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...

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...

 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...

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...

  Wall to wall carpeting only became common in houses during the 20th century, when the technology to make it cheaply and also the technology to clean it relatively easily (vacuums) made it much more practical than it had been in former times. In the old days, you had to uproot the entire carpet and take it outside to be beaten or scrubbed, while the wood floors underneath were swept and washed. Routine cleaning of a carpet would have usually been done by servants while the family was away on vacation. Nowadays a lot of people have carpets, and in many cases they're seen as a cheaper type of flooring than bare wood or tile. However, when dealing with traditional magic spells and hoodoo rituals, this can become a bit of a special encumbrance: instructions for floor sweeps, floor washes, and the use of colored sachet powders becomes an issue on a carpeted floor, whilst it is not an issue on a wood or tile floor.  Most traditional hoodoo cleaning and drawing rituals were made for...

Finding the right materials for spellwork can be a challenge, especially when one is in a situation where traditional ingredients are unavailable. Whether it’s due to limited access, tight budgets, or time constraints, many practitioners face the question of how to adapt their tools without compromising the spell's effectiveness. Fortunately, magic has always been a practice of ingenuity and resourcefulness! Hoodoo in particular was practically founded upon adapting traditions to new cultures and landscapes where the old herbs, tools and licenses were no longer possible to employ. Adaptation is absolutely possible in witchcraft of this type. Yet there are limits. It is considered perfectly good practice to substitute certain items with certain things, but not others. For example, if one were to perform the Return a Lost Lover Spell from Homemade Hoodoo , but one didn't have any access to lavender oil, what would one use instead to substitute for it? The thought might be to use ...

Kyphi was the name given to a style of sacred incense, rather than to a specific blend. The name is derived from the Greek rendering of the Egyptian word kapet, which simply means “fumigation” or “incense.” Whether due to the limited number of fragrant herbs available at the time, or due to some requirement dictated by the way it would be used, kyphi recipes do have certain things in common and do not seem to be a totally random combination of herbs. Honey, cinnamon and mastic appear to always be included, and raisins or wine are very typically added. The total number of ingredients might be fewer than ten or they could number more than seventy. A much simplified version of the recipe can be found in my book The Conjure Cookbook. Here is a fairly easy version of kyphi from the 12th century BC. palmarosa cinnamon sweet flag mint pine resin mastic raisin wine (preferred -- red wine from grapes is an acceptable substitute) honey The herbs can be used fresh or dried. A proper kyphi should ...

The Queen Elizabeth Root used in hoodoo is usually nowadays an orris root. In older hoodoo it was taken from a plant called stillingia, or Queen's Root . I cannot find the exact point at which the new name was acquired, but it appears that the name "Queen Elizabeth" came to use coincidental with the time that it was being replaced in curio catalogues with orris root. In this instance, it was probably to evade accusations of fraud or mislabeling for selling queen's root from a different plant.   A similar thing happened with John the Conqueror root, where the easier to acquire jalap replaced the more traditional root, usually identified as either Solomon's Seal root or a Jack in the Pulpit root.  In hoodoo tradition, the John the Conqueror root is the symbol of masculinity; it's even (rarely) called "man root." Its properties include the ability to draw money, success, wit, virility, love, crossing, uncrossing, and luck. The female root is the Que...

The usual explanation one hears for the name of the deadly nightshade as "belladonna" is that it was used as a cosmetic eyedrop to make women beautiful. Another popular claim is that, because of its alleged use by witches, that it's a euphemism for a witch (compare the word beldam ) or perhaps a euphemism for the ancient goddess worshipped by the witches.  No one ever has produced written evidence to back up either of these claims. For the eyedrop theory, one would like to see a historical recipe for a purely cosmetic eyedrop made from the substance, and evidence of it in widespread use. All one finds are medical recipes used to treat diseases of the eye. The very idea of cosmetic eyedrops was rare in the era when the belladonna word appears, partly because it was hard to maintain purity of the ingredients to make a consistently eye-brightening formula. Even into the 19th century, eating a spoonful of whiskey and sugar was the kind of semi-superstitious beauty treatment ...

Let's start by acknowledging that the debate around cultural appropriation can be quite polarizing. Personally, I believe that some arguments against cultural appropriation can sometimes feel like a step backward toward segregation, albeit under the guise of "protecting cultural integrity." However, regardless of where you stand on the issue, it's important to address misconceptions that often arise. One such misconception involves smudging and smudge sticks. Some believe these practices are exclusive to Indigenous peoples of the Americas, and that others using them is a form of appropriation.   Some people have therefore expressed outrage at the notion that witchcraft or herbalists have "appropriated" smudging from Native Americans. Yet, anyone who is concerned about the matter must know this: -- "Smudge" is an English word. It is not the native term in any of the tribal languages for the so-called smudge ceremony . Rather, it is how the English ...