What Is The Importance Of Product Labels?

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Packaging and labeling have always been essential magical tools in the urban Hoodoo tradition. Product labels are vital in increasing brand visibility and spiritual or magical perceptibility. Spiritual supplies manufacturers communicate the product's value to the customers and spiritual entities through artistic labels. It's one of the essential means of communication between the brand, the root workers, and the spirits they work with. The product labeling contains crucial occult information that is printed on the packaging. Labeling is not just about branding and product promotion; conjure workers believe spirits note far more critical symbolisms when they see the labels. 

Due to this, marketers began marketing Hoodoo supplies and paraphernalia with attractive labels and graphics in mail-house order catalogs, Jewish and Chinese drugstores and pharmacies, and spiritual supplies shops. 

In the years before the Civil Rights movement and the "Black is Beautiful" revolution that evolved from it, African-American and Hispanic women consistently hawked cosmetics, hygiene supplies, and home-care products with transparent Westernized motifs. The socio-cultural pressure to achieve the broadly accepted 'American' beauty standard, much like the pressure cast on American women of all colors, shapes, sizes, and backgrounds, was prevalent long before Jewish chemists and pharmacists like Morton Neumann, Joseph Menke, Morris Shapiro, and LeRue Marx came along. What these individuals did do, however, or should I say what their graphic designers did do - thanks to the provocative nature of their label designs - besides helping to shape the urban Hoodoo world, also gave a new commercial platform to an unashamedly more homey, progressive, literate, domineering, aggressive, romantic, and sexualized images of the modern Black women.

Jewish-owned manufactories then became known for their stylized packaging and advertisements, which featured illustrations and photographs of African-American models. Notable graphic artists who illustrated the product labels and ads were Charles C. Dawson and Jay Jackson, both African-Americans; the former was even a Georgia native. 

Following the ancient belief of native Africans concerning the significance of symbolism and imagery, these designs were created to share and understand the meaning of advertising messages. African Americans, including conjure workers and artists alike, are attached to images because of their ancestral consciousness. Traditional signs and symbols are considered dynamic human activities and conditions that touch every living domain for meaningful development and peaceful coexistence. 

The illustration of symbols and other imagery is a tradition of Central West African origin. Animal prints, geometrical figures, line patterns, ritual emblems, and figurative rock and wood arts are attested in the slave trade regions. Therefore, the practice of giving significance to symbolic and allegorical imagery in Hodoo owes its origin to African cultural convergence. 


Figures wearing Arabian or Indian-style headscarves, tignons, and turbans once became a personification of a wealthy and successful businessman. Orientalism became fashionable and opulent among the general populace during the 19th and 20th centuries. Due to this, genie lamps, incense burners, oil lamps, Asian elephants, and even Allah's name, which is written in Arabic script, also became symbols of enterprise, luck, and abundance. 


We are not sure if this directive came straight from the Jewish merchants or from the influence of their Black colleagues and employees, but the lovely novel artwork, along with catchy product names like "Follow Me Boy" sachet powder, "Kiss Me Now" perfume, "Essence of Bend-Over" floor wash and "Red Fast Luck" dressing oil became calling cards through the entire history of Hoodoo. The cosmetic mail-order catalogs gave their target clientele apparent cause-and-effect scenes of the passionate and auspicious moments awaiting them if they used the product.

To get acknowledged on a pharmacy or occult shop shelf or in the hands of a door-to-door salesman, these Jewish merchants felt the best response was to employ mostly black designers, salespeople, copywriters, and factory workers. These people could also market their concoctions in a style and language more likely to resonate with the intended market.

Labels helped build brand and product efficacy, spiritual recognition, and communication, promoting consumer loyalty and magical potency. However, the most effective signs and symbols would be those that the consumers could easily culturally and consciously relate with since a familiarity bond had previously been created. Hence, most symbols they used were those items or curios, commonly used in spell works, that evoke the "lucky" imagery of the brand name, such as heart, four-leaf clover, wishbone, horseshoe, dice, eye, key, black cat, hand, crown, star, etc. 




Dedicated collectors now scour the globe looking for rare tins and bottles of these vintage products due to the artistic merits of those stunning labels.


More often than not, most people think that all products with labels can be used in Hoodoo practice. This is incorrect. A commercial product can only be used in Hoodoo if it passes several practitioners' extensive research and thorough testing. That testing determines the level of awareness and efficiency among mundane consumers or how figurative or emblematic the commercial design is. 

The more graphic the product label is, the stronger the product's performance in Hoodoo magic. If the product has a dominant, attractive, and symbolic graphic, it would likely be used in spiritual workings. That is because a strong graphic design means a specific product is first recalled when a specific magical or spiritual condition is mentioned.

For example, Florida Water will be recalled due to its floral design product label when one thinks of attracting youth, love, and beauty. 




Arm & Hammer Pure Baking Soda

Due to its logo design, this product is often used for masculine nature, vigor, strength, and endurance. It is also employed in workings to strengthen those who are weak, timid, afraid, or shy. And also for a steady job.



Bag Balm

The Bag Balm product is known for its characteristic green square tin cans featuring a cow's head and red clovers on the lid. Because of these graphics, rootworkers recommend this strongly-scented, lanolin-rich ointment to advocate it as a base in compounding, especially strong protective Hoodoo rubs and balms used to attract good luck in love and marriage matters. 




Buffalo Ammonia

The Buffalo icon gives this product other magical uses, such as promoting strength, power, and survival. Incorporating this in your floor wash would ensure your family members do not deviate from life paths and goals. Buffalo also represents one's heritage and roots, which can be used to cleanse one's ancestral shrine.  




Hoyt's Cologne

Some people have confused Hoyt's Cologne with Hoyle's Playing Cards and the famous card game rule book by Edmund Hoyle. This might be because the brand names sound almost similar and the earlier typographic style of Hoyle's Playing Cards, which bore a resemblance to the cologne's name. Since then, Hoyt's Cologne has become lucky for gamblers, and people's faith extends well beyond gambling. 




Jockey Club Perfume

Its name and graphic design were derived from the most prominent commercial horse racing organization in the United Kingdom. Owing to this, the cologne is used for good luck, success in money matters, and winning in games of change.




Lewis Red Devil Lye

This product was once sold in boxes with labels of a big, furious, smiling devil (they now replaced it with plastic bottles and reduced the size of the devil, as shown on the left side). That artwork of the devil in the vintage container was why some practitioners bury four unopened containers of Red Devil lye at the four corners of a property with the Devil images facing outward to guard one's premises.




Lucky Brown Pressing Oil

The label carries talismanic emblems that symbolize love and luck, conveying that it is scented with herbal essences with specific magical properties.




Lucky Tiger Hair Tonic with Oil

Tiger represents power and one's ability to exert it in various situations, making this product effective in enhancing power, mastery, and control over adversaries. Alternatively, the tiger represents female sexuality, aggression, and seduction, so this traditional hair-care product can also be used for the same purpose.




Mrs. Stewart's Liquid Bluing

The maker's husband of this product opted not to market this product with his wife's face, instead using a photo of his wife's mother since he thought an older face would instill more confidence in the product. The portrait has remained on the packaging ever since. As the motherly figure implies, it gained a reputation as a protective spiritual supply for women and children, medically and magically, and as a bringer of peace to the home.




Murray & Lanman Florida Water Cologne

The name and packaging label refers to the fabled Fountain of Youth, which was said to be located in Florida, and the scent's "flowery" nature. Flowers symbolize perfection, spirituality, kindness, compassion, gentleness, pleasure, beauty, love, youth, joy, and gain. Blooming flowers represent hidden potential and latent talents, so Florida Water cologne can also help one to discover and enhance their potential. Flowers can also denote a particular time or season, which can be used as a libation to the spirits during their sacred days or feasts. 




Royal Crown Hair Dressing Pomade

All-purpose hairdressing for men in a crown-embossed package; the crown signifies success and victory.



White Flower Analgesic Balm

White flowers, such as lilies, symbolize tranquility, spirituality, faith, peace, purity, joy, and bliss, so we can use them to massage our heads when we need those conditions. 


A Conjurer's collection of vintage African-American anointing, rubbing massage oils, hair-care products, colognes, perfumes, ointments, balms, etc. (Photo courtesy of Lucky Mojo Curio Co.)


As tackled, humans and spirits alike communicate better with product labels embedded with objects, symbols, and scenes they culturally or consciously relate with most easily. Hence, conjure workers recommend effectively applying Hoodoo symbols and symbolism and graphic layout of conditions individuals want to achieve in product labeling to better reach the spirits one works with.


Some of Tim + Neal's labels are anointing and dressing oils. 


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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.