Sympathetic Magic

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In many magical traditions from different cultures, both ancient and modern, the concept of sympathetic magic plays a crucial role. Scottish social anthropologist James Frazer distinguished between the two fundamental types of sympathetic magic - the imitative and contagious. For him, the first type, imitative magic, observes the Law of Similarity and, thus, holds the axiom that 'like produces like. The contagious magic, on the other hand, follows the Law of Contact. It infers that whatever the practitioner does to a material object will affect equally the person with whom the item was once in contact, whether it was once part of his body or not.


A poppet stuffed with herbs and other magical goodies. This one doesn't have a taglock inside since I plan to use this Dollie as a personalized one in which it could represent anyone just by attaching personal concerns to the outside.


Hoodoo sympathetic magic resembles imitative and contagious folk magical practices in West Central Africa known as "Juju." It is a magical and spiritual belief system practiced by some people of Akan, Ewe, Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo tribes, among others. Rainmakers in Ghana, for instance, would mouth-sprayed water into the air to imitate the falling of rain and blessings. Medicine men in Nigeria would smother spots on the body of a person suffering from chickenpox and wash away the patches afterward to imitate the removal of the disease. Some hunters in Cameroon would make effigies of animals they desire to kill.

The most familiar kind of African Juju is image magic, wherein an image is ritually prepared and fixed to represent a living person, who can then be charmed, healed, injured, or killed through performing some ritualistic gestures and magical operations to the effigy, such as praying it over, smoking it with herbs, sticking needles into the image, or burning it. Juju practitioners use imitative magic to produce the desired effect of imitating it. 


A voodoo doll, fixed and prepared to represent a target. It is noticeable that the doll's left eye is shut to signify and ensure that he will only have one-sided views and thinking. And he shall refuse to see someone else's viewpoints other than his right-hand man.


The second principle of thought in African Juju is contagious magic. The principle holds that objects or materials, once in contact with a living person, can influence each other even after the connection is broken. A typical example is a relationship between a person and any part of his body, such as hair strands, fingernails, or teeth. Some tribes in West Africa are careful to conceal their biological cast-offs, such as extracted teeth since these might fall into the hands of certain people who could harm the teeth owners by working magic on them. 


 A cut piece of clothing from the target's shirt was made into a magical packet.


These objects or materials utilized in contagious magic are known in Hoodoo as 'personal concerns.

Personal concerns are biological matters and personal items from the target or victim or anything that carries the DNA or identity of the target. Employing personal concerns is vital for developing confidence and a sense of reassurance and contentment with the practitioner working on someone at a distance. It helps in crafting an image and individuality of the person being worked on since these items are extensions of one's identity, personality, values, and lifestyle.

Types of Personal Concerns 

Generally speaking, the more intimate and personal the link is to the individual, the more powerful it is, and the more the magic will entangle with them. The most powerful personal concerns originate within the physical body and decrease in strength as the personal concern departs from the body. 

1. Bodily Fluids

  • Blood
  • Semen/Penile Discharge
  • Vaginal Secretions
  • Saliva

2. Bodily Effluvia and Detritus

  • Urine
  • Feces
  • Sweat
  • Mucus
  • Phlegm
  • Earwax

3. Body Sheds/Cast-Offs

  • Hair Strands/Particles
  • Nail Clippings
  • Skin Sheds
  • Skin Dirt - Bathwater or wash water 
  • Teeth
  • Umbilical Cord
  • Placenta or Amniotic Sac

4. Articles of Clothing

  • Underwears
  • Socks or any footwear
  • Panty-hose
  • Shirts
  • Pants
  • Skirts
  • Other apparels


The couple's dirty underwear is tied with a cinnamon stick and sprinkled with sexual and love-drawing herbs such as damiana leaves, cubeb berries, rosemary leaves, catnip leaves, rose petals, etc. 


5. Representations

  • Photographs
  • Portrait Painting
  • Sculpture
  • Drawing of a Person
  • Other Artistic Representation of a Person

6. Impressions

  • Person's Signature or Handwriting
  • Thumbmark
  • Handprint or Footprint 
  • Body Measurement
  • Silhouette of a Person

7. Miscellaneous

  • Business Card
  • Official Records of Legal Documents (birth certificate, marriage certificate, divorce papers, identification cards, etc.)
  • Newspaper Clipping
  • Something Owned by the Person
  • Something Touched by the Person (e.g., cigarette butt, keyboard dust, the dirt of the shoes, left-over drink, etc.)
  • Person's Legal Name


Remember that this ranking is only applicable and constructive in the Hoodoo tradition, as some traditions view some specific concerns on the list as more powerful than others. For example: employing pictures is rarely used in Middle Eastern magic due to the injunction against graven images in Judaism and Islam, but hair, nails, and especially a person's name are considered potent due to their belief about the sanctity of names (clearly evident based on how the stated religions revere the sacred names of God). In West African magic, the feet hold a special place which is why the emphasis is on foot-track magic.

Another thought to consider about using personal concerns is what type of magic one is attempting to perform. If you are working on affecting someone's sexual nature then sexual fluids are a great tool to bring about change. If you are trying to impact someone's mind, hair particles are a perfect tool to influence your target. If you are trying to affect someone's appearance or allure, a picture would be the better choice for this job. 


Panty with the vaginal fluid of the client and her petition paper was placed inside a jar to capture and conjure her essence.

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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.