What religion curses people by poking pins at dolls? Detailed answer

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What religion curses people by poking pins at dolls? Detailed answer

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What religion curses people by poking pins at dolls?

In the voodoo religion (known as vodun in Benin, voudou in Haiti, and vudu in the Dominican Republic), there is no practice of poking dolls with pins to harm someone.

Witchcraft voodoo rites are a much more complicated thing. The religious cult of voodoo originated in West Africa, from where, with dark-skinned slaves, he came to America and the Caribbean islands.

At the heart of all voodoo rituals is healing. Perhaps the closest thing to what is generally considered a "voodoo doll" is a wooden "bocheo" (literally - "figure endowed with power") with small holes in the torso. To direct the healing energy to the right place, wooden twigs were inserted into the appropriate holes.

The "voodoo doll" of popular myth actually goes back to the European poppet ("doll", "puppet") (from the Latin pupa, "doll") figurine traditionally used for witchcraft. Poppet, in turn, goes back to ancient Greek dolls that were used as protective sculptural images - the so-called kolossoi. Made of clay, wax, cloth stuffed with cotton, grain or fruit, the doll became the personification of the object of witchcraft: everything that was done with the doll had to happen to a person.

King James I mentions them in his Demonology (1603):

"Some of the others I speak of he (the devil) taught how to make images from wax or clay: when these images are placed on fire, the people they represent and whose names are inscribed on them begin to wither and fade from the constantly tormenting them from this moment of illness.

As for the image of voodoo followers as practicing "black magic" forbidden in Europe, the unconditional "merit" in its creation belongs to the early colonists and slave owners, who, for more piquancy, seasoned their stories with cannibalism, zombies and human sacrifices. It was stories like these that fired the imagination of the crowd in the first place and whetted the appetite of the creators of the first motion pictures and cheap pulp novels, instilling in them an obsession with voodoo as something terrible and dark.

Sticking pins into people and contemplating their suffering is not an alien idea for Christianity. Some of the more ominous images of the crucifixion of the Counter-Reformation are written out so blatantly that they leave little room for the imagination.

Today, a balance has been established between voodoo and Christianity: both traditions coexist quite peacefully. A famous Haitian proverb says: "Haitians are eighty percent Catholic and one hundred percent voodoo."

Author: John Lloyd, John Mitchinson

Random interesting fact from the Great Encyclopedia:

Who Invented Sign Language?

Our life is replete with cruelty towards those whose illness the environment is not able to understand. For example, for many centuries the deaf and dumb were considered dangerous to society. In many countries they were considered abnormal and placed in mental hospitals, and often killed.

In the XNUMXth century, a man appeared who wanted to at least somehow help these unfortunate people. It was the Italian doctor Jerome Cardan, who believed that the deaf and dumb could be taught to use special signs. His work attracted great interest, and during the XNUMXth century an alphabet for the deaf and dumb was created, which has been preserved to this day. However, it took another century for the first school for the deaf and dumb to be opened in Leipzig, Germany.

Nowadays in every civilized country of the world there are educational institutions for the deaf and hard of hearing. Many can name among their environment people who are completely deaf, who do not know what the sense of hearing is. We are talking only about those who were born without hearing or lost it before they learned to speak. The causes of hearing loss are different. These may be certain diseases, severe head injuries, or certain inner ear defects.

Why can't deaf people speak? Almost always the reason here is that they have never heard human speech! It is known that almost all deaf children with normal mental abilities can learn to speak if they are taught in a special way. There are cases when 70-year-old elders learned to convey their own and recognize the thoughts of others quite adequately through gestures, facial expressions and the alphabet for the deaf and dumb. Some patients can thus "talk" at a rate of 130 words per minute. Of course, they are largely dependent on sign language. For example, the index finger across the lips means: "You are telling me a lie." Light tapping on the cheek with three fingers translates as "My uncle."

Currently, the deaf are learning to understand what is said and to speak. This is achieved by observing the articulation of the lips of the interlocutor, the ability to notice and even feel the lips, the vocal apparatus of the teacher, followed by the reproduction of the movements seen.

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