Damage to waxen images, dolls,
figurines, or clay poppets, by sympathetic magic
produced similar damage on the body
of the enemy they represented.

The damage might merely be "constant sickness"
(as James I allowed) or it might be death.

This belief is both primitive and universal and crops
up today in more primitive cultures and in pockets
of superstition in so-called civilized nations;
for example, in 1946 a Mexican sorceress in Colorado
substituted a photograph for the figurine.

From Egypt the superstition passed
to Greece and Rome; from classical Rome,
the waxen image came into European sorcery.

Horace, for example, in his Satires referred
to a waxen image made by a witch Canidia
for amatory purposes.

English and Scottish trials are especially rich
in accusations of making figurines,
dating from very early times.

George Sinclair referred to a group
of devil worshipers burning a wax effigy to cause
the death of the Scottish King Duffus (AD 968),
and, perhaps more historically,
to twelve witches burning the image
of King James III in 1479 at Edinburgh.

Probably the clearest account of waxen images
was given by old Mother Demdike at the trial
of the Lancashire Witches in 1612.
She confessed: The speediest way to take
a man's life away by witchcraft is to make
a picture [figurine] of clay, like unto the shape
of the person whom they mean to kill, and dry
it thoroughly.
And when you would have them to be ill in any
one place more than another, then take
a thorn or pin and prick it in that part
of the picture you would so have to be ill.
And when you would have any part of the body
to consume away, then take that part
of the picture and burn it.
And so thereupon by that means the body shall die.
(Wonderful Discovery of Witches
in the County of Lancaster, 1613)

In Scotland, in 1597, Janet Leisk of Fortiefairde
put a waxen image on a spit for six hours,
"and as the wax melted, at that same time and hour,
so his body melted by sweating."

In the absence of a poppet [volt], the early treatise
on witchcraft, La Vauderye (1460), suggested that
sticking pins into a tree was just as effective.

In indictments charging maleficia by use of poppets,
tangible evidence could be introduced.
At a witch trial in London in 1537,
a witness testified he saw a crowd of people
in a churchyard gazing at what at first glance
looked like an unburied child.
"The clerk of the church took out a piece
of cloth knit like a winding sheet and ripped
it, and found therein an image of wax made
in the form of a young child, with two pins in it."
The witness then asked a bystander if he knew
what it was and was told it was a device to cause
a person to consume away; but to have been
really effective, the figurine should have been placed
either in horse manure or in a dunghill.

The little images could be made either of wax or clay
(called corp chre in Scotland).

On February 26, 1579, at Abingdon,
Mother Stile and three other women were condemned
for murder by making "pictures of red wax
about a span long and three or four fingers broad,"
and piercing them with a briar thorn.

Other witches, as revealed at Lady Foullis' trial
in 1590 in Scotland, shot arrowheads at the effigies.

If the wax figurine remained hidden, the victim
would suffer sickness during the life of the figurine,
estimated generally at about two years.

The clay image was made from loathsome ingredients:
earth from a new made grave, bones
of a man or woman burned to ashes, black spiders,
"with an inner pith of elder, tempered all in water
in which toads have been washed."
-Examination of John Walsh, 1566.

A clay image could be placed in a running stream
to be worn away by the water.

However, if such an image was pierced
where the heart should be,
the victim would die within nine days.


Making Herbal Candles