The Spellcaster's Source Hoodoo and Voodoo Witchcraft Blog of Talia Felix

Walk into any spiritual supply shop that stocks dried herbs and ask for five-finger grass. You'll get a bag of something green and dried. Walk into three different shops, you might get three different plants. Ask what it actually is and you'll get answers ranging from "it's got five leaves" to "it's for protection" to a shrug and "it's what my supplier sends." The identification mess around five-finger grass illustrates a broader problem in rootwork: common names are folklore, not botany, and sometimes the folklore doesn't even agree with itself. The most common candidate sold as five-finger grass is Potentilla species: cinquefoils. The Latin name gives it away: potentilla means "little powerful one," and cinquefoil derives from the French cinq feuilles , five leaves. Most cinquefoils have palmately compound leaves divided into five leaflets, which makes the connection to "five-finger grass" obvious enough th...

  So-called "Voodoo dolls" are the the most iconic "evil witchcraft" in pop culture. If you see those in a movie you just know a character is up to no good.  A whole post about this sort of witchcraft already exists here .  This post today deals in quite another topic -- namely, what to do if you are the victim of a Voodoo doll. With most magic spells, even if the enchantment was effective, the spell would have to be performed anew to redo its influence once the victim is uncrossed. Ways to achieve this include spirtual uncrossing baths , using a witch bottle , or multi-step curse removing rituals. But, if a practitioner is keeping a voodoo doll of their victim, the doll might easily be re-worked time and again, for as long as the practitioner has it and is interested. This makes it difficult for the victim to fully free themselves of the influence. The answer to such a conundrum is to fight fire with fire and make your very own uncrossing voodoo doll. This met...

 Myrrh The other day I made a bath recipe for myself using some artificial myrrh oil (real myrrh essential oil being quite expensive -- about $160 a half ounce as of this writing.) Sniffing it, it called to mind so many other spells that I've done that I realized -- this is THE smell of hoodoo. American hoodoo magic, with its blend of African, Indigenous, and European traditions, has a long history of utilizing various herbs, roots, and materials to create potent spells and rituals. One such ingredient that holds a significant place is myrrh. It is not a native plant to the Americas: commiphora myrrha is native to the Arabian penninsula and Africa. It appears often in the Bible, and because of this was adopted into European high magical traditions. As I mention in my book Conjuration , incense wasn't much used in American hoodoo till the early 20th century, when the "catalogue culture" of De Laurence and others brought to it more high magical tradition and incorpor...

Spirit contact is one of the oldest human practices, and working with ancestral spirits is often considered the safest entry point for beginners into occult work. Your own blood ancestors have a vested interest in your wellbeing -- you carry their legacy forward. Unlike random spirits or unknown entities, they're already connected to you and (presumably) wish you well. It is therefore a common recommendation that those interested in beginning spiritual work start by building an ancestral altar.  The home ancestor altar as we know it today draws from multiple streams: Catholic home shrines with their candles and holy cards, Chinese ancestor tablets with daily offerings, Mexican ofrendas with elaborate decorations, Spiritualist "memory corners" popular in the late 1800s, and various folk practices of keeping photographs and mementos of the deceased. What we see in modern spiritual practice is a synthesis of these traditions, adapted to contemporary life. Harry Middleton Hya...

  This simple spell to keep away the police comes from Zora Neale Hurston's collection of 1920s magic spells.  You need: 3 large John the Conqueror roots Talk to the roots and tell them you need them to keep away the police and the law. Then bury them at your gate or whatever entry would be used to access your property. 

There is a well-known ritual, often played by children, called Bloody Mary . The game is played thus: one or more players go into a darkened room with a mirror, and light a single candle. The main player then stands at the mirror and chants the name "Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary" ad infinitum or until wishing to stop the game. It is said that the player will see his or her own reflection morph into that of Bloody Mary, who, if allowed to manifest in full, will then reach out of the mirror and kill the player. If one plays the game with the assistance of a second, it's the second's job to flip on the light switch if things get too scary -- turning the light back on will assuredly send away the spirit in the mirror. As I was taught, one can also summon other ghosts this same way, simply by chanting their name instead of Bloody Mary.  Now again, this was all taught to me as a kid in the context of being a game to play -- but of course, true believer...

Recently was seeking a good aid for some of my difficulties in sales, and found a spell from the Black and White Magic of Marie Laveau which recommended a particular mojo to be anointed with Master and Has No Hanna oils. Has No Hanna is another of the formulas that's been standardized to near-ruin by the works of Slater. His recipes are: HAS NO HANNA OIL Orange Rose Gardenia open safety pin iron filings HAS NO HANNA INCENSE Tangerine base Most recipes you will find for sale are variants on these citrus-based formulas. Unfortunately, this falls in a similar vein to "High John" oils that contain no actual John the Conqueror root. It's missing the key ingredient. Admittedly, it's hard to blame people for some of this confusion, as the item at work seems to be itself based on a bit of botanical confusion. Like Van Van from  vervain , the name is a corruption -- possibly deliberately done for purposes of branding by the original manufacturer who s...