Hoodoo For Dummies
If you want to know how Hoodoo:
- Kept communities healthy when hospitals wouldn't see them
- Went from African cosmological technology to African American liberation magic
- Scared the bejeezus out of slave owners, unlike Christianity, which they demanded enslaved people practice instead
- Was carried forward by grandmothers, aunties, and root doctors against all odds
- Kept women alive through birth at a higher rate than "proper medicine" did
- Has impacted music for centuries—from gospel, to blues, to hip hop
- Shows up in practices you might already do but never had a name for
- Built Black economic power when banks wouldn't serve Black communities
- Handles everything from protection to prosperity to problem people
- Belongs in conversations about science, history, and spirituality and much, much more, then you'll want this book.
Everything else
The Newsletter
Essays and research notes on Hoodoo history, practice, and the places where folk tradition and formal scholarship argue with each other.
Subscribe HN·PT-03 / Membership / PatreonPatreon
Deeper material for people who want it: extended research, working notes, and direct access. Membership funds the scholarship program.
Become a patron HN·SC-04 / Program / 15 domainsCOMING IN OCTOBER: Community Scholar Program
A structured course of study across fifteen domains of Hoodoo scholarship, built for people who want to do the reading properly.
coming soon HN·CR-05 / CorrespondenceTalks & Interviews
Available for lectures, podcasts, press, and consultation on Hoodoo history and practice. Reach me here.
Get in touchAbout
I am a long-time Hoodoo researcher and practitioner, founder of Elysian Trust, and a parapsychology scholarship recipient who has taken part in studies at UC Berkeley, MIT, and the University of Virginia.
Hoodoo is usually handled one of two ways: as folklore to be catalogued, or as product to be sold. I am interested in a third option, which is treating it as a living tradition with its own internal logic, and then doing the research to match. That is what the “nerd” is doing in the name.