The Power of Dolls, Effigies, and Statues

Lest anyone doubt the power of the human form, we have only to revisit the recent media coverage of controversial statutes and demands to remove them.

Statues from the King Tut Exhibit, 2016.  Courtesy, our son, Mitchell Milani

Dolls, like their statuary cousins, evoke emotion.  For some, those emotions are uncanny, as in the doll studied in The Uncanny Valley study.  Collecting dolls, making them, playing with them, evokes emotion.  For the poet Rilke, that emotion involved horror and distrust, but for others, dolls and effigies of the human form evoke delight.  Artists from the Ancient World to Leonardo to Henry Moore have loved the human figure and wanted to immortalize it in their art.

Courtesy, Dr. E's Doll Museum

Courtesy, Dr. E's Doll Museum

All politics and emotion aside, dolls have talismanic powers.  Max von Boehn in Dolls writes about image magic and ancestor worship. Certainly, the earliest dolls were objects of ritual and respect, and they were believe to have magic powers. Voodoo involves image magic, and voodoo dolls have existed for centuries.  Freud explored the power of dolls, automatons, and similar things in his famous essay,"The Uncanny", analyzed in an excellent essay by Professor Eva Marie Sims, "Uncanny Dolls."

Angel Statute, Public Domain Image

By the same token, more and more is being written about robots and their use in society.  Dark Net is a novel of suspense about an entire company that is overrun by its own Artificial Intelligence.  The AI forms a murderous cartel that hires assassins to do its bidding.  Other horror movies explore the evil potential of dolls, statues, and robots run amok.

Voodoo Doll, Public Domain

These artificial creations are not alive, yet they are.  They are not alive, yet not dead, and, they are made in our image, or can think as we do, or act as we do.   Robotics are the future in many disciplines, and statues represent their human models.  To disrespect the statue or harm it, is a type of image magic wherein the person is also disrespected or harmed, similar to burning in effigy.


Will these "dolls" take over the world--well, perhaps, to paraphrase the great poet Sylvia Plath who collected paper dolls, their foot's in the door.


Sylvia Plath, Public Domain Image