghost hunter said it was false, without hesitation, that Voodoo was a serious religion and that they don’t make dolls and stick pins in them to harm other people. A friend of mine, who is a Vodou priest (please note that the latter spelling is the way many adherents spell it to distinguish their religion from the Hollywood version full of human sacrifice and yes, voodoo dolls), told me that that isn’t completely accurate. He told me pins are used in Vodou pakets, which, simply put, are small wrapped, bundles filled with consecrated herbs and liquids. I am not going to go into how they are made because I’m not a vodouisant. I will say, though, that these pakets are not made to hurt people, but to protect the owner of the paket, or for good luck, healing, and the like. They are often made with satin and silk, beads and sequins, and other beautiful materials. There are wax figures you can buy in the shape of males and females, and it is a given that there are those who may work with them for benevolent or malevolent reasons. These individuals do not make up the majority of Vodou serviteurs.

My friend did point out a possible point of origin for the “voodoo doll”: the nail fetishes, nkisi nkondi, of the Congo people. They were used to cure illnesses, protect a village, seal agreements, settle disputes, and destroy enemies (which is where the causing pain aspect of the voodoo doll might come from).

Nkisi nkondi were sacred objects anointed and filled with ritual herbs and other materials (in the same spirit as the paket). This was done by what I’m going to call, in my ignorance of a better term, the village shaman, a specialist in both tribal law and religion. Spirits would then be attracted to the figure, depending on what herbs and materials were used, and take up residence. The nails driven into the figure represented oaths taken, deals made, or other circumstances when the spirit is called. Hammering the nails into the nkisi nkondi activated the power within. Nkisi refers to the spirit itself, nkondi (whose root means “to hunt”) the figure, who basically hunted down the evildoer and took care of him or her.

It was something, though, to see an admission that Vodou is a religion. Ghost hunter may have met people who had mocked her for her belief in the paranormal, so she might have felt a kinship to the followers of Vodou. I, myself, am a Roman Catholic. Our belief is that, during the transubstantiation, the actual body and blood of Christ are on the altar. I’m going to pause here.


Images: Top-Masqueraders on the Mexican Day of the Dead; Above– an nkisi nkondi, or nail fetish.