Poppets are a powerful and widespread form of sympathetic magic. They can be made out of a variety of materials, most commonly cloth or wax. They are typically used to represent a person, and can be used in a wide variety of spells.
There are a number of common ways of tying a poppet to a person:
- dressing them in clothes made out of clothes owned by the target
- making them out of clothes owned by the target
- enclosing within them a slip of paper with the person’s identifying information written on it
- enclosing hair/ nail clippings of the target
- carving the target’s name into it
A poppet can also be made to represent a person who needs healing. The poppet can be stuffed with healing herbs.
A really interesting application of this I’ve heard is having one re-usable healing poppet, with a slot in the back for taglocks to focus the healing magic. The idea behind re-using it is that the healing magic surrounding the poppet builds up over time and becomes more and more effective.
The most well known application of a poppet to cursing is sticking it with pins or needles, but they can also be burned. There is a long history of using poppets in cursing:
- For example, several rag dolls were discovered in Bridget Bishop’s old house during the Salem witch trials. They had been pierced with hogs’ bristles and pins.
- As another example, Elizabeth Bradwell allegedly created a wax image of a man called John Moulton, and stuck a nail in its head and buried it.
- One of the reasons King James I was so terrified of witchcraft was that in 1441, a noblewoman named Eleanor Cobham was accused of trying to kill him using a wax image poppet. However, she claimed the poppet was for a fertility spell.
- Isobel Gowdie, in arguably one of the most famous European witch trials, confessed to making a poppet out of clay called a ‘corp creadh’. She and her coven claimed to roast it in the fire every time the wife of the local lord had a baby, in order to make the baby fall ill and die.
[Image description: clay figure of a woman stuck with pins]
Another application of poppets are love spells: creating two poppets, one for each person, and binding them together.
Corn dollies are another form of poppet. They were traditionally made out of the last wheat of the harvest, as a ‘spirit house’ for the spirit of the wheat; although they were not always human shaped. It would then be ploughed into the first furrow of the season. However, corn husks can be used to make poppets for modern spells as the material is cheap and easy to get hold of.
