Candle Burning And Ministry

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Folk Judeo-Christian magic is hard to imagine without candles. We use them often for a variety of spiritual and magical purposes. This week, for example, we did our traditional ancestral veneration, and for hours a memorial candle shed its light in our home to remind us of their ongoing presence in our lives. At the saints' feasts, it has long been customary for us practitioners to light offertory or votive candles to recall the memory of the holy people. And during the day of uncrossing a client experiencing a complex and challenging adverse situation, a single, long-burning fixed candle illuminates the darkness in the client's life created by crossed conditions such as trauma, serious illness, spirit attachments, or enemy works. According to my mentor, all three of these rituals are based on the comforting thought expressed in Proverbs 20:27 "The human spirit is a lamp of Adonai; it searches one's inmost being..." Light betokens life.

But symbols are malleable, and candles in Judeo-Christian magic are also made to express transitions. Thus, spell casting or working is set apart by the lighting of candles. Whether one or seven, wax or oil, the flame burns evenly and quietly on the wicks symbolizing to a tee the sacredness and tranquility of the activity. Just like in prayer and sometimes, even in meditations, spells and rituals begin with lighting candles to mark the transition from profane to sacred time, from mundane to spiritual, from darkness to light.

The seedbed for this widespread ritual use of fire as symbolic language is none other than the Bible, where light imagery abounds. Repeatedly, to express the inexpressible, its authors took recourse to images of light. Thus, the process of imposing order on chaos begins with the divine command, "Let there be light..." (Genesis 1:3). Or Moses first experiences God's compassion in the form of a random bush aflame yet unconsumed (Exodus 3:2). That same compassion manifests itself in the wilderness as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night to guide the Israelites on their arduous journey (Exodus 13:20-21). At Mount Sinai, God's presence is established by fire atop the mountain, "Now Mount Sinai was all in smoke, for the Lord had come down upon it in fire..." (Exodus 19:18).

By extension, the metaphoric language of light is also applied to the Scriptures. Based on Psalms 119:105, "Your word (God) is a lamp to my feet, a light for my path," the exegesis depicts the Bible as a light that keeps one from stumbling, an unerring moral compass. Metaphor has created kinship. God, the Scriptures, and the human soul find common ground in the imagery of light.


(Photo courtesy of Ariel Marzan)


Based on this, we can deduce that the developments in the ritual candle magic in the Hoodoo tradition were inspired by a long tradition of Judeo-Christianity, specifically, Roman Catholic candle-burning combined with African-American folk magic to produce a brand-new style of working with lights, both for prayers and tricking. 

The process of candle burning replaced some old rituals of plantation conjurers. It only became more popular when New Orleans Voodoo, Santeria, Lucumi, and other Afro-Caribbean religions intercrossed with the practices of Hoodoo. But in the plantation or antebellum days, a magical or spiritual flame was sustained with a wick in the appropriate oil for a spirit, saint, or deity. 

Candle burning initially does not appear in the Black-Belt Hoodoo tradition. Candles were costly during those times, and they were rarely encountered by slaves except in their masters' houses which they called the 'big houses.' During slavery, Blacks used grease lamps in their quarters to supply them with light. Southern Louisiana Hoodoo appeared to be the exception with the influence of Roman Catholicism and Haitian Vodun and the emergence of New Orleans Voodoo, which all utilized candles in their workings. 

Candle shops eventually surfaced as successful Hoodoo enterprises specializing in manufacturing, selling, and supplying conjure or spiritual candles. Most candle shops were owned by companies that distributed other spiritual supplies, such as condition oils and sachet powders. Due to this, candle burning became one of the fashionable and sought-after magical techniques employed in root doctoring. With Judeo-Christian and European magical amalgamation, conjure workers and root doctors were taught that employing candles would make their works more efficacious. This methodology soon spread throughout the rest of Louisiana, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina and, by the late 1940s, was relatively uniform throughout the South among all professional conjure workers. Adaptation of European occultism and Judeo-Christian mysticism could also be seen in the colored wax candles in glass jars or glass-encased candles that are often labeled for specific purposes such as 'Fast Luck,' 'Love Me,' 'Money Drawing' and 'Uncrossing.' 

The books of Mikhail Strabo, the proprietor of Guidance House, a leading supplier to the spiritual, Hoodoo, and magical community, and Henri Gamache, a prominent mid-20th century occult author and folklore researcher who developed a unique Creole combination of African, Judeo-Christian, Zoroastrian, and Spiritualist magic, were believed by many to have contributed a lot regarding African-American candle magic.
Seven-branch menorah candlestick. 


Following the methodologies of the two said authors, it became popular among conjure workers of the 1940s to light and burn small candles of various colors to draw money, luck, love, and success; to ward off evil; to incite revenge; to dominate others. Because many, if not most, of the spiritual suppliers at that time were Jews, they usually offered 7-branch menorah or 9-branch menorah. Jews and African-American spiritual practitioners at that time shared a similar belief that one should strictly decorate their home with this type of candle holder as a symbol of the First Temple in Jerusalem. This also gave Hoodoo candle-burning ceremonies a slightly Kabbalistic representation.

Some deacons, reverends, ministers, or bishops began practicing candle burning too on behalf of their congregants, and they became known as candle workers, and their altar works, 'candle ministry.' The preparation of the candles by most Church workers in the past and until this day is accompanied by the recitation of prayers or Psalms. 

Candle Work Terminologies

  • Dressing or Fixing - includes preparations like carving names or words in the wax; dressing with oils; loading; butting; rolling in herbal blends or mixtures; dusting with dried herbs or powders; decorating and enchanting; praying over them. 
  • Loading- involves digging a hole in the wax of a glass-encased, jumbo, or vigil lights and pouring oils or inserting herbs and petition papers. Jumbos are loaded from below, and vigil lights are from above. Skewers can be used to poke and dig the wax of glass-encased candles.
  • Butting - involves cutting off the tip, carving a new one on the bottom end to bring out the wick, and burning the candle upside down.
  • Steady Burn - if conditions or situations take some time to resolve (a court case, for instance, or healing a serious illness), the worker may light one candle after another for several consecutive days. Likewise, if one uses a kerosene lamp, the worker may add new oil several times without putting out the flame while refilling the reservoir, thus ensuring a 'steady burn.'
  • Burning in Sections - an intentional interrupted burning - only requires the worker to burn the candle portion by portion at a time for several days. 
  • Moving Candle Spell - a progressive conjure ritual procedure in which the candles are repositioned during their burning period, acting out the intentions of the spell works.
  • Setting Lights - dressing, fixing, and lighting candles for a specific person with the desired outcome and letting them burn through until they are finished. 
  • Carving - etching the name of the person, the intention, or sometimes even symbols using a pen, needle, nail, knife, sharp bone, stick, or any pointed objects. 

Color Correspondence

 
Road Opener spellwork utilizes a red candle for love and romance, a green candle for money, an orange candle for opportunities, and a yellow candle symbolizing our client's devotion.


Note: The color symbolism used by conjure workers is influenced by European magical traditions, admixed with remnants of African religious symbolism.

Black
Magical Property: Banishing negativity, sorrow, revenge, maleficia (sorcery)

Blue
Magical Property: Peace, harmony, tranquility, joy, blessing, healing

Brown
Magical Property: Legal matters, justice, balance, endurance

Copper
Magical Property: Money, passion, professional growth

Gold
Magical Property: Abundance, achievement, finances, good fortune, healing, intuition

Green
Magical Property: Growth, fertility, prosperity, business, gambling luck, good job

Gray
Magical Property: Neutrality negate the negative influence

Indigo
Magical Property: Astral work, meditation, overcoming depression, spirit communication, stop gossip and lies.

Lavender
Magical Property: Intuition, gay love, or romance

Light Blue
Magical Property: Intuition, understanding, communication

Olive
Magical Property: Confidence, forgiveness, prosperity, travel, growth

Orange
Magical Property: Action, encouragement, overcoming addiction, opportunity, road-opening

Pink
Magical Property: Friendship, domestic harmony, fertility, love, relaxation, emotional healing, romance

Purple
Magical Property: Influence, spiritual communication, spiritual development
Planet: Jupiter

Red
Magical Property: Action, courage, passion, love, sexual potency, sports, strength, fast luck

Silver
Magical Property: Intuition, meditation, psychic power, gambling luck

Violet
Magical Property: Mastery, power, ambition, control, command

White
Magical Property: Clarity, spiritual blessings, purity, healing

Yellow
Magical Property: Confidence, inspiration, spirituality, travel, money


Phallic, skull, and cross-figure candles. 


Figural and Novelty Candles

  • Black Cat candle -  for gambler's luck.
  • Bride and Groom candle - red for passion, pink for reconciliation, white to attract new love or sanctify marriage and fidelity, black to cause harm or damage to a couple, and blue for peace in the home.
  • Cross candle - used as altar candle to invoke divine forces to uncross yourself or the client. White for spiritual purity and insight, black for enemy work, brown for court cases and legal matters, green for money drawing, red for love drawing, orange for luck and success, and yellow for road-opening.
  • Devil candle - burned in exorcism or if a house is infested with evil vibration. 
  • Double-Action candle - this candle is designed to reverse any negativities or evil that worked against you. White and black are used to reverse hex, red and black are used if someone is destroying your love life, and green and black are used when someone is causing you financial problems. 
  • Genital candle (penis and vulva) - relating to sexual behavior. White to attract a new sex partner and to heal the genital organs, pink for romantic sex or to turn a friend into a lover, red to induce lust and passion, blue to bring fidelity or limit their sexual interest to their current partner only, black to control a person's sexual nature.
  • Human Image candle - used to represent the target of a spell.
  • Lovers candle (nude embracing couple) - red for sexual passion, white for new love.
  • Seven Knob Wishing candle (flattened spheres stacked seven-high) - burned on seven consecutive days, for seven different wishes, or for seven-fold strength on the same wish.
  • Lucky Buddha candle – for good fortune, happiness, contentment, and abundance.
  • Skull candle - can be used to represent the head of the person.


Lovers candle employed in Return to Me Spell.


Tips and Tricks for Fixing a Candle

  • Fixing a candle to draw - rub the oil up one side and down the other from the center point or simply stroke the oil toward you.
  • Fixing a candle to repel - stroke the oil away from you.
  • Fixing a reversible candle - cut off the original tip, carve a new one on the bottom end, and etch the enemy's name in mirror writing. If you are returning evil to the sender and you know where he lives, turn and point the candle toward his house and dress it with oil in that direction. Burn the candle upside down on a mirror.
  • Fixing a double action candle - butt the light, make sure you carve a new tip on the black portion. Etch your name or your client's name on the colored portion, from the center outward, and the enemy's name or the condition you want to remove backward, in mirror writing, on the black portion, also from the center outward. 
  • Fixing a genitalia candle - flow oil onto it and handle it like you are holding the real counterpart, then rub the oil on it intimately like you do on an actual genital or sex organ.
  • Fixing a lucky Buddha candle - flow oil onto it, particularly rub its round belly.
  • Fixing candle with herbs - melt a beeswax or cheese rind wax on a cookie sheet in the oven or on a hot plate, sprinkle the herbs on, remove the cookie sheet from the heat, then roll a candle in it until it collects the herbs. Other practitioners tend to simply dress or rub the candle with the appropriate oil and then roll the candle in a mixture of dried herbs.
  • Fixing a candle with oils and powder -  dress the candle with oil, then sprinkle them with a sachet of powder.
  • Feeding a candle while burning - when the candle forms a well of melted wax in the center as it burns, drip extra oil into the well to keep it strong as it works. 
  • Fixing glass-encased candle - poke holes into the wax with a barbeque skewer, drip oil into the holes, finish off the top with herbs and symbolically colored glitter, pray over it, and knock or seal it.

Loaded glass-encased candle.

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See, What Our Path Is

Being immensely interested in African diaspora religions and Folk Catholicism, we primarily honor our ancestors, Church saints, angels, folk saints, and Afro-Caribbean spirits such as loas and orishas. If we absolutely have to put a label on ourselves, we prefer the label of “Folk Judeo-Christian” as we live according to the customs and traditions of conjure workers and root doctors from the Deep South and syncretic followers of Christ in various nations of the Caribbean and Latin America.

Our spirituality includes West African-based Caribbean-style tradition as well as Esoteric Christianity and Yoruba religion. Generally, we practice Gullah folk magic popularly known in the Deep South as Hoodoo or Lowcountry Voodoo; the ancient wisdom founded by Orunmila in Ile-Ife called Ifa, and a bit of Lihim na Karunungan (Filipino Esotericism or Philippine Mystery Tradition).

Respect, What Hoodoo Is

Despite visible evidence of Central West African, Islamic/Moorish, Native American, Judeo-Christian, European, and even a few East Indian/Hindu, Chinese, and Latino/Caribbean retentions, influences, and admixtures, this does not mean that Hoodoo is an open and unrestricted system of eclectic magic.

Conjure, and Rootwork is rooted in African-American culture and Folk Protestant Christianity. Any practitioners of Hoodoo who did not grow up within African-American culture should still have a fuller understanding and high regard for its origin.

In the beginning, the early conjure doctors were entirely Black. The students were all Black, the elders were Black, the teaching was Black, and they focused only on Blacks as their audience. But other races were accepted when they had also been brought into the Hoodoo community and learned the tradition. Even so, we should still acknowledge that Hoodoo, Conjure, or Rootwork is not ours but only belongs to the Black community. We are just believers who are grafted into their rich yet humble tradition and, by word and deed, embrace genuine African-American folk spirituality and magic. This is all we can do for all the blessings we received from God and our Black ancestors.

Hoodoo's lack of religious structure and hierarchical authority do not mean that any person or group can appropriate or redefine it. If one cannot respect Hoodoo as it is and for what it is, then please, do not play with it.



Learn, How Conjure Is Worked On

Authentic Conjure is not all about blending and selling oils and casting spells online to make money. Hoodoo has its own spiritual philosophy, theology, and a wide range of African-American folkways, customs, and practices which include, but are not limited to, veneration of the ancestors, Holy Ghost shouting, snake reverence, spirit possession, graveyard conjure, nkisi practices, Black hermeneutics, African-American church traditions, the ring shout, the Kongo cosmogram, ritual water immersions, crossroads magic, making conjure canes, animal sacrifices, Jewish scriptural magic, enemy works, Seekin' ritual, magical incorporation of bodily fluids, etc.

Unfortunately, they are currently missing in marketeered or commercial Hoodoo, as they are being removed, disregarded, or ignored by unknowing merchants who simply want to profit from an African-American spiritual tradition, thus reducing Hoodoo to just a plethora of recipes, spells, and tricks.

Tim and I are completely aware that we are not African-Americans, so we are doing our best to retain and preserve the customs and traditions of the slave ancestors to avoid unnecessary conflict with the larger Black-Belt Hoodoo community and prevent them from labeling us inauthentic outsiders and our practice as mere 'cultural misappropriation.'

Accept, Who We Are

The byproduct of eons of slave history, Black supremacists believe that only people with African or African-American blood are real Hoodoo practitioners and are often inclined to consider themselves as the elite of the Hoodoo community; a place in which they believed that Whites, Latinos, Asians or any other races who do not have Black ancestry do not belong. Black supremacists are prone to be very hostile towards both “outsiders” and those accepting of them, fearing that their promotion and acceptance would dilute or even negate the Black identity of Hoodoo.

Although we do understand why some Blacks hold this stance, since a lot of people nowadays are misappropriating many aspects of Hoodoo and teaching the spiritual path even without proper education and training (for purely monetary purposes), we would, however, want to say that not all non-Black Hoodoo practitioners are the same.

WE respect what Hoodoo is, and we never try to change it, claim it as our own, disregard its history, take unfair advantage of it, speak against the people who preserve it, and mix it with other cultures (like our own) and call it Filipino/Pinoy Hoodoo, Gypsy Hoodoo or Wiccan Hoodoo because there are no such things.