ABSTRACT
This word, which is often used in French books on magic, means the act of making a figure of wax of a certain person as exact as possible as regards face (the Latin in + vultus) and form and special characteristics, with the intention, after having performed upon it certain baleful acts and ceremonies, of making the person represented by the wax figure to suffer all the pains and indignities which the magician inflicts on the wax figure. Whilst the magician is attacking the wax figure he repeats spells and incantations which effect the transmission of aches and pains and sufferings to the human being wheresoever he may be. Thus, if a needle was thrust through the knee joints of the wax figure the human being which it represented would suffer agonies in his knees; if a needle was thrust through the heart of the wax figure the human being would die. But envoutement could be practised with a good as well as a bad object. For there is on record the case of a seaman who during a fight at sea was shot in the eye with an arrow, and as a result he suffered indescribable agony. But his friends made a figure of him with the arrow in his eye, and took it to a famous shrine of the Virgin Mary in Syria. The figure of the Virgin drew the arrow out of the eye of the figure, and at the same moment the arrow which was in the eye of the seaman, who was still on the sea, fell out from it, and the pain ceased from that moment.
