Hoodoo

Hoodoo, also called rootwork or conjure, is an African American tradition of folk magic that took shape among enslaved and later free Black communities in the American South, blending West and Central African spiritual practices with elements of Christianity (especially the Bible and the Psalms), Native American plant knowledge, and European folk magic. It is important to distinguish it from Vodou and Santeria: hoodoo is a system of practical folk magic rather than an organized religion with a pantheon of deities, most practitioners are and have been Protestant Christians who understand their work as operating within a Christian framework, using the power of God, the saints, and scripture. Its practitioners (rootworkers, conjure doctors, "two-headed" doctors) work chiefly with the materials of the natural and domestic world: roots, herbs, minerals, animal parts, graveyard dirt, candles, and personal items, made up into "mojo bags," "gris-gris," dressed candles, powders, and washes to achieve concrete ends, healing, protection, luck in love, money, gambling, or legal trouble, and sometimes to cross or uncross an enemy.

Rich in its use of biblical text as incantation and shaped by the specific historical experience of African Americans, hoodoo preserved African spiritual sensibilities under conditions of enslavement and oppression, and it remains a living tradition, with a documented history in the great folklore collections of the twentieth century and a continuing practice today.

The single largest source for this tradition is a collection of interviews. Harry Middleton Hyatt recorded thousands of hours with practitioners and clients across the American South from the 1930s onward and published the transcripts at enormous length, largely unedited. The result is a record in the speakers' own words of what was done, what it cost and who did it, and it remains the foundation of serious study of the practice.

The distinction that most needs making is between hoodoo and the religions it is often confused with. Hoodoo is a body of practical workings: protection, luck, love, court cases, healing, and the undoing of harm done by others. It has no pantheon, no initiation and no priesthood, and the great majority of its practitioners have been Christians who saw no conflict, using psalms and biblical verses as working material. Vodou in Haiti and Vodun in West Africa are religions, with deities, initiated priesthoods and liturgies. Conflating them is both inaccurate and, in the popular press, usually pejorative.

Its sources are African, Native American and European in mixture, with a substantial layer drawn from the Bible, and it was shaped by the conditions of slavery and its aftermath, in which recourse to law and medicine was frequently unavailable.

By the early twentieth century a supply trade had grown around it, with mail-order houses selling oils, powders and roots to a national market. Some of that trade was run by people outside the communities that used it.