Unsympathetic Magic - Laura Resnick [51]
“I’ve also got one that looks a bit like Dr. Zadok,” Puma said, pointing it out.
I looked at the little figure, which was clad in garish green-and-purple trousers. “Well, the white hair and beard, I’ll grant you,” I said. “But Max would never wear those pants.”
“Hmm.” Max regarded the voodoo doll with interest.
“Don’t show Esther one that looks like me,” Jeff said to Puma. “She might start sticking pins into it.”
“There’s always that possibility,” I agreed.
Looking at the Max-like doll, Jeff asked doubtfully, “Do people really do things like that?”
“Oh, of course,” said Max.
“What’s so ‘of course’ about it?”
“It’s sympathetic magic,” Puma said.
“Sticking pins into a doll to torment a person sounds pretty unsympathetic to me,” said Jeff.
She smiled at this sly witticism. “ ‘Sympathy’ means an affinity between two things. In this case, a magical association, so that what happens to one thing affects the other thing in a similar way.”
“It’s pretty far-fetched,” Jeff said.
“It may be the oldest form of ritual magic.” Puma seemed relieved to have a topic to take her mind off the menacing mystical influences looming over Harlem. “Paleolithic hunters painted pictures on their cave walls that showed them killing and honoring their prey. They believed that the magic associated with this ritual art would help them achieve success in the hunt.” She smiled and added, “At least that’s one theory about cave paintings.”
“And another theory is that they didn’t have cameras back then, so they painted the story of their big day out on the savannah,” Jeff said, flirting with her. “Hoping to impress the girls back at the cave.”
She smiled again, responding to his charm.
I was less susceptible, since I was well acquainted with the neuroses and vanity that came with Jeff’s charm.
Puma said, “But sympathetic magic does go back thousands of years.”
I asked with a slight feeling of dread, “Do you have a Ph.D. in anthropology, too?”
She looked puzzled by the question. “No. I have an undergraduate degree in business.”
“Oh, good,” I said.
Max took up her theme. “Sympathetic magic, evoked through effigies and fetishes, was and is practiced in cultures all over the world. Poppets like these—” He gestured to the voodoo dolls. “—were common for centuries in European sympathetic magic.”
“Do you mean witchcraft?” Jeff asked.
“For the most part.”
“In fact,” Puma said, “the voodoo doll was adapted from the European poppet.”
“Hmm.” Jeff examined the doll in his hands. Then his gaze moved to a nearby display of Catholic ritual objects. “So what’s the foundational text in Vodou? The Bible?”
Puma shook her head. “There isn’t a foundational text.”
“Really?” I was surprised. “Nothing like the Koran? The I Ching? The Book of Mormon?”
“No. Vodou developed as the religion of slaves—people who weren’t taught to read or write,” Puma explained.
“But the slaves revolted and drove the French out of Haiti two hundred years ago.” Jeff said to me, “It was well worth the effort, but it was a brutal conflict, and Haiti’s happy ending still seems a long way away.”
Thinking of Haiti’s grinding poverty in our era, and particularly of the massive 7.0 magnitude earthquake that had devastated the country and killed a horrifying number of people, I thought it did indeed seem to be a nation bereft of its just rewards as a society where slaves had overthrown their captors and founded a free republic.
“Even today, Haiti’s literacy rate is only a little more than fifty percent,” Puma said. “And it was much lower in the nineteenth century. So Vodou is an oral tradition, not a written one. The rituals and beliefs have been passed down verbally, for many generations, right up until our current-day mambos and houngans—who will leave behind their knowledge orally, too.”
“So that’s the only way you can learn about it?” Jeff asked. “In person?”
“Oh, there are books about Vodou; just no books of Vodou.” Puma added, “And actually, there aren’t that many good books about it. Nowhere near as many as there are about other major religions. It’s