by Rachel Emery

A Meteorology major and a GIS minor from Glenarm, Illinois, Rachel Emery wrote this essay for Catherine Mintler’s “Doppelgängers and Doubles” class.

Have you ever wished Sigmund Freud was still alive so you could finally make clear your dislike for him and your disagreements with his outdated, problematic scientific ideas? Although not the same as bringing him back to life, his new form as a modern Voodoo doll gives you a chance to tell him how you really feel, and even stick a few pins in him. Maybe don’t mutilate him too much, though, for his 1919 essay titled “The Uncanny” is largely the reason we understand the feeling of uncanniness brought on by this doll of him today.

But first, some background on Voodoo. Haitian Vodou comes from a blend of religions from Western African Fon and Yoruba cultures, the Central African Kongo empire, as well as Catholic influences. These practices were then taken to the United States, particularly Louisiana, during the slave trade and after the Haitian Revolution as refugees were forced to relocate to the States. Historically, this religion’s goal was a balance between humans, their environment, ancestral spirits, and a group of deities known as the lwa (Long 88). Associated with this religion are ritual figurines used in the ancient African cultures from which Vodou was created. One of these figurines is known as the nkisi nkondi, which is a “power object” of the Kongo people and represents local habitations of the spirits of the dead for the living to use. The figure has a wide variety of purposes, including bearing witness to oaths in which those participating seal their commitment by driving a nail into the body of the figure, as well as keeping someone in good health. Therefore, this type of ritual magic is and was historically used as a form of social power deeply integrated into Kongo life and society, allowing them to channel natural powers for social good (Armitage 92-3).

It is important to note this background of not only the Vodou religion itself, but also the use of ritual figurines within it which bear semblance to modern day voodoo dolls, as Anglo-European colonization of African culture spawned what are now widespread misinformed views and attitudes towards once very meaningful and legitimate religious practices. While Haitian Vodou and the use of ritual figurines within it have complex and meaningful origins, European and American misunderstandings of these practices throughout history mark the modern “voodoo doll” as foremost a product of the exploitation of Afro-Caribbean cultures through imbalanced racial power dynamics and Western consumerism. After Vodou reached the United States, New Orleans Voodoo emerged from changes to the original Haitian belief system and was commonly practiced by slaves and free people of color. Undoubtedly as a result of racial discrimination in the south, Voodoo as a religion became merely a symbol of Black rebellion, sin, and sorcery in the eyes of white society, whose members at the same time also began exploiting the religion for their own entertainment (Long 88). Ultimately, the history of Voodoo’s origins in Haitian Vodou were erased, and the once meaningful religious practices associated with Voodoo were widely sensationalized for white America. The most recognizable result of this? The voodoo doll.

In its popularization, the voodoo doll showcased a false presumption of the presence of “sympathetic” and “figurative” image magic—in which the doll itself could be used to represent and affect a specific victim—in Vodou and early Voodoo culture, which remains a widespread ideal surrounding the religion today (Frankfurter 46). However, these magical connections through dolls actually originated in Anglo-European mythology, long before either Haitian Vodou or New Orleans Voodoo existed. For example, this magic can be traced back to poppets used in the Byzantine empire to either physically harm a specific victim or to bind the spirit of a demon to them, as well as to many other ancient European cultures (Armitage 87). In conjunction with rampant racism against Black and other people of color who subscribed to Vodou beliefs during the time of its migration to the United States, these sympathetic practices once legitimized in ancient Europe were instead applied and used against Vodou and its ritual figurines, such as the nsiki nkondi, to aid in painting it and its followers as exotic, sinful, and superstitious. Similarly, the voodoo doll, while clearly a marketable and profitable piece of exploitative consumerism, became and remains the face of Voodoo and its connection to past Vodou practices, despite its closer likeness to Anglo-European figurative image magic.

Turning to the figure of Sigmund Freud as a popularized “voodoo doll,” many of its features contribute to its uncanniness which connects us to him today. According to Freud, the Uncanny is that class of the terrifying in which the familiar is made unfamiliar. In relation to dolls specifically, he says their uncanniness arises from the infantile fear of a doll coming to life, balanced on the brink between life and death, animate and inanimate. In the case of this doll, Sigmund Freud is no longer alive, so it makes us wonder and even fear that we could communicate or even bring back to life someone who is already dead in the same way that traditional Vodou is used to communicate and interact with ancestral spirits. The stitching between the front and back, then, not only shows this very fine line between life and death, but also symbolically holds the spirit of the person the doll represents, which contributes to its connection to a real, once living person, only now in an inanimate form. Since a Voodoo doll in popular Western culture is now seen as an inanimate human double used for sympathetic, and oftentimes harmful, magic, Freud’s original idea of a double or doppelgänger acting as a harbinger of death become all the more realized with this doll. Freud is no longer alive, but the act of controlling or harming the figure meant to portray him represents his original fear of a body double possessing the ability to threaten the life of the original subject. Finally, in his essay Freud emphasizes the role of the eyes producing uncanniness due to another infantile fear of one’s eyes being damaged or removed, which he unsurprisingly coined as the “castration complex of the eyes.” The eyes of this doll are uncanny in Freudian terms because not only is one “eye” completely missing, but the other is not an actual eye, merely a button.

The explanations for the uncanniness of this doll do not just come from direct evidence from Freud’s essay, however: the strange and mistaken history of Voodoo and voodoo dolls further adds to its multifaceted unfamiliarity. The popularization of the religion and the dolls by white society twisted histories and forced magical practices and mythologies, first familiar to European cultures, onto Afro-Caribbean cultures, in turn making their own ancient practices unfamiliar to them in the modern day. In this sense, a Voodoo doll also acts as the harbinger of death today since the white cultures which created it for their own entertainment effectively killed its history, enshrouding it in mystery and darkness for centuries. Additionally, the large uncertainty now surrounding what Voodoo is due not only to its historical ambiguity and blend of many different cultures to, but also to the ever-changing perceptions of Voodoo in the United States. From a novelty to a sinful attack on American values, yet all the while entertaining to white citizens, the continuum of perspectives and attitudes towards Voodoo further defamiliarize its practices to its followers. While beginning as unfamiliar to white society, in the modern day, the religion seems only now to be unfamiliar to those who originally practiced it due to the power white society has expressed over the monetary and cultural value of Voodoo and voodoo dolls through history. In any case, the voodoo doll has become an homage to exploitative practices against minority cultures rather than a truthful representation and product of the religion which laid the foundations for its success. It is because of this that so much confusion still surrounds the modern voodoo doll of the Western world, and that it still forces us to wonder if one can control the person the doll represents, that person’s soul or ancestral spirits, or merely the doll itself. Perhaps it is all these changes and confusion surrounding the origins and the history of Voodoo and the voodoo doll which remain the most uncanny aspect of all.

Works Cited

Frankfurter, David. “‘Voodoo Doll’: Implications and Offense of a Taxonomic Category.” Arethusa, vol. 53, no. 1, 2020, pp. 43–58., https://doi.org/10.1353/are.2020.0001.

Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. Writing on Art and Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.

Houlbrook, Ceri, et al. The Materiality of Magic: An Artefactual Investigation into Ritual Practices and Popular Beliefs, Oxbow Books, Havertown, PA, 2015.

Long, Carolyn Morrow. “Perceptions of New Orleans Voodoo: Sin, Fraud, Entertainment, and Religion.” Nova Religio, vol. 6, no. 1, Oct. 2002, pp. 86–101. https://doi-org.ezproxy.lib.ou.edu/10.1525/nr.2002.6.1.86