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

Cinnamon is an herb said to be ruled by either the Sun or by Mercury (sources vary in the opinion of which.) It is used for Venus-ruled love, family and money matters with such frequency that it is sometimes considered to be under her dominion. True cinnamon is cinnamomum zeylanicum – most cinnamon sold in the US is cinnamomum cassia , but they can both be used interchangeably in magic unless the spell asks for one or both of them specifically. It is an herb considered especially pleasing to the orisha Oshun or Oxum or Ochun, who rules love matters, and who is popularly petitioned by many hoodoo practitioners. Spell to Bring Back a Lover: Mix powdered cinnamon and sugar. Write out a paper with the target’s name 3 times, and your own name crossed over it 3 times. Sprinkle the cinnamon and sugar over this paper, then set it beneath a burner of Oriental Bouquet incense. Burn this incense over the spiced paper every day for 9 days. Ochun Attraction Bath Spell: Begin on a Tuesday n...

Sugar spells are everywhere these days. People know you can “sweeten someone up,” and if you poke around online for five minutes, you’ll find love spells that ask you to write a name on a paper and put it in a jar with sugar, honey, syrup, or a piece of candy. It’s not just popular — it’s practically its own genre. But the real history of sugar in hoodoo is a little deeper, and as always, a little weirder. Traditionally, sugar was used to sweeten someone toward you — whether for love, kindness, better treatment, or even to grease a boss’s attitude at work. You’ll find older spells that use sugar to make a judge lenient or to keep someone from being angry. What’s rarely mentioned outside the tradition is that the type of sugar used could be significant. Yes, really. In older hoodoo practice, sweeteners were sometimes matched to the race or skin tone of the person being targeted. Molasses - thick and dark, was typically used if the person was Black. White sugar - for a white person. Hon...

  Blindboy Boatclub is an Irish artist and author, who has a weekly podcast on which he talks about pretty much whatever he thinks is interesting. Sometimes the topic is Irish folklore.  On a recent edition of the Blindboy Podcast , he recounted an eerie experience of being out for a walk and hearing a disturbing, shrill scream that he initially took for a child being tortured. He followed the noise and eventually found he had come into contact with a Banshee, or as he later figured out after doing additional research, a female fox with a cough. (No spoiler there, that's the actual title of the episode: "I Thought I Heard the Banshee But It Was a Fox With a Cough.") What struck me most about this story wasn’t the twist ending, amusing as it was, but the folkloric richness Blindboy unpacked along the way. As he explained the origins and traditions surrounding the banshee, I was reminded of my own encounter with another famous weeping woman of folklore: La Llorona. While t...

Dust Devils! Whirlwinds! Vortexes! These natural phenomena are considered powerful magic by hoodoo tradition. A minor whirlwind is created when local winds start to spin on the ground. This causes a funnel to form. The funnel moves over the ground, pushed by the winds that first formed it. The funnel picks up materials such as dust as it moves over the ground, thus becoming visible. Terms for such minor whirlwinds are usually a "devil" (dust devil, water devil, fire devil, etc.). They've been called by this name since the 19th century. Whether from the association from the name, or whether the name came because of an already established folklore, the connection is nevertheless that these phenomena are the product of a supernatural being. Consequently, the dirt that's been sucked up in one of these powerful vortexes is believed to have a special power. Acquiring some of the dust is a feat for a practitioner, but not impossible -- it requires seeing one on advance and p...

It's one of those expressions like "familiarity breeds contempt" and "lion's share" that no one uses correctly anymore. From time to time somebody even observes: "Why would you want luck o' the Irish? Historically the Irish have pretty terrible luck." That, friends, is actually key to the saying. Correctly, when someone talks of Irish luck or luck o' the Irish , it doesn't mean luck.  As one 1838 book put it, "Irish luck -- which means anything but chance." In other words, if you say someone got something through Irish luck, it means he got it through something other than being lucky. It might mean hard work, it might mean bribery, it might mean trickery, but not luck. Anything but luck is Irish luck.  Irish author Blindboy Boatclub relates on his podcast the local explanation for the phenomenon: In Limerick we just believe that bad luck happens to us all the time. Nothing can go right for Limerick, and anytime anything go...

Prosper Mérimée was a French writer of the Romantic movement. As with many Romanticists, he was also a noted archaeologist, historian, and an important figure in the history of architectural preservation. He is best known for his novella Carmen , which became the basis of Bizet's opera Carmen.  Mérimée acknowledged that he chose to make his femme fatale Carmen a gypsy mostly because that's what he had been studying at the time he composed the novella, and he was very excited about the subject. One can't fault any man who lived 200 years ago for not following modern academic styles in his research, but just because it's old doesn't mean his reports should be totally discounted. These are some of the best records we have about the life of the Romany people at the time.  Within his fictionalized story of Carmen, he sought to utilize known information about their lifestyle and magical practices. Because the story was widely read, these types of spells became general fol...

  Why ghosts wear clothes or white sheets instead of appearing in the nude Shane McCorristine , Newcastle University When you think of a ghost, what comes to mind? A ghastly, mouldy winding-sheet? A malevolent pile of supernatural armour? Or a sinister gentleman in a stiff Victorian suit? In 1863 George Cruikshank, the caricaturist and illustrator of Dickens’s novels, announced a “discovery” concerning the varied appearance of ghosts. It does not seem, he wrote : That any one has ever thought of the gross absurdity and impossibility of there being such things as ghosts of wearing apparel … Ghosts cannot, must not, dare not, for decency’s sake, appear without clothes; and as there can be no such thing as ghosts or spirits of clothes, why then, it appears that ghosts never did appear and never can appear. Why aren’t ghosts naked? This was a key philosophical question for Cruikshank and many others in Victorian Britain. Indeed, stories of naked or clothesless ghosts,...

  It is very common online and in books to see the claim that a "magic spell" is so called because you write, or spell, it out on paper. Contrary to popular belief, spells are not so called because you "spell" them out. It is in fact a branching out of  a now-obsolete Middle English word spel , meaning "an utterance, something said, a statement, remark; also, a conversation." It could also mean a fixed story or poem (that you memorize and recite) and then, by extension, a chant you recite. And, by extension, a spell in the magical incantation sense. In one Middle English to Latin glossary, spell is equated with "syllabicos."  Of interest, this word is also the second element in the term  gospel . Literacy was not the most normal of conditions until fairly recently. There are parts of the world even today where it is uncommon. It is therefore no surprise that in former times, things were communicated more often by speech than by writing. However,...

The desert is a peculiar mistress. She offers beauty that steals the breath and danger that stops the heart. New Mexico, my home, is no exception. It’s a land where legends and reality often blur, where the line between truth and myth is drawn with a shaky hand. It's a place where old women swear centipedes crawl under your fingernails and eat your heart. It's not just a story whispered to frighten children but a genuine belief held with the fervor of religious conviction. Old New Mexican women of Spanish extraction will scream in horror at the sight of a centipede, not merely for their swift-moving many-legged terror, but because these women honestly think that the bugs are deadly, murderous creatures. In the arid sun beaten expanses of New Mexico, I remember my own grandmother, a woman of strange, deep-set, and often confused beliefs, who would warn us against these nightmarish creatures. Rollie-pollies (pill bugs) she would say, were the same as centipedes. Now it is general...

  The tales of La Llorona are as varied as the rivers she's said to haunt. From the somber lament of a spurned lover to the chilling image of a vengeful hag, each retelling adds a new layer of intrigue to her spectral existence. Yet, amidst the cacophony of narratives, one thing remains certain: her presence transcends the boundaries of mere folklore. It is usually said that the wicked ghost La Llorona (Spanish: "the weeper") was a beautiful woman who married an unfaithful man, bore him two children, and then out of spite or despair she drowned the children in " the river" (it is always whatever river is nearest.) She then either died herself, or sometimes simply became an immortal roamer like the Wandering Jew, and now her ghost haunts waterways, weeping loudly, looking for children who will replace her own. Admittedly, I have only ever heard this version of the story in books. My grandmother when I was little told me that La Llorona was "a crazy woman, w...

THE DEAD WOMAN'S PHOTOGRAPH Virgil Hoyt is a photographer’s assistant up at St. Paul, and a man of a good deal of taste. He has been in search of the picturesque all over the West, and hundreds of miles to the north in Canada, and can speak three or four Indian dialects, and put a canoe through the rapids. That is to say, he is a man of an adventurous sort and no dreamer. He can fight well and shoot well and swim well enough to put up a winning race with the Indian boys, and he can sit all day in the saddle and not dream about it at night. Wherever he goes he uses his camera. “The world,” Hoyt is in the habit of saying to those who sit with him when he smokes his pipe, “was created in six days to be photographed. Man--and especially woman--was made for the same purpose. Clouds are not made to give moisture, nor trees to cast shade. They were created for the photographer.” In short, Virgil Hoyt’s view of the world is whimsical, and he doesn’t like to be bothered with anything disagr...

In the dimly lit corridors of Europe's shadowy past, amidst the swirling mists of mysticism and madness, lie the cryptic enigmas of prophetic writings. To traverse these murky waters, one must embark on a voyage through the annals of time, where seers and sages peered into the abyss and returned with visions that rattled the very foundations of reality. In this kaleidoscope of clairvoyance, one figure looms large, a spectral presence haunting the recesses of medieval lore: Merlin, the enigmatic wizard of Arthurian legend. Born of a union between a mortal woman and an incubus , Merlin emerged from the primordial chaos as a harbinger of destiny. His famed prophecies cast a spell of intrigue upon the minds of kings and commoners alike. From them shall the stars turn away their faces, and confound their usual course. Corn will wither at their malign aspects; and there shall fall no dew from heaven. The roots and branches will change their places, and the novelty of the thing shall pass...

(This image is what DeepAI thinks "LGBTQ love spell" looks like and I frankly haven't anything to refute it. Kind of reminds me of sigils or veves.) So from time to time, I'm asked "what should I do if I want to perform [some well known hoodoo love spell] but I'm gay?"  The answer, in most cases, is you don't need to do anything differently at all! Gay/lesbian love spells have long been cast in hoodoo tradition, and they use the same formulas and ingredients as other spells. While there are a few love formulas which are especially aimed at gay love spells (and I'll list them at the end of this post) for most spells there is no reason the standard love mixture won't work just as well for a gay spell as a straight one. The reason for this, is that most love formulas in hoodoo will work for both men and women equally -- a woman can use Come to Me on a man or a man can use it on a woman. And so, a man can also use it on a man or a woman on a woma...

 Zora Neale Hurston writes: "They are the bodies without souls. The living dead. Once they were dead, and after that they were called to life again."  We're talking of the zombies .  While the concept entered pop culture in the 20th century and became a type of horror monster more similar to the medieval style vampires , the concept was at first a folk belief and somewhat less gorey than the brain-eating, contagion-spreading creatures of Hollywood. The earliest mentions of zombies in English describe only evil spirits, usually ghosts of the dead. The Oxford English Dictionary admits the probability that the word is related to duppy and jumbie , other regional terms for such spirits. They bear some similarity to the intranquil spirits (plural) of Latin American lore. The idea of the zombie as a fully reanimated dead person seems to be uniquely Haitian. Carlos Esteban Deive mentions them in his book of Dominican magic, Vodu y Magia en Santo Domingo , but specifying that ...

When one's doing research into the song  House of the Rising Sun , it's hard to get everyone you talk to to leave off the Animals version. One obsession that particular set of lyrics begets is an assumption that the song is necessarily about New Orleans and any actual location called The Rising Sun. The Rising Sun was not an unusual name for colonial taverns, with ones having existed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in Milton, Massachusetts, and in Fredericksburg, Virginia; there were also several in England throughout the years, with a famous one in Cloth Fair, London. It was also applied as a name for ships and as a nickname for redheads or people with especially ruddy complexions.  The choice of the name likely has as much to do with the rhyme scheme as anything, and it's the kind of thing that gets easily changed (see Child's collected folks songs about a ship called "The Sweet Trinity" or "The Golden Willow Tree" or "The Golden Vanity" o...