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

  Once was a time when I was known for my Hoodoo Review blog, where I reviewed products from various occult shops and botanicas. Eventually I got rid of the blog because I was experiencing too much trouble with inconsistency in products -- that is to say, an item I had loved the first time I bought might not be made the same way when I ordered from the same manufacturer a year later. Sometimes this was due to certain occult shops or practitioners not following a set "recipe" and instead making the formulas however they felt like making them on that occasion. Other times the problem would be a decline in quality (especially from larger makers) as the search for cheapness and easiness overrode the tradition or effectiveness of older more expensive formulas. One example was the Ar-Jax brand of incense, which originally had some herbal matter in the mixture, but over time came to be made with the same plain, colored incense mixture that everything sold by Wisdom Products uses. In...

  Well, you live in New Mexico long enough, eventually you will see La Llorona .  Short version of the legend: she's a ghost or a zombie or something in that unnatural vein, a weeping woman. Her reason for weeping is that she murdered her children -- traditionally said by drowning them in a river, and so she is frequently sighted around rivers.  October 31st, 2021, I saw her! In broad daylight. Maybe it was just a crying lady by the river, but strictly that's all her name means. Here it goes: I was out for a walk downtown in Santa Fe, going along the river. It was around one in the afternoon. In the area up near Canyon Road I was walking on a dirt trail directly beside the river, down in the ditch. (The Santa Fe River never has much water in it, it's more like a ditch with a little trickle going through.) As I am walking, I start to hear the sound of a woman sobbing and wailing very very loudly.  I think this can be one of two things: someone pulling a Halloween pran...

 

This post was inspired by someone in a historical art group on Facebook asking, "Are there no black artists who worked in these years [1850-1950]?"  The answer to that is, there weren't many working in Fine Art due to reasons I presume I don't have to explain; nevertheless there were a few who made it. And they're often overlooked due to their artwork looking just the same as anything else from the time. Indeed, there's an assumption nowadays that a black artist must be making work about the experience of being black. Surely , you might think, he'd paint black subjects, or his art would look African-inspired! This was not the expectation of art in the 19th century, nor would it have likely been popular under the circumstances of the time. A person painting African-inspired art would have been denigrated to the level of "folk artist" and any attempts infiltrate the Fine Art world with such pieces would have been ridiculed, at best, as evidence of...

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 ...

A while back on an occult books group, someone was looking for books in Latin about astral projection. Not any books that mentioned it, mind — books in Latin , presumably older than 18th century, on the topic. And I knew right away: they weren’t going to find it. That’s not because the concept doesn’t exist in older magical literature. You can certainly find accounts of soul flight, dream visions, bilocation, remote spirit-walking, or being “carried forth in ecstasy” — from the Pythagoreans all the way to 19th-century spiritualists. But you’re not going to find the phrase astral projection in Latin. You’re not even going to find it in English until fairly late in the game. That’s because astral projection isn’t an ancient concept. It’s an old idea in a new hat. And the hat, in this case, seems to date from somewhere around the 1880s. Using Google Books’ advanced search, you’ll find that the term barely shows up in print before the 1890s. The earliest reference I’ve been able to confi...

  I'm not a fan of pirates -- but I am a fan of old graveyards. In the last decade or so, I've noticed an increasingly prevalent belief that graves which include a skull and crossbones design are the graves of pirates. Below is a screencap demonstrating the issue. The too common mistake seems to come from a popular association of the skull and crossbones design with the pirate flag or "Jolly Roger." Yet, historical records of pirates suggest this exact flag might have never even been used. A 1724 account of a pirate attack states : About Eleven of the Clock one Night, after the whole Crew had been Some Time assembled in the great Cabbin, I heard three Huzza's, and then they all came upon Deck, and hoisted Jolly Roger, (for so they call their black Ensign, in the Middle of which is a large white Skeleton, with a Dart in one Hand, striking a bleeding Heart, and in the other an Hour Glass.) [...] When they fight under Jolly Roger, they give Quarter, which they do no...