เครื่องรางกรีกรี (ถุงเครื่องรางแอฟริกาตะวันตก)Gris-gris

Two lines run out of this object and they need keeping apart, because the sources that cover one do not cover the other.

The first line is West African and Muslim. The gris-gris originates in the Muslim Mande communities of far West Africa. Travellers through the Volta Basin, in what is now Ghana, reported Mande speakers such as the Dyula distributing Islamic charms they called gris-gris, and the practice spread to other Muslim peoples, among them the Dagomba, who wrote extensive Arabic manuscripts with magic formulae and prescriptions for preparing amulets. Among Mande Muslims the craft has a name and a course of study: Karamokobara, which divides into seli, prayer, and siri, path. Those who take seli become scholars of Qur'anic law, karamokos; those who take siri become scholars of the written talismans, marabouts. Some cross over. The tools of the siri side are spoken prayers, numerical squares called katemi, and written inscriptions from the Qur'an.

The second line is American, and the word changes on the way. Atlantic slavery carried the gris-gris to the Americas with enslaved Muslims, and it was kept up by practitioners of the traditions Wikipedia names "Louisiana Voodoo" and Haitian Vodou. In Haiti it held its original sense: an amulet with good intentions. In the United States it went the other way. It came to be thought of as something brought down on a victim; enslaved people used gris-gris against their owners, and gris-gris were found in burials. New Orleans court cases of 1773 convicted enslaved people of using gris-gris to kill those who held them, and those are among the earliest legal mentions of the tradition in Louisiana. Enslaved conjure women made gris-gris to start rebellions, and the bags were held to have guided people to freedom on the Underground Railroad and shielded them on the way. In October 1849 authorities arrested an enslaved man for carrying a human finger wrapped in flannel that he believed brought good luck; people in New Orleans sought human remains from tombs for this work, and gravesites were disturbed for it. In Cajun communities the term means black magic and ill fortune. Against that, Gris-Gris doctors have worked in the Louisiana Creole community for centuries and are looked on favourably by the Black community at large. Both of those are reported here and neither is settled here.

It is also, in West Africa now, an everyday object with a measured place in public health data. A 1982 survey found gris-gris among the top three methods of contraception known to women in Senegal — the three named were abstinence, roots and herbs, and charms. Over 60% of women reported knowing such traditional methods; the pill, the best known modern method, was known to a little over 40%. Gris-gris are worn across the whole of society, the source says, "from wrestlers to soldiers to housewives, and can feature anything from monkey to snake to mouse".

Written, then bagged. A marabout or another literate specialist writes Qur'anic verses, or a numerical square, on paper; the paper goes into a small cloth sack with herbs and a set number of small objects; the sack is worn, usually at the neck. In the American line the contents shift with what the conjurer has and what the job is, and the bag is kept on the body.

Living on both sides of the Atlantic, and not the same object on each. As of 2026 this project has read no figure for how many are made by marabouts and how many are sold over a counter.