Hoodoo

Hoodoo, folk tradition of healing, hexing, and divination originating among African Americans in the United States. Hoodoo draws heavily on older African religious practices introduced to North America through the transatlantic slave trade from the 16th to the 19th century. The tradition has also integrated influences from Christianity as well as various European and Native American folk traditions, resulting in the formation of a uniquely American religious practice.

Origins and history

As a result of the transatlantic slave trade, an estimated 10 million to 12 million enslaved West and Central Africans were transported to the Americas between the 16th and 19th centuries. They were typically raised within various African traditional religions—or in a few cases Islam or Roman Catholicism—but in the Americas they usually found themselves in plantation societies dominated by western European colonizers who practiced Christianity. In the British colonial holdings of the West Indies and American colonies, these slave-owning colonizers and plantation administrators were predominantly Protestant. These Protestants denigrated African traditional religions as “pagan” and over time made efforts to Christianize the enslaved populations.

This Anglo-Protestant-dominated environment largely prevented African Americans from replicating the communal spirit-oriented traditions of their ancestors, but in many cases enslaved people were able to call on supernatural aid in rites of a more secretive and private nature. It was in this context that the tradition now known as Hoodoo developed. The calls for supernatural aid often consisted of individuals’ attempts to protect themselves and strike back against slave owners under the extreme inequities and traumas of the plantations. In several instances these rituals were utilized during slave rebellions; the New York slave rebellion of 1712 reportedly began with a pact sealed in blood and powder, a practice with African religious parallels.

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Hoodoo was transmitted orally in these early centuries and was never homogeneous. Instead, there was much variation arising from the particular admixtures of African ethnicities in any given area of North America—in addition to influences absorbed from Native and European American communities. Scholars have discerned three broad regional variations within Hoodoo during the slavery era: one covering the Gulf Coast regions of Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi; a second encompassing South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida; and a third in Maryland, Virginia, and eastern Tennessee. These regions often employed their own local terminologies. The word Hoodoo, for instance, was originally found largely in the Mississippi River valley and was only later adopted more broadly across the United States.

In emphasizing private and practical ritual tasks, Hoodoo bore similarities with other African-derived traditions that developed in the Anglo-Protestant-dominated British West Indies and that are now commonly called Obeah. Both Hoodoo and Obeah differ from the more communal, deity-focused African diasporic traditions that emerged in French-Catholic-dominated Haiti, as well as in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies of Cuba and Brazil. A communal African-derived religion also developed in the Catholic-dominated Louisiana, and that tradition has come to be known as Voodoo to distinguish it from Hoodoo, but that died out in the early 20th century. In practice, the boundary between Louisiana Voodoo and Hoodoo was often blurred and their names used interchangeably.

Early Hoodoo was not codified in written texts, but evidence for its use survives in the archaeological and historical record. Archaeological evidence for Hoodoo practices, in the form of buried deposits of ritual materials, has been recovered from 18th- and 19th-century plantations, especially in Virginia. Historical evidence can also be found in the written recollections of African Americans, including prominent figures such as Frederick Douglass, as well as in Euro-American accounts that are typically hostile to Hoodoo practices.

Hoodoo spread across the country following the emancipation of enslaved people in 1865 and the early to mid-20th-century Great Migration of African Americans out of the South and into urban areas of the North and West. This expansion of Hoodoo’s geography and urban shift also brought about a level of homogenization and the decline of regional distinctions. Within urban communities Hoodoo became increasingly commercialized, its ritual material distributed through supply houses, sold in stores, and advertised in the growing African American media. In many cases those involved in these commercial enterprises were European American and had little or no connection to Hoodoo traditions. It was also within this commercial context that Hoodoo adopted new practices such as the ritual use of candles. It similarly came to be informed by other spiritual traditions, such as astrology and the use of grimoires—books of spells—such as The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses.

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Growing intellectual interest in African American folklore generated fresh research into Hoodoo during the early 20th century, much of it collected by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s and ’40s. The author and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston made a study of African-derived religious practices in New Orleans, published as “Hoodoo in America” in the Journal of American Folklore in 1931. Further important material was also assembled by Harry Middleton Hyatt in 1936–41 and published later in five volumes as Hoodoo-Conjuration-Witchcraft-Rootwork (1970–78). Despite this surge of interest, for much of the 20th century Hoodoo was still typically labeled derisively as “superstition” or “magic,” rather than being considered a form of religion. Only in the 21st century have historians and scholars in the study of religion pursued more cautious academic research on Hoodoo.

In the 21st century, commercial interest in Hoodoo remains prevalent, reflected in the many publications and websites marketing the practice as well as its increasing visibility on social media. Some Hoodoo practitioners have begun calling themselves witches, reflecting the increasingly positive reassessment of that term, which historically referred principally to practitioners of occult harming practices. The online popularization of Hoodoo practices has led to their being adopted by individuals outside the African American community, which has in turn generated concerns about cultural appropriation.

Beliefs and practices

Hoodoo consists of ritual procedures designed to encourage the supernatural or spirit world to assist the living. Many of its rites can be performed by anyone, but there have often been individuals with a special aptitude for and knowledge of these practices. Such ritual specialists have been called root doctors, conjure doctors, conjurers, or Hoodoos. Both men and women have taken on these roles, although the male practitioners are more prominent in accounts from the 19th and early 20th centuries. These ritualists served a range of clients, whether African Americans or members of other ethnic groups, and sometimes built lucrative businesses around their services.

The Hoodoo tradition presumes a belief in a supernatural or spirit world that can be called upon for assistance, often through charms and incantations. Early Hoodoo drew on inherited African concepts of divinities, spirits, and manipulable spiritual forces. As Christianity spread widely among African Americans from at least the 18th century, it became common for Hoodoo practitioners to invoke figures from Christian theology and integrate Christian elements into their practice. There are, for instance, various cases in which enslaved African Americans used a Bible in a divinatory practice to expose thieves, and many recorded Hoodoo charms invoke the Christian God or quote from Psalms. Although Christians often disapproved of Hoodoo, for many African Americans its practice has served as a particular, local, and lived expression of Christianity rather than something antithetical to it.

Hoodoo focuses heavily on practitioners’ practical issues and concerns. One of its key functions has been for healing, often employing a complex knowledge of medicinal plants and in many cases providing the only medical services available within African American communities. Hoodoo rituals are thought to offer protection from threats either mundane or supernatural, including threats from slave owners; for instance, there are accounts of amulet bags containing special roots to protect enslaved people from being whipped. In other cases Hoodoo was used to counter the threat of curses, as in the practice of suspending bottles from a tree to trap any malevolent spirits or witches traveling in spirit form.

Hoodoo was not only considered a means of assisting people; it has also been associated with hexing or cursing and, in the 18th and 19th centuries, with poisoning. These harming practices were sometimes directed at slave owners. At other times these techniques were employed amid disagreements between African American individuals, arising from issues such as economic competition or romantic jealousy.

Portents and omens, often thought of as signs, have long been important in Hoodoo. The tradition includes the use of divination to help diagnose the cause of an ailment or to locate lost objects. Many forms of divination have been practiced historically in Africa, but divination techniques found in Hoodoo have sometimes been of European derivation; for instance, Hoodoo frequently employs cartomancy, or divination using playing cards.

Hoodoo accords a prominent role to collections of materials, often assembled into sacks or bags, that are deemed to possess supernatural power. The materials used can vary widely, including roots, herbs, crystals, stones, coins, cloth, ceramic sherds, pins, powders, and the body parts of animals. Another recurring ingredient is goopher dust, which consists of soil collected from graveyards. Often these assemblages of items are tied together in a bundle or bag and may be referred to as hands, mojos, or gris-gris. In some cases these assemblages are spiritually activated and their power maintained, often through offerings of alcohol or the application of oils, which are thought to enable them to carry out their intended function. Once created, these assemblages might be concealed beneath doorways or in chimneys or instead worn on the body as a form of portable protection.

Creating assemblages of physical objects as a source of power has various precedents in the religions of West and Central Africa, as, for instance, in the Kongo ritual objects called minkisi, in which the different ingredients are seen to possess specific properties that contribute to the overall efficacy of the ritual assemblage. These American power-assemblages thus underscore the long-standing African heritage of Hoodoo.