HOODOO, CONJURE, and ROOTWORK: Definition of Terms

Hoodoo, Conjure, Rootwork, and similar terms refer to the practice of African American folk magic.

Hoodoo is an American term, originating in the 19th century or earlier. One of its meanings refers to African-American folk magic. Here is how i define the word "hoodoo":

Hoodoo consists of a large body of African folkloric practices and beliefs with a considerable admixture of American Indian botanical knowledge and European folklore. Although most of its adherents are black, contrary to popular opinion, it has always been practiced by both whites and blacks in America. Other regionally popular names for hoodoo in the black community include "conjuration," "conjure," "witchcraft," "rootwork," "candle burning," and "tricking." The first three are simply English words; the fourth is a recognition of the pre-eminence that dried roots play in the making of charms and the casting of spells, and the fifth and sixth are special meanings for common English words.

Hoodoo is used as a noun to name both the system of magic ("He used hoodoo on her") and its practitioners ("Doctor Buzzard was a great hoodoo in his day"). In the 1930s, some practitioners used the noun "hoodooism" (analogous with "occultism") to describe their work, but that term has dropped out of common parlance. Hoodoo is also an adjective ("he layed a hoodoo trick for her") and a verb ("she hoodooed that man until he couldn't love no one but her"). The verb "to hoodoo" appears in collections of early pre-blues folk-songs. For instance, in Dorothy Scarborough's book "On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs," (Harvard University Press, 1925), a field-collected version of the old dance-song "Cotton-Eyed Joe" tells of a man who "hoodooed" a woman.

 

A professional consultant who practices hoodoo on behalf of clients may be referred to as a "hoodoo doctor" or "hoodoo man" if male and a "hoodoo woman" or "hoodoo lady" if female. A typical early reference occurs in Samuel C. Taylor's diary for 1891, in which he describes and illustrates meeting with a "Hoodoo Doctor" while on a train. Taylor, a white man, recounts that the word "hoodoo" was taught to him by the black Pullman porter on the train. The "doctor" he describes was both an herbalist and folk-magician.

A remarkable blues song in which the word hoodoo is used as a noun, as an adjective, AND as a verb is "Hoodoo Lady Blues" by Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup, recorded in October 1947 for Victor Records. (The transcription is by Gorgen Antonsson, antonsson.se@mbox304.swipnet.se, and Alan Balfour, abalfour@dial.pipex.com):

"HOODOO LADY BLUES"

Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup

Believe I'll drop down in Louisiana, just to see a dear old friend of mine

Believe I'll drop down in Louisiana, just to see a dear old friend of mine

You know, maybe she can help me, durn my hard, hard time.

You know they tell me in Louisiana, there's hoodoos all over there

You know they tell me in Louisiana, there's hoodoos all over there

You know they'll do anything for the money, man, in the world, I declare.

Spoken: Yeah, man, play it for me [followed by guitar solo]

"Now, Miss Hoodoo Lady, please give me a hoodoo hand;

"Now, Miss Hoodoo Lady, please give me a hoodoo hand;

"I wanna hoodoo this woman of mine, I believe she's got another man."

Now, she squabbles all night long, she won't let me sleep.

Lord, I wonder what in the world this woman done done to me.

"Now, Miss Hoodoo Lady, please give me a hoodoo hand;

"Now, Miss Hoodoo Lady, please give me a hoodoo hand;

"I wanna hoodoo this woman of mine, I believe she's got another man."

Unlike the word "conjure," the origin of the word "hoodoo" is not known with certainty. It has for the most part been assumed to be African, and some have claimed that it derives from a word in the Hausa language for bad luck. However, its earliest usage in America is connected with Irish and Scottish sailors, not African slaves. in the mid 19th century, ships that had suffered a series of ill-fated voyages and mishaps were called hoodoo ships or were said to have been hoodoo'd. In some accounts the problems onboard these vessels were attributed to an evil spirit or presence.

Those who attribute the word hoodoo to Irish or Scottish seamen say that is is a phonetic transliteration of the Gaelic words Uath Dubh (pronounced hooh dooh), which means dark phantom, evil entity, or spiky ghost. (It is "spiky" because Uath -- hooh -- is, additionally, the Gaelic name for the spiky Hawthorn or May tree.) A Gaelic origin for the word hoodoo would also explain why a certain type of eerie geological rock formation across the Americas is similarly called a hoodoo -- Irish trappers and traders saw these weird objects as personified demons.

A Gaelic origin for the word hoodoo does, believe it or not, make sense in terms of African American history, for a large percentage of American sailors during the 19th century, especially before the Civil War, were African Americans, and they mingled freely with Irish sailors in the Atlantic shipping trade and in seaports from New York to New Orleans.

In earlier times a "hoodoo ship" was a term applied to a "ghost ship," that is, one found drifting with no crew. From there it became a more general term meaning a cursed or bad-luck ship. T

In early 20th century agricultural supplies, "hoodoo powder" was a compound applied to tree stumps to cause them to decay more 'rapidly -- again a reference to ghosts -- in this case the ghosts of dead trees.

That's not how the word is used now, though. In contemporary Britain, hoodoo usually refers to a sports-jinx ("Tottenham Hotspurs banish Manchester United hoodoo"). In the African American community, the word hoodoo has, for the past 100 years at least, referred to a whole set of magical practices, of which curses and bad luck are only a small part.

Eoghan Ballard has made an interesting argument that the word hoodoo derives from the Spanish word for "Jewish." Although this sounds unlikely on the face of it, there is some precedent for the idea: Among Cuban practitioners of Central African Mkisi-worship -- which is called Palo ("Sticks") in Spanish, due to its use of woods, roots, and herbs -- there are two major groups, those who practice Palo Cristiano (Christian Palo) and those who practice Palo Judio (Jewish Palo). In this context, the word Judio (pronounced hoo-dyoh) does not refer to Judaism per se; it refers to the fact that the adherents of this subset of Palo are unconverted to Christianity -- they retain African symbolism in their practice and, like the Jews, they have refused to give themselves over to Christianity. It is Eoghan's theory that the word hoodoo may derive from the special sense in which this Afro-Caribbean Spanish term Judio is used in Palo -- and would thus refer to African slaves who refused to renounce African customs and practices.

Some writers have said that the word "hoodoo" is a corruption of the word "Voodoo," but that seems highly unlikely. In the first place, Voodoo is a West African religion that was transplanted to Haiti (see below) and hoodoo is a system of primarily Central African magical belief and practice. Furthermore, the word "hoodoo" appears everywhere in the black community, but the word "Voodoo" co-exists with the word "hoodoo" primarily in the state of Louisiana (where it was brought by Haitian immigrants in the early 19th century) -- and even there the two terms refer to different things entirely. Finally, in other parts of the South, the word "Voodoo" is not encountered at all except in the writings of uninformed white people, and the terms "hoodoo," "rootwork," "conjure" and "witchcraft" are variously applied to the system of African-American folk-magic.

A long discussion of the regional distribution of these terms can be found in Harry Middleton Hyatt's "Hoodoo - Conjuration - Witchcraft - Rootwork," a 5-volume, 4,766-page collection of material (consisting of 13,458 separate magic spells and folkloric beliefs) gathered by Hyatt from 1,600 informants in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia between 1936 and 1940. It is worth noting that in all the interviews Hyatt recorded, rootwork practitioners, even in New Orleans, spoke only of hoodoo, never of Voodoo. In fact, the only conspicuous use of the word Voodoo occurs in a typed letter sent to Hyatt by an educated black hoodoo doctor who encouraged him to make an appointment to interview him. This root worker was fully aware that he was writing to a white man and it is quite clear from the context of the letter that he was tailoring his speech to fit what he believed to be the white folklorist's preconceptions.

 Ferdinand Jelly Roll Morton calls it Hoodoo not Voodoo

"Some ... some say voodoo. But we ...

it's known in New Orleans as hoodoo."

-- Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton, 1938.

This oddity of locution -- black people calling their magical practice hoodoo and white people calling it Voodoo, as if by doing so they could convince black folks that rootwork is a West African or Haitian religion -- is clearly noted in Zora Neale Hurston's important book on the subject, "Mules and Men," published in 1935.

Hurston was an African American folklorist with a fine ear for dialect who also wrote a book on Haitian Voodoo ("Tell My Horse"), so she spoke with authority when she referred to her subject as "Hoodoo, or Voodoo, as it is pronounced by the whites."

Hurston indicated with one sly double-bodied verb that it is both a white error of dialect to "pronounce" the word hoodoo as Voodoo, and it is also a white error of academic authority to "pronounce" the practice of hoodoo to BE Voodoo.

Now, it could be argued that Hurston was from Florida and that she preferred the word hoodoo to Voodoo, even though the latter was the more common term in New Orleans -- but such an idea can definitely be countered by referring to an interview that Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton, an African American Creole native of New Orleans (and a famous jazz musician in his own right) gave to the folklorist and musicologist Alan Lomax of the Library of Congress in 1938.

Morton, who was quite conscious of the recording of the interview and its historical importance, went out of his way to explain many local idioms and turns of speech to Lomax, who was a white man basically ignorant of such matters. When Morton began describing to Lomax why a multiple murderer in New Orleans was never prosecuted, he interrupted the flow of his own words to explain his terminology to Lomax. He said:

"I guess the reason why he got out of trouble so much, it was often known that Madame Papaloos was the lady that ... always backed him when he got in trouble. I don't mean with funds, or anything like that. Money wasn't really in it. As I understand, she was a hoodoo woman. Some ... some say voodoo. But we ... it's known in New Orleans as hoodoo."

Reading between the lines in Morton's polite and erudite speech pattern, it is easy to recognize that the "some ... some" are white people -- but he did not wish to offend Lomax by naming them as such -- and that the "we" are the black Creoles of New Orleans. (A lengthy extract from the interview is at the Southern Spirits web page titled "'Jelly Roll' Morton on Hoodoo in New Orleans."

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My experience parallels that of Hyatt, Hurston, and Morton, for i too have found that in most cases where the words "hoodoo" and "Voodoo" appear to be used interchangeably, further research discloses that a rural black speaker used the word "hoodoo" and a white or urban black author, editor, or indexer either mistranscribed the word as "Voodoo" or erroneously "explained" the speaker's meaning by claiming that hoodoo actually is Voodoo. Examples of this error are too numerous to mention; they can be found everywhere in printed folklore studies and on the world wide web. For example: the book "Voodoo and Hoodoo" by Jim Haskins is not about Voodoo; it is about hoodoo -- and Haskins, who is black, knows it, too, and said so in the body of the text; but still he allowed his publisher to perpetuate the error in his title.

Furthermore, in collecting old African American songs about hoodoo, two things are quite apparent: First there are no recordings of songs by white Americans that mention hoodoo until long after the Second World War (and during this same time-period there are hundreds of recordings by black musicians from all around the country that name and / or describe hoodoo and its practices), and, second, none of those earlier songs by black nusicians refer to "Voodoo;" it is not until the post-War electric-urban rhythm and blues period that black singers took their cues from white record producers and began to call hoodoo Voodoo in recorded songs. For a clear example of this, see the lyrics transcriptions of two different recordings of "The Mojo Boogie" by J. B. Lenoir.

In African American communities along the Eastern seaboard, the word "witchcraft" is often used as a synonym for hoodoo. While the work described is more African than European in character, the terminology follows the old British sense of the word, wherein "witchcraft" is viewed as both a healing art and a harmful activity. However, whereas in mainstream English "witch" and "witchcraft" are purely nouns, in many black communities, "witchcraft" can be a verb when used in a negative context: Thus, a witch is said to "practice witchcraft" and his victim is said to have "been witchcrafted," rather than the mainstream English "been bewitched." Thus it would be proper to say, "She witchcrafted that old man until she just about run him crazy."

In some areas, people reserve the word "hoodoo" to refer to harmful magic and have another term, like "spiritual work," for beneficial magic, but in other regions, hoodoo is said to include everything from love spells to protection magic. Likewise, in the Carolinas, where the word "witchcraft" is more popular than the word "hoodoo," "witchcraft" generally means harmful (hoodoo) magic, and "helping yourself" means performing (hoodoo) spells that may increase your happiness, draw money, or enhance gambling luck.

"Conjure -- sometimes spelled "cunjure" to express old-fashioned dialect pronunciation -- is another regional term for hoodoo. It derives from the English "conjurer," but what is described is neither invocatory magic nor prestidigitation, which is what the words imply in standard English. In the African American community, a "conjurer," "conjure," "cunjure," or "cunjure doctor" is a hoodoo practitioner, and the work he does is "conjure," "cunjure," "conjure doctoring," "cunjure doctoring," "conjuration," or "cunjeration."

Generally speaking, "conjure" does not carry the negative or cursing connotation that "hoodoo" can -- and the old-fashioned figure of a "conjure man" or "conjure woman" is not quite as open to frightening associations as "hoodoo man" or "hoodoo woman."

The term "candle burning" as a generic descriptor for spell-casting of any kind became increasingly common in the wake of the 1942 publication of the popular instruction manual, "The Master Book of Candle Burning" by Henri Gamache, The phrase is taken from the book's title and it refers to the widesprad use of candle magic among those who frequent black occult shops in urban areas. These stores, which were once equally often known as "herb shops" or "drug stores," stock a wide variety of products, including medical herbs, minerals, and animal curios. Since the early 1940s, they have also been called "candle shops," and the form of spiritual work they propagate into the black community is now known to many as "candle burning." It should be noted, however, that "candle burning" does not refer exclusively to the lighting of candles for magical purposes; it is a generic term that encompasses the use of oils, powders, herbs, incense, and other preparations -- and thus, a person suspected of practicing magic of any kind aganst an enemy might be said to be "burning candles on her."

The word "trick" is not all that common among hoodoo practitioners, but is still used often enough to have generated subsidiary terms like "trick doctor," "trick bag," "laying down tricks," "tricking," and "tricky." A trick bag is a mojo bag. Being "tricky means "liable to use conjure when you least suspect it," and can be heard in context in the song "Hoodoo Lady" by Memphis Minnie (Lizzie Douglas): "You better watch her -- she's tricky!"

Other terms for a professional hoodoo practitioner are "root doctor," "root worker," "two-head(ed) doctor," "two-head(ed) woman," and "two-head(ed) man." The first two refer to rootwork -- the use of herbs for medical and magical purposes; the latter three are African survivals, referring to the worker's contact with spirits who reside in the cunjure doctor's head and may guide him or her.

Descriptive verbs for performing harmful hoodoo spell work include to "hurt," "jinx" "trick," "cross", "put that stuff (or thing or jinx) on [someone]," "throw for [someone]" (when powders are utilized), and "poison" (which can refer to contacted as well as ingested substances). Curative magic to counteract these operations may be called "uncrossing", "jinx-breaking," "turning the trick" (sending it back to the sender), "reversing the jinx" (sending it back), or "taking off those crossed conditions."

The ambiguous verb "fix" can refer to either harmful or benign magical operations or conjure work. Generally speaking, when "fix" is applied to an inanimate object -- as in "fixing up a mojo," or "he makes fixed candles," or "she fixed some baths for him" -- the intention is helpful and the word is synonymous with "prepare," "anoint," or "dress." But when the verb "fix" is applied to a person rather than an object -- "she fixed him," "she got him fixed," or "I'm going to use Boss Fix powder on my supervisor," -- the subtextual implication is that the intention is to either manipulate or harm the client's enemies. The only exception to this is in the phrase "she fixed her pussy," where the woman dresses or prepares her own genital organs in such a way that any man coming into contact will be magically captured. In this case the intention is helpful to the woman who fixes her pussy, but manipulative to the man who thus finds that "she hoodood his nature."

If the hoodoo practitioner or conjure worker is also a clairvoyant or a psychic reader he or she may also be known as a "gifted reader," a "fortune teller," or a "Black Gypsy. The reader may divine your future by means of playing cards or tarot cards, palmistry or hand reading, tea cup reading, bone reading, with a pendulum or a spirit board, or by direct second sight or prophesy. Not all readers will "work" for you or practice hoodoo, but most workers will "read for you." Those gifted readers who practice hoodoo folk magic for their clients within a Christian religious context, especially (but not exclusively) within the Spiritualist Church, are sometimes called "spiritual doctors," "spiritual workers," or "spiritual ladies," and are said to perform only "spiritual work," by which it is meant that they will pray for a client and "help" him (magically), but they will not lay tricks or put on jinxes to hurt a client's enemies.

WHAT HOODOO IS: An African-American Folk-Magic Tradition

Folk magic is a world-wide phenomenon. The beliefs and customs brought to America by African slaves mingled here with the beliefs, customs, and botanical knowledge of Native Americans and with the Christian, Jewish, and pagan folklore of European immigrants. The result was hoodoo.

The hoodoo tradition places emphasis on personal magical power and thus it lacks strong links to any specific form of theology and can be adapted to any one of several forms of outward religious worship. Although an individual practitioner may take on students, hoodoo, conjure, and rootwork are not obviously hierarchical systems. Teachings and rituals are handed down from a one practitioner to another, but there are no priests or priestesses and no division between initiates and laity.

Root doctors and gifted readers are widely sought after by clients. Whereas in the typical White Protestant Christian social model, especially in its more right-wing form, where magic-workers are shunned or relegated to the outskirts of the community, African-American conjures may be pillars of their community and well-respected members of their churches and fraternal orders. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many of the best workers became nationally known and people travelled hundreds of miles to consult with them. Among such well known root workers were Doctor Buzzard of Beaufort, South Carolina; Doctor Jim Jordan of Murfreesboro, North Carolina; Aunt Caroline Dye of Newport, Arkansas (shown here); and the Seven Sisters of New Orleans, the latter two both celebrated in rural blues songs.

Of all the pantheon of African deities, one, variously known as Nbumba Nzila, Ellegua, Legba, or Eshu in Africa, is clearly recognizable in hoodoo: he is the "dark man" or "black man" or "devil" one can meet at the crossroads -- a direct iteration of his role in African theology. As a trickster and opener of the way, he is vaguely similar to the Teutonic pagan devil, and like that deity, he is often confused by Christians and Jews with the Biblical Satan, but he is not that entity, and many wise hoodooists know well that he is not.

Like the folk magic of many other cultures, hoodoo attributes magical properties to herbs, roots, minerals (especially the lodestone), animal parts, and the personal possessions and bodily effluvia of people. The African origins of hoodoo, rootwork, and conjure can clearly be seen in such magical customs as jinxing, hot footing, foot track magic, crossing, and crossroads magic, in which are embedded remnants of the folkloric beliefs of the Congo, Yoruba, Fon, and Ewe people (whose religions in African and the diaspora are variously known as Palo Mayombe, Santeria, Lucumi, Ocha, Umbanda, Kimina, Candomble, Orisha-worship, Loa-worship, Nkisi-worship, etc., but who do not practice hoodoo per se.) A generic term for this class of folk-magical operation is tricking or laying down tricks.

Foot track magic ascribes magical essence to a person's footprint. In practice, the conjurer may, for instance, bury the lifted footprint dirt of his or her victim in a bottle spell with other items or lay a trick by sprinkling a mineral-based powder such as Goofer Dust, an herb-and mineral formula such as Hot Foot Powder, or a scented sachet powder across the victim's foot track, where it will be stepped upon. Walking over the buried bottle spell or contact between the powder and the victim's foot results in magical "poisoning," an "unnatural illness," or a run of bad luck.

Hot Foot Powder is the name for a mineral and herb powder mix used in a sub-set of foot track magic called hot footing, drive away, or get away work. The Hot Foot Powder is typically sprinkled around the doorway or threshold of an enemy and will cause him or her to leave home and wander the world. It may be laid across a path leading to a home or sprinkled in a place of business, but the classical application is at the enemy's door.

Crossing is a sub-set of foot track magic in which the person's path is "crossed" with a mark drawn in the dust or laid out with herbs or powders. The "hurt" enters the victim through the feet when he or she walks over the mark or trick. Typical crossing marks include wavy lines, crosses, and X's (the latter two usually drawn within circles). They are sometimes spit into or upon to activate them. Crossing may also include setting out crossed needles, pins, nails, or brooms to work a spell.

Because it is an important retention of Central African folk magic traditions, by extension, the word crossing has also come to be a near-synonym for jinxing, a form of curse in which the practitioner throws herbs, powders, or prepared waters or oils into an enemy's yard or performs a candle-burning curse. The "crossed" or "jinxed" victim is said to suffer unexplained bad luck, often for years on end.

Antidotes for foot track magic include finding and destroying the buried bottle spell; setting out salt to kill the roots; performing a ritual bath, sweeping, and floor washing to remove the powders; and the wearing of protective amulets, such as a silver dime, or nine Devil's Shoe String twigs, in the shoes or around the ankles.

Antidotes for crossing and jinxing are called uncrossing and jinx-breaking respectively, and they may entail candle-burning, retaliatory curses, and the wearing of amulets.

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Crossroads magic involves a set of beliefs about the acquisition of power and the disposition of magical items at a crossroads or place where two roads intersect. African-American crossroads magic is similar to European folk-magic involving crossroads, but arose independently (and probably earlier) in Africa, and reflects African religious beliefs.

Hoodoo -- especially in the form called "rootwork" -- makes use of Native American botanical folklore, but usually for magical rather than medical purposes. American plant species like the John the Conqueror Root (Ipomoea jalapa) shown here have taken on great significance in hoodoo --- a significance that precisely parallels their usage among Native herb doctors.

The influence that Natives had on rootwork is openly acknowledged, for the concept of the "powerful Indian" or "Indian Spirit" is endemic in conjure and crops up again and again in the names given to hoodoo herbal formulas and magical curios. Many of the most famous rootwork practitioners of the 19th and 20th centuries came from mixed-race families and proudly spoke of learning about herbs from an "Indian Grandma." More information about the Native American sources of hoodoo herbal and zoological curios can be found in my book "Hoodoo Herb and Root Magic."

Hoodoo also freely incorporates European botanical folklore -- e.g. the notion that carrying a buckeye nut will cure rheumatism, which is German and Dutch in origin. Furthermore, since at least the early 20th century, most hoodoo and conjure practitioners have familiarized themselves with European-derived books of magic and Kabbalism such as the "Albertus Magnus Egyptian Secrets" compilation, "Pow-Wows or The Long-Lost Friend," "Secrets of the Psalms," "The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses," and so forth.

The use of Moon phases in spell-casting, astrological signs of the Zodiac in magical symbolism, and Planetary days of the week for timing of magic spells and recitation of Psalms, and Prayers -- derived from Jewish and Christian magical sources -- are all to be found in conjure, and moreso among practitioners who are urban or who have had access to books on those subjects.

However, although many African-American root doctors work with information about herbs and astrological magic derived from Mediaeval and modern European folklore, the typical hoodoo practitioner or conjure doctor does not place as much emphasis on European systems of word-magic (gematria), number-magic (numerology), or astronomical magic (astrology) as European-American practitioners do. also, while maintaining an altar for candles and incense are almost invariably part of any hoodoo doctor's or conjure practitioner's set-up, hoodoo conjurations themselves require none of the typical neo-pagan accoutrements such as knives (athames), cauldrons, chalices, or wands.

When it comes to divination systems, a few urban hoodoo and conjure readers use astrology and some read tea-leaves, palms, or cards -- but they are as likely to use a deck of 52 playing cards as a tarot set -- and they may call what they do "Gypsy fortune telling," a term that came into wide use in the black community around World War Two. The oldest form of hoodoo divination, "casting the bones" or "reading the bones," is a direct survival of a West African system of divination with bones. The American version, rarely encountered in urban conjure or hoodoo practice today, uses a variety of chicken bones or possum bones and maintains much the same form it had in Africa. Another type of divination, in which a specially prepared mojo hand called a Jack-ball serves as a pendulum, is mainly consulted to determine whether one will have luck in gambling at a given time.

Divination from dreams is an important part of hoodoo, too. Practitioners consult "dream books," alphabetical listings in which each dream image is accompanied by a short interpretation and a set of lucky numbers to use in gambling. In former times, the most popular numbers game in the African American community was an illegal lottery called Policy, and some of the older dream books, such as the perennially popular "Aunt Sally's Policy Players Dream Book" still carry that name in their title, although now they are used by folks who play state lotteries. Also still popular are the many dream books by Professor Uriah Konje and Professor de Herbert (two pseudonyms of Herbert Gladstone Parris). The popularity of dream divination in the African-American community is testified to by the fact that in 1942, one major supplier, King Novelty Co., sold no less than 16 different competing dream books. Almost as many are still available today.

Probably the one thing that most distinguishes hoodoo from other systems of folk magic is the centrality of the mojo bag or mojo hand, also called a conjure bag. This item, also known as a conjure hand, toby, trick bag, jomo, or nation sack, frequently takes the form of a flannel bag filled with roots, herbs, minerals, and other "curios." The mojo bag is usually carried on the person, but it can also be hidden in the bedroom or at a place of business, or placed behind a doorway. There is a taboo against anyone who is not the owner touching it.

While numerous other cultures also utilize personal magical bags -- the so-called "fetish" bags of Native Americans and the red woolen bags used by "witches" in Tuscany -- the mojo hand is essentially African; its closest cultural relatives are the Afro-Caribbean wanga or oanga bag used in Obeah magic and the pacquet used in Voodoo. Variant forms of hand include the luck ball, wound of yarn or string around a hidden object; the black hen's egg, which is blown out and then refilled with magical powders; and the Jack ball mentioned above, a luck-ball-cum-pendulum consulted in divination.