Sorcerers of Knowledge

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In the Brooklyn Public Library gathering dust in the basement cellars, I found over 5000 pages of spells. As a hoodoo practitioner, whose black family is from Louisiana, I cried roaming the pages. Tale after tale of black southerners using complex formulas to bring money, heal physical ailments, keep romantic love, and create protection from the police. In the 1930s Harry Middleton Hyatt an Episcopal priest was commissioned to collect folklore from the American South. The result was Hoodoo, Conjuration Witchcraft, and Rootwork, five volumes of interviews with over 1600 people all of whom except one are black. They are dense and written in southern black vernacular. Although these books have been a wealth of knowledge for scholars and dedicated practitioners of hoodoo, they remain unknown to the public. My hope with this project is to translate and make accessible knowledge that might otherwise go unused. I have also included spells from Zora Neale Hurston’s collection “Hoodoo in America.” Her extensive study of African-derived religions in the south is a gift to all those interested in the practice and those of us learning our ancestral history.

The spells in this collection are meant to be used. Because these interviews were collected in the 1930s the practitioners had access to items that we do not have today. I have adapted some of the ingredients based on similar properties such substituting sulfur for gunpowder because it is an ingredient in gun-powder and is also used in hoodoo for protection. Prescriptions that call for consumption should be used at your discretion as with anything that is consumed to first assess its compatibility with your body. For occult items that may be hard to find or if the name has changed, I have provided links for online purchase. Although Hoodoo is still dismissed in the public eye as mere superstition, there is empirical evidence, for its validity and practical use. A medicinal application is much easier to prove but the fact alone that practices have survived and adapted from Africa through the middle passage to today should be proof enough of its efficacy. We must not dismiss both the spiritual and medicinal knowledge of the ancestors.