Just as some peoples associate a person's transition to a new status with a ritual (for example, upon marriage or reaching adulthood), it is believed that with the help of certain ceremonies, an inanimate creature can become something like a half-human or just become something else. …
Such a model of thinking now may seem alien and strange, but in the past it was used quite actively. So, during the Middle Ages, one abbot broke the fast, giving the sheep the name "carp" and quietly eating meat like fish.
In 1930, the occultist Aleister Crowley did the same. He christened the cock with the name Ionnan the Baptist and sacrificed him. Thus, he symbolically tried to resist the influence of Christianity on the world and tried to contain it.
It is believed that even if one assigns the inner qualities of a person to a figure through such "baptism", a magical connection is established between the object and the person. Everything that happens to the image will also happen to its magical counterpart. This principle formed the basis for the manufacture of voodoo dolls. If a person wanted to exterminate his enemy, then he made a realistic image of him and named the enemy.
To establish a stronger bond, it was necessary to place the hair or nails of your victim in the figurine. Then the pupa was slowly destroyed: pins were driven into it, burned in a fire or drowned in a pond. Positive spells, for example, love spells, worked on the same principle.
It is rather difficult to judge how effective such methods were. However, sometimes they worked. Perhaps there really was a special magical connection between the image and the victim, or maybe the matter is in the direction of the energy of the person conducting the ritual. Also, the victim can convince himself of some kind of negative, if, say, he knows that damage has been imposed on him.
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