Hoodoo

So cleansing waters, it's very different for depending on where you're at in the diaspora.

So in Hoodoo, I'm saying Hoodoo specifically because this is like what is popularized in Hoodoo and New Age Hoodoo and what I've seen so far.

So if it don't resonate, oh well.

But Florida Water is a big one.

foreign concept to me for me i'm just like ah i don't know i'm gonna do magic wherever the hell i probably would be more of a chaos magician at this point maybe but i don't really i don't know enough about that to actually do it i know i should get into it though but yeah so for us it's more like we're getting more further back than that back to the folk practice back to the appalachian stuff to the catholic folk magic right and that's where it really kind of like makes sense for christianity which we have to go together

right so like um Folk religions, I'll throw out one and please correct me, things like Hoodoo in the American South or Santeria or things like that, they are based in Christianity.

They're just using root work.

They're using food.

I grew up in Miami and I spent eight years of my life in Alabama.

I know Hoodoo and I know Voodan and I don't talk to you guys a lot about it on the show because it's not my practice to divulge.

I can talk about, you know, Irish nature magic and Santeria all day, but the other stuff that's for someone else.

So you can know things about a closed practice, you know, or in my case, people actually showed you how to do it, but it's not your place to go and share too much about it.

Why do you think people show it online for? You think is that a sincerity or maybe what incites some fear into people?

I think that part right there, that part, you know, people, again, me coming from a Hulu background also, all the stuff was never out in the open.

What you kept was in a closet somewhere.

It was for you, and you do spiritual work.

Dr. Chereau lives in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, with her beloved family and a three-legged cat.

Her writings on the intersections of magic, Africana religions, and popular culture tropes of voodoo can be found online at The Academic Hoodoo.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Black Studies Podcast.

Today, we have the absolute pleasure to talk with Dr. Yvonne Chereau, Peggy Chan Professor Emerita of Black Studies and Emerita's Professor of Religion at Swarthmore College.

I love that.

Yeah.

You know, my work is on Hoodoo and Conjure, you know, the little angels.

So it was just part of my spiritual world.

So this idea of even being able to communicate to something else was just...

It was a concoction made by all of my family members in different ways that allowed me to step into being a Hoodoo woman, a conjure woman, and a Oshun priest and a Petebe and all these [laughs] titles and different names that I have now.

My family completely poured into that, even though all of them would identify as Christian-

Mm-hmm

Mm-hmm

... from your family, right? So then what encourages you to go deeper into these practices? How did you stumble upon, you know, like especially African religion?

So I would say I found Hoodoo specifically sort of, quote, unquote, "first," and why I say that is because I was raised by people that I would consider Hoodoo women and men.

Now, Hoodoo is a specifically African American spiritual tradition.

The practice took deep root in the coastal Lowcountry of South Carolina and Georgia, nurtured by the Gullah Geechee people.

The Gullah Geechee people, isolated on the sea islands of the Atlantic coast, fiercely preserved their African cultural and spiritual traditions, weaving them into Hoodoo folk magic.

And in the Low Country, the tradition evolved, and the specific color of the bottles became paramount.

While any shiny bottle might catch a spirit, Cobalt blue was the most powerful.

Because I don't really think the concept, the pure concept of zombie was around at this time.

So the pure concept of zombie, as I understand it, coming from Africa to Egypt, you know, most prominent in, like, Haiti or whatever, in Hoodoo religion or whatever, was like, yeah, to totally have control through your witchcraft, your spellcraft or whatever, of another person's body or whatever, making them to do your will, which is why in Haiti it became a metaphor for slavery, because it really was, you know, basically taking control of the other person's body.

The concept of the zombie Its development and its lineage and its history is totally different than demonology and the history of demons.

But anyways, these books, these spells that they found were incantations, sometimes just for protection.

Yeah, the dime keeper.

What are some of the common elements of the practice? Like in Hoodoo, there are some sort of common elements that everybody kind of knows.

Do you know what I mean?

Yeah, I do know what you mean.

And when I talk to my African-American Hoodoo practitioner friends, we love to compare notes.

And one of the notes is about eggs.

You know, every folk magic has a use of eggs because eggs are a symbol of life and, uh, and they do something a little bit different with eggs than we do, but we use eggs for a lot of different things.