Contained Spells: Bottles, Jars, Boxes, Pots, And Eggs

Stay At Home - Sugar Box Bed Spell performed by Tim in which he utilized doll babies in a sugar box bed to symbolize long-lasting love and romance that will surely fill our client's home.

Contained spells are essentially little worlds in which specific events are made to happen that, in turn, affect our targeted conditions or client's situations. It is believed among Southern practitioners that God gave us the ability and power to create our own worlds and realities. Just as God separated the light from darkness and dry land from water, this biblical text affirms that humans - created in the image of God - may seek to bring order to our chaotic and dynamic world by making our own favorable world. The power can be experienced in Conjure, for example, in mojo bags, nation sacks, bottle spells, jar spells, cooking vessel or bucket spells, and box spells.

An old practitioner from the Deep South cautions people, however, to use the power of our imagination and creativity wisely in a justified, appropriate, and thoughtful manner. We must also reject the feeling that we are destined to live with and exemplify only in the world created by others. Our tradition teaches that each of us can model and remodel our worlds through our choices and actions. By doing so, each of us can bring honor to God, the Maker of Heaven and Earth, and ourselves.

Nkisi mbumba. (Photo courtesy of Smithsonian Museum of African Art) 

Hoodoo tradition traces the origin of contained spells to Kongo "nkisi" - a general term for power objects made from wooden figures, wooden boxes, cooking pots, gourds, animal horns, animal skulls, sacks, and bundles that contain empowering spirit(s) that is regarded not only as a guide but also as a symbol, magical key, as it is, to the nature and essence of the purpose of nkisi such as divination, diagnosis, healing, social justice, and protection among the Kongo people of Central Africa. An object only becomes an nkisi if it is filled with medicinal ingredients ("bilonggo") and a spirit resides within the container, which could be an ancestral spirit ("bakulu"), a tutelary spirit ("bisimbi bankita"), or an earthbound spirit ("minkuyu"). One example of non-figurative nkisi is called "mbundu." It is usually made of nets, raffia bags, and wooden boxes with traditional bilonggo, "diiza" cactus, "nkasa" bark, and wooden dishes attached to the bundles. It is often employed to settle serious disagreements within the community.

A Kongo mbundu.

When the Kongo people were brought to the New World, they contributed significantly to developing container spells or contained spells. In the American South, aspects of minkisi have been retained through mojo hands and bottle and jar spells. To create these spells, the appropriate magical materials are bound and contained in a package or in a particular vessel, similar to how the Kongo people ritualistically make their minkisi.

How the Kongo captives were employed in America impacted their ability to continue these magical container traditions with little interruption. Due to their artistic talents, the Kongo people were also employed as artisans, woodcarvers, potters, and tailors. Through these media, they maintained their motifs and combined them with their magical knowledge, passing them down to future generations. Another significant advantage in preserving magical containers was the earlier exposure and conversion to Christianity of the Kongo people by the Portuguese when they were still on their native soil. They eagerly incorporated Catholic paraphernalia such as beaded rosaries, crucifixes, medals, relics, and images of saints into the minkisi tradition. When some enslaved Kongo were brought to the United States, they did not have difficulty adjusting since most of them had already learned to view these adaptations as Christian means to express their traditional Central African beliefs. This artistry, religious flexibility, relative isolation, and protective secrecy would lead to the perseverance of African container magic in America. The oldest containers used by the earliest Hoodoo practitioners are animal horns and teeth, eggs, and gourds. Later came pots, metal caskets and buckets, glass bottles and jars, boxes, and leather and cloth bags.

One interesting folk belief in Hoodoo that was developed amidst the spread of contained spells is that empty bottles, jars, or containers are believed to be hollow shells or vessels for the spirits, like a body without a soul, and parasitic spiritual entities can latch onto these empty vessels and live inside. Due to this, conjure doctors ensure all their stored empty containers are closed or covered. Drinking bottles are kept on their sides to prevent spirits from inhabiting them.

Suppose you have genuinely made an effort to deliver your best on your work, but your boss continues to treat you disrespectfully and unfairly and gives inconsiderately, then Boss Fix. The Honey Jar spell might help sweeten your supervisor or manager and favor you above all others!

Bottles and Jar Spells 

In the Deep South, throughout African-American history and even today, bottles, mason jars, canning jars, and jam jars are commonly used to cast magical spells for a wide variety of purposes, including love drawing, money drawing, court cases, and legal work, blessing, protection, enemy works, and peaceful home. Traditional supplies in such container spells are honey or sugar, which rootworkers employ when they want to sweeten people and situations; vinegar or lemon juice, which conjure doctors may prepare to sour a client's enemies; peace water, which is used to promote peace and harmony; and war water, which sorcerous practitioner may prepare and use for enemy works. At times, bottle and jar spells may contain a variety of trinkets, lucky pieces, curios such as herbs, animal parts, and minerals, petition papers, scriptural prayers, seals and sigils, Catholic paraphernalia such as crucifixes and medals of saints, and personal concerns for a variety of purpose. The items being included symbolize the work being done. Each ingredient represents the things or the conditions the person desires to acquire and experience in their own world or reality, such as romance, prosperity, or good fortune. Conjure workers who know the origins of Hoodoo practices and African-American folkways interpret them as a kind of 'neo-nkisi.'

Memory jars and face vessels usually deposited on graves in Southern African-American cemeteries also share a great deal of similarity with Kongo funerary markers ("maboondo"), both in their symbolic form and mortuary functions.

Simple Love Me - Honey Jar Spell

Materials Needed:

- A jar of honey
- Brown grocery bag paper
- Pen
- Square of camphor
- Two clove pods
- Two rose petals
- Deer's tongue leaves
- Two pieces of lodestones
- Red candle
- Love Me oil

Honey Jar Spell I personally performed for a client to sweeten the working relationship with her colleagues.

Ritual Procedure:

Prepare your grocery-bag paper by tearing it neatly on all four sides while saying, "In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen!" and writing the person's name three times on it, one name under the other:

Juan dela Cruz
Juan dela Cruz
Juan dela Cruz

Then rotate the paper 90 degrees clockwise and write your own name across the person's name, three times as well:

Neal Ocampo
Neal Ocampo
Neal Ocampo

Now all around the crossed names, write your intention in a circle and in one continuous run of script letters (without lifting your pen on the paper), with no spaces. Do not cross t's or place a dot to i's or j's yet; just write your intention in one run and be sure to connect the end of the last word with the beginning of the first word to complete the circle. Afterward, cross your t's and dot your i's or j's. If you make a mistake, start all over again.

To control and influence your situation, circle the names on the paper with your petition.

Next, fold the paper toward you and make it into a small packet to bring what you want your way and express your intention. 

Then, get the jar of honey and open it. To make room for the folded paper packet and other magical ingredients, take out a spoon's worth, and eat it while uttering, "As this honey is sweet to me, so will I become sweet to Juan dela Cruz." Do this three times and push the folded paper packet into the jar.

Put the camphor, rose petals, cloves, a pinch of deer's tongue leaves, and lodestones into the jar. While placing them, instruct the camphor to remove mental messes, deer's tongue leaves to make the target initiate a conversation, clove pods to inspire connection or bond, lodestones to promote admiration and attraction, and rose petals to spark love and romance. Once done, close up the lid.

Shake the jar while focusing on your intention and all the positive energy and thoughts you can muster. Feel the power running into the honey, herbs, and stone, activating them to sweeten your special someone. Envision an inspirational event with your special someone and clearly affirm and pray that it is already happening in your world and will gradually permeate here in the physical world.

Dress the red candle with Love Me oil and stand the candle on the lid of the closed-up jar, and light it. As the candle melts in the jar, see the attraction and love flooding towards your target - see the red color lending you strength and allow it to fill your heart and mind.  Let the candle burn all the way out. Do this every Friday for as long as it takes. Add each new candle on top of the wax remains of the last one. Do not clean the dripped-on wax and open the jar; just allow your contained spell to be wrapped and surrounded by the magic of love and attraction. Feel its warmth permeate your condition to the very soul. Keep the jar on your altar.

Shut Up Jar Spell utilizes herbal curios such as red pepper, clove buds, devil's shoestring, slippery elm bark, alum crystals, chain, and padlock to shut the mouths of false friends and those who speak ill of our client.

Boxes

The most famous box spells in the Hoodoo tradition are mirror-boxes, used to imprison one's enemy and reflect and reverse all negativities, including ill-wishes and psychic assaults back to the sender. Mirror-boxes act like the enemy's coffin as it is traditionally buried in a cemetery after they are prepared, with petitions for the work to be held by spirits of the dead.

Coffin box is used by modern conjure workers for Destruction or D.U.M.E (Death Unto My Enemies) workings. 

Burying the curse of the mirror box in the graveyard to turn the body and souls of the enemies over to the hungry spirits!

Sweetening spells may be worked with boxes as well. Boxes, in this case, serve as lover's bed. Conjure workers use a packet of sugar instead of a honey jar as a container for a sweetening spell

Cooking Pots, Plant Pots, and Buckets

Though not popular in Hoodoo, some practitioners use this vessel the same way as other containers are used in spells. This type of spell is undeniably connected to the Kongo minkisi in its physical form: curios and other ritual materials are kept in pots or buckets.

Contained a spell for success and luck.

Preparing and fixing the pot to be used in the Destruction spell.

Kongo, Suku, and Yaka people are known tribes that create a magical mixture of animal bones, fur, claws, the dirt of animal footprints, and animal sexual organs, charged with gunpowder or glass to be contained in baskets, pots, and food tins.

This particular type of minkisi resurfaced, too, and is still current in the present-day Afro-Cuban religion of Palo. In this religion, the ritual focus is the "nganga," also called "el caldero" or "la prenda." The Cuban nganga is both a spiritual force or entity from the land of the dead and the container in which it resides, empowered by the inclusion of graveyard rocks and soil, human bones, skulls, branches, and sticks from various trees, knives, and blades, and animal remains. The priest of the religion called "Tata" can attract and confine the "mpungus" through the use of this vessel and direct their force for benefit or harm.

Palo Monte nganga.

This practice had since spread to the United States due to the exodus of Cuban refugees and was later adapted by Hoodoo and other folk magic practitioners.

Black Hawk, a Native American Sauk and Fox tribe leader who lived from 1767 to 1838, is being venerated by placing his plaster head in a tin bucket (some say the New Orleans version of a Palo nganga), with arrows, spears, "bwete" figure, stalks of golden wheat grain and American flags. Black Hawk buckets are often placed near doorways.

Venerating the spirits of Black Hawk and Bwete at a Spiritual Church Movement shrine. (Photo courtesy of Association of Independent Readers and Rootworkers)

A Hoodoo practitioner from Florida taught me how to use a plant pot in contained spells. She asked me to look for a clay pot enough to actually create the world I wanted to experience. Then, I was told to fill an equal bowl of herbs, oils, dirt, and other materials I needed in my spell. After that, I mixed them thoroughly until they started to look like dough. I sprinkled my chosen fruit seeds (sweet fruits for luck, citrus for cleansing, and spicy for enemy works) into the pot, then I took gentle hold of the dirt dough, put it into the pot as well, on the top of my chosen fruit seeds, and cover them with more earth. As the pot was filled, my mentor told me that I should see the intention I was drawing being planted, as the seeds germinated and started to shoot, so my desire and intention would take root and blossom in my life.

Mojo Bags

A mojo bag is a small contained spell traditionally prepared by a spiritual worker for a client and covered with red flannel or chamois leather. To learn more about mojo bags, please see the link.

Eggs and Coconuts

Many Hoodoo spells utilize eggs and coconuts, but for these two natural materials to qualify as containers, other curios, oils, or powders must be introduced. Eggs and coconuts can also be seen as ready-made containers; they could represent a person's head and, thus, used to affect a person's mind either to heal or to curse with profound effect.

Necessary materials in creating Sigidi. 

This magical and spiritual significance came from Kongo, Yoruba, Fon, Ewe, and other West African ethnic groups in which coconuts and eggs are revered. In some Yoruba tribes, for instance, coconut is used to represent Sigidi's head. Sigidi is the protective aspect of the Orisha Esu. Coconuts painted with red and white dots are buried under the ground and covered with a plate of shattered glasses, iron nails, and blades. This will provide the owner of the Sigidi defense and protection from sickness and death. If people are under spiritual and magical attacks, initiated priests will do divination to know and assess if it's appropriate to use the Sigidi for the offense. If the spirits agree, the priest will dig up the Sigidi from the ground and sing the prayer for Sigidi from sunrise to sunset.

When I was still starting to learn about container spells, among the first spells that I knew was a rotten egg hex. To do it: obtain a large-sized egg (preferably a black hen) and write the name of your target upon it 13 times, along with your curses and evil intentions for him. Dip the egg in boiling water for a minute but not enough to cook it, then place it outside under the scorching Sun near a red ant's nest for thirteen days, so it will spoil. Poke a hole at either end of the egg and insert a mixture of rust, sulfur, Devil's dung, and Devil's shoestring, then throw the egg against the front door of your target's home at midnight. Walk away and don't look back.

Coconut head can also be used in the Inflammatory Confusion curse. This is performed by drilling the eyes of the coconut open, draining out its water, and inserting the target's name paper and other personal concerns. The coconut is then prayed over and baptized to tie directly to the target's head. Sulfur, graveyard dirt, black mustard seeds, vandal root, cayenne pepper, skunk cabbage, calamus root, and guinea pepper are added right after to dominate them most cruelly and confusingly. Lastly, the coconut head is sealed shut by dripping wax from a black candle around the holes and setting the candle on top of the head. Just place the coconut in a small bowl to make it steady and stable. Some people even cuss and shout at the coconut - it needs to be that ugly so one can really cause confusion on the target.