Hey everyone. Welcome back to Seeking Witchcraft. I'm your host Ashley, and today I have on Matthew Venus, the author of Insuling the Epigy, a Witch's Guide to Inspirited Objects. Welcome, Matthew, to the show. Could you tell listeners a bit about yourself?

Thanks. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Kind of the short version is I am an animist, kind of primarily as the center of most things I do.

And beyond that, I am a folk magician, a witch, an artist. I'm also an Aborisha in the Lakumi

tradition of Orisha worship. And I am a Tata and Dengay in a tradition of Kimbandha, Jayangola.

Wow, what a background. That's pretty impressive. Thank you.

Of course, yeah. So with your book, so how did this idea begin? Was this something that grew

out of your own personal practice, out of the things that you're involved with. Tell me just a bit about

like where this came from. Yeah, kind of a bit of everything. Working with art and artistry and

creating spirit vessels, working with effigies, dolls, poppets, statuary, doing sculptural work

has been a big part of both my personal artistic practice,

but also, I mean, very much tied into my magical practice because those two things for me

kind of exist simultaneously. And so it's really born largely out of my own personal work,

my own personal experiences and practices as someone who's kind of

been working with these concepts and developing my own approaches towards it over the past

and 20 some odd years, if not more, really. So yeah, it's really kind of born out of a real love

for this aspect of craft and practice. For those who may have never heard these terms before,

could you explain what the difference is between an effigy, a poppet, and the concept of animism?

Sure. So an effigy really is the way that I'm utilizing it in my work in general, as it applies,

an effigy is anything that's really kind of a sculptural human,

our humanoid form. So when we think of statuary, puppets, puppets, dolls, you know, the,

the broad spectrum of those things, from very small in size to very large in size, anything that

has kind of a humanoid form could be considered an effigy.

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