Potter Casey Porter's face jugs carry on a tradition steeped in folklore.

October 2011. Face It: Sometimes an ugly mug (or jug) is just what's needed.

Draped in black, All Hallows Eve lurks sulkily in the wings with its large entourage of shadowy beings who raise both goose pimples and hackles, much to our perverse delight. Because we humans love to be scared silly and love to scare others as silly as we, Halloween has had stubborn staying power from pagan to present times. Never mind that most popular costumes are juvenile pop characters; a few denizens of the dead clones still mingle with them. The fact is we still seem to have a need for folkloric monsters that we know can’t exist but can distract us from fears of grim realities and possibilities in today’s world, as evidenced by high ratings for television’s campy but gruesome "True Blood" with vampires armed with switchblade fangs and werewolf knockoffs, the shape shifting werepanthers prowling southern swamps and forests. Oooh, they’re scary but certainly less so than nightly news broadcasts. In other times, other cultures, the fear factor was more than distraction. It identified inexplicable calamities by naming them and putting faces on them.

The face jug—a.k.a. face mug, ugly mug, and voodoo pot—exemplifies the practicality of monstrosity. Made in the American South prior to the Civil War, these functional earthenware, stoneware or porcelain vessels were demon mug shots. A grotesque face with eyebrows, eyes, noses, ears, lips and teeth formed from strips of clay grinned, glared or stared at the consumer of the contents of jugs made by African slaves trained as potters. With no written history of the utilitarian yet fascinating pottery pieces, researchers of the pottery phenomenon must content themselves with oral history handed down through generations—and some speculation.

Face jugs date back to ancient Egyptian, Roman, Greek and Celtic pottery forms. On this side of the Atlantic, Mayan and Aztec civilizations produced them as well, and some believe their pottery, brought to southeastern America by conquistadors who ransacked native treasures, influenced African American potters. Oral history tells us, however, that West Africans taken to the Caribbean before being sold into slavery in America were forcibly introduced to Christianity—its God, its devil—yet retained their own religious ancestor worship and a tradition of meditation using carved wooden sculptures to channel spirits of departed ancestors for guidance. They wove into Christian doctrine their own traditions, trying to reconcile differences between the old and new religions, resulting in voodoo. With the West African belief that the soul existed in the head, the voodoo pot or face jug was a natural form for them to adopt. The faces were representative of those they knew, the good, the bad, and the ugly: their own ancestors whose eyes they could look into for solace; the Christian devil, who might be worth contacting as an ally in an alien world; or possibly white slave owners and overseers in grotesque caricature. Face jugs gave slaves a tenuous sense of control and protection in a world where they had none. In the home, the faces were believed to keep evil from crossing the threshold and, on a more practical level, demonic faces bared their teeth to scare children away from poisonous liquids like coal oil or precious liquids like whiskey.  Placed on graves when slaves weren’t allowed to mark them with tombstones, face jugs reputedly defied the devil and kept him from snatching vulnerable newly released spirits who could then make their way to Heaven instead of being dragged to Hell. With their worldly and otherworldly uses, face jugs became part of the slave culture. Their shards have been unearthed in southern areas known to be slave burial grounds and have been found along the route of the Underground Railroad.

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