Picture

From Traditional Witchcraft Wiki Project

A picture is a portrait or likeness, normally a doll of way or clay, made of a person in order to affect them by witchcraft. The most famous use of this phrase is that made by Demdike when making her confession during the Pendle witch incident. During her confession she explained how "pictures of clay" might be used to kill someone:

And further this examinate confesseth, and sayth, that the speediest way to take a mans life away by witchcraft, is to make a picture of clay, like unto the shape of the person whom they meane to kill, & dry it thorowly: and when they would have them to be ill in any one place more then an other; then take a thorne or pinne, and pricke 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 burne it. And when they would have the whole body to consume away, then take the remnant of the sayd picture, and burne it: and so thereupon by that meanes, the body shall die.

The use of picture as a term for an image through which witchcraft is wrought is found also in the late 16th century poem by John Dunne, called "Witchcraft By A Picture", which goes as follows:

WITCHCRAFT BY A PICTURE
by John Donne

I fix mine eye on thine, and there
Pity my picture burning in thine eye ;
My picture drown'd in a transparent tear,
When I look lower I espy ;
Hadst thou the wicked skill
By pictures made and marr'd, to kill,
How many ways mightst thou perform thy will?

But now I've drunk thy sweet salt tears,
And though thou pour more, I'll depart ;
My picture vanished, vanish all fears
That I can be endamaged by that art ;
Though thou retain of me
One picture more, yet that will be,
Being in thine own heart, from all malice free.