Spells Using Personal Concerns

Personal concerns are objects physically connected to a specific person, used in spellwork to create a direct magickal link to that person through the principle of contagion. The Law of Contagion, one of the two structural principles of sympathetic magick identified by James Frazer, holds that things once in contact continue to share a connection even after physical separation. A strand of hair that grew from a person’s head remains linked to them. A garment they wore carries their bodily presence. A signature in their own hand carries the imprint of their specific energy and intention at the moment of writing.

Personal concerns are used across an enormous range of folk magick traditions worldwide, from the well-documented practices of Hoodoo and European cunning folk to similar practices documented in African, Asian, and Latin American folk traditions. Their use reflects a broadly shared human understanding that physical objects carry the presence of the people they are intimately associated with.

History and origins

The use of personal items to create magickal links to individuals is attested across thousands of years of documented magickal practice. Ancient Egyptian magick used hair, clothing fibers, and wax figures containing personal materials. Roman curse tablets were sometimes sealed with body fluids or hair from both the curse-worker and the target. The Greek Magical Papyri include recipes calling for the hair, fingernail clippings, and sandal thong of the target in various operations.

In European folk practice, the well-documented uses of personal concerns include witch bottles, which contained the targeted person’s hair, urine, and nail clippings, and poppets stuffed with the target’s personal materials. Cunning folk across Britain and Europe used these methods for both healing and harmful operations, and the use of personal items is well documented in witch trial testimony as evidence of intended malefic practice.

Hoodoo developed an especially detailed and systematic approach to personal concerns, with precise rankings of their potency and specific methods for incorporating them into mojo bags, working jars, and other operations. In Hoodoo practice, body fluids including sexual fluids, menstrual blood, saliva, and sweat are considered among the most powerful personal concerns, with hair and nail clippings ranked below them. A handwritten signature is the most commonly available substitute when physical items are not accessible.

In practice

Personal concerns are incorporated into spellwork in several ways depending on the working’s form and intention.

In mojo bags and spell bags: The personal concern is added as one of the bag’s ingredients to create a direct link between the bag’s working and the target person. For self-directed workings, practitioners add their own hair or nail clippings. For workings directed at another, their hair, a worn thread from their clothing, or a name paper represents them within the bag.

In candle workings: A personal concern is placed under or near the candle, or inscribed on its surface (for a written name or small photograph). The candle burns in relation to the concern, directing the working’s energy toward the person represented.

In working jars: Honey jars, vinegar jars, and other jar workings typically contain name papers and personal concerns as their central link to the target. The jar’s other ingredients act upon the target through the concern.

In poppets: A poppet made to represent a person is most strongly linked to them when it contains their personal concerns. Hair or cloth from their clothing is traditionally sewn inside the poppet, making it a more direct representative of the person than visual resemblance alone.

Name papers as substitute concerns

When physical personal concerns are unavailable, the name paper serves as the primary substitute. In Hoodoo tradition, the target’s full legal name is written nine times in the practitioner’s own hand on a small piece of paper, sometimes with additional identifying information such as date of birth or address. The name paper is then treated as a direct representative of the person, incorporated into the working as a personal concern.

Some practitioners cross the name nine times with their own name to create a working that places the practitioner in relation to the target. Others anoint the name paper with a relevant condition oil, fold it toward them or away from them depending on the working’s direction, or place it at the center of an elaborate jar working. The name paper is a versatile and widely used element of folk spellcraft.

Ethical considerations

The use of personal concerns from another person without their knowledge concentrates the ethical questions of directed spellwork in a particularly concrete form. Because the concern creates a direct physical link to the person, the working’s effect on them is understood to be especially direct. For protective workings done on behalf of someone who cannot consent (such as a child) or for self-protective workings, the ethical situation is relatively clear. For workings intended to influence an adult person’s choices, emotions, or behavior without their awareness, the question of consent is the same as for any directed spellwork, made more pointed by the physical intimacy of the link.

In myth and popular culture

The magical significance of physical tokens and personal items belonging to a person runs through ancient literature and folklore. In the Iliad, Achilles’s armor carries such an intimate connection to his person that Patroclus’s wearing of it both grants temporary protection and marks a fatal confusion of identity. The folklore tradition of gaining power over a person through their hair, nail clippings, or a piece of their clothing is documented from ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia through to nineteenth-century folk beliefs recorded in Britain, Ireland, Scandinavia, and elsewhere.

Witch trial records from the early modern period across Europe contain extensive testimony about the use of personal items in harmful magic: hair collected from a victim’s comb, wax melted to a candle before someone’s door, a garment obtained and used to make a poppet. These testimonies, gathered under duress and not reliable as factual accounts, nonetheless document what contemporaries believed about the magical power of personal items, and they reflect practices attested in earlier papyrological and ethnographic records.

In contemporary popular culture, the voodoo doll is the most familiar image of personal-concern magic in Western awareness, though this representation is heavily distorted. The actual practice of poppet magic, which uses personal concerns to establish a link between the doll and the person it represents, is a genuine magical tradition distinct from the simplified and often inaccurate popular image. The television series American Horror Story: Coven and various horror films deploy the personal-concern link as a plot device, maintaining the cultural visibility of the concept even as they distort its actual practice.

Myths and facts

Several common misunderstandings about personal concerns in spellwork deserve direct address.

• Personal concerns are not required for all directed spellwork. Name papers, photographs, and deliberately created symbolic links can function adequately in many workings, particularly when physical items are unavailable.
• The potency hierarchy in Hoodoo (body fluids above hair and nail clippings, hair above handwriting and photographs) reflects that tradition’s specific understanding and is not universally shared. Other folk traditions organize their understanding of personal item potency differently.
• Using someone’s personal concern without their knowledge is not magically straightforward regardless of its ethical status. The connection established is real within the logic of the tradition, but the ethical complications around working on a person without consent are serious and widely acknowledged even within folk magic practice.
• Hair found in a public place does not create a reliable personal concern link unless it clearly belongs to a specific identified individual. Ambient shed hair is generally considered too disconnected for directed working.
• The voodoo doll as portrayed in popular culture, a pin-stuck doll used to cause pain, is a grossly distorted image of actual poppet practice. Traditional poppet work uses personal concerns to link the figure to the person and can be directed toward healing, binding, or influencing as well as toward harm.
• Digital photographs are considered less potent than physical photographs by most folk practitioners, though they are used in practice. The physical contact a printed photograph represents is understood as establishing a more direct contagion link.