marionette

It’s World Puppetry Day today, which is organised by the Union Internationale de la Marionnette (UNIMA). So that’s why I’ve chosen ‘marionette’ as this week’s WOTW (as no one calls it).

A marionette is a puppet controlled from above using wires or strings (so other types of puppets like ventriloquists’ dummies or Sooty aren’t marionettes – except in France, where it refers to any type of puppet). As you can probably guess from the spelling, the word ‘marionette’ comes from French. For some reason we lost an ‘n’ when it came into English, as the OG French term was ‘marionnette’. That comes from an Old French word, ‘marion’, which means ‘little Mary’. This is likely because the earliest marionettes were used to depict biblical events, in which the Virgin Mary was a big star.

How much is that scary puppet in the window?

Puppetry has been around for bloody ages, and some historians claim they actually predate actors in the theatre. In fact, there’s evidence of string operated puppets as far back as 2000 BC in Egypt. But who cares about that when we can talk about HAUNTED PUPPETS?

In 2015 paranormal investigator Jayne Harris filmed a supposedly haunted puppet every night for three months using a timed night vision camera. She was called in after its previous owner, who inherited it from his late father, claimed it tried to CHOKE HIM TO DEATH in the middle of the night. You can read more and see the (slightly underwhelming) video footage in this article.

If that doesn’t convince you, what about Mr Fritz, a disembodied ventriloquist doll’s head, which was caught on camera BLINKING in the middle of the night. Mr Fritz was made by a prisoner at the World War II Stalag II-B concentration camp. His new owner noticed that the door to the case the head was stored in kept opening over night, so he set up a camera to see what was going on. You can see the footage of the blinks in this article (my apologies that it’s from the Daily Mail). HIS LIPS BLOODY MOVE TOO.

Sleep well tonight…

charisma

The excellently named Charisma Carpenter – yes, that is her real name – of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame (photo credit: Gage Skidmore – also an excellent name)

Someone who’s charismatic is charming, attractive and often a little bit sexy. But you know that already. But did you know that ‘charisma’ actually has its roots in religion, specifically Christianity? It was only in the early 20th century that it came to have the little-bit-sexy meaning it has today.

‘Charisma’ originally comes from the Greek word ‘kharisma’ (so not much of a leap there) which means ‘favour freely given’ or ‘gift of grace’. Both the Hebrew and Christian Bibles talk about divinely conferred charisma, which is used to talk about someone who’s a favourite of him/her upstairs i.e. who’s received God’s favour. In English, from about 1640 onwards, people used ‘charisma’ to refer to a gift or power bestowed on someone by the Holy Spirit for the good of the church.

So where did the sexy come in? I’m afraid that’s a very unsexy story. German sociologist Max Weber came up with a new definition of charisma some time before 1920 (it was found in an unfinished manuscript after he died), which is generally regarded as having dragged the concept from theological obscurity into everyday use. He described it as:

“… a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These as such are not accessible to the ordinary person …”