The Spellcaster's Source Hoodoo and Voodoo Witchcraft Blog of Talia Felix

Sugar spells are everywhere these days. People know you can “sweeten someone up,” and if you poke around online for five minutes, you’ll find love spells that ask you to write a name on a paper and put it in a jar with sugar, honey, syrup, or a piece of candy. It’s not just popular — it’s practically its own genre. But the real history of sugar in hoodoo is a little deeper, and as always, a little weirder. Traditionally, sugar was used to sweeten someone toward you — whether for love, kindness, better treatment, or even to grease a boss’s attitude at work. You’ll find older spells that use sugar to make a judge lenient or to keep someone from being angry. What’s rarely mentioned outside the tradition is that the type of sugar used could be significant. Yes, really. In older hoodoo practice, sweeteners were sometimes matched to the race or skin tone of the person being targeted. Molasses - thick and dark, was typically used if the person was Black. White sugar - for a white person. Hon...

There’s a certain point in nearly every magical worker’s life where they brush up against the conspiracy crowd. Sometimes it’s harmless — a weird neighbor who asks whether mercury retrograde is real or just a NASA cover-up. But sometimes it isn’t harmless. Sometimes it’s your friend of ten years, who used to burn candles for clients and make decent oils, suddenly insisting that the Federal Reserve is a front for reptilian soul harvesters and that he won’t use peppermint anymore because it’s “coded” by shadowy authoritarian forces who want to end ESP. It’s not just fringe weirdos, either. You can be reading a totally respectable book about herb magic and hit a sentence like: “This formula predates Big Pharma and therefore cannot be patented.” That’s fine, until the next paragraph explains that the AMA was founded to suppress ancient Egyptian energy frequencies. And it gets printed because — let’s face it — most of the magical community doesn’t vet sources like academics or scientists do...

  Wall to wall carpeting only became common in houses during the 20th century, when the technology to make it cheaply and also the technology to clean it relatively easily (vacuums) made it much more practical than it had been in former times. In the old days, you had to uproot the entire carpet and take it outside to be beaten or scrubbed, while the wood floors underneath were swept and washed. Routine cleaning of a carpet would have usually been done by servants while the family was away on vacation. Nowadays a lot of people have carpets, and in many cases they're seen as a cheaper type of flooring than bare wood or tile. However, when dealing with traditional magic spells and hoodoo rituals, this can become a bit of a special encumbrance: instructions for floor sweeps, floor washes, and the use of colored sachet powders becomes an issue on a carpeted floor, whilst it is not an issue on a wood or tile floor.  Most traditional hoodoo cleaning and drawing rituals were made for...

  Blindboy Boatclub is an Irish artist and author, who has a weekly podcast on which he talks about pretty much whatever he thinks is interesting. Sometimes the topic is Irish folklore.  On a recent edition of the Blindboy Podcast , he recounted an eerie experience of being out for a walk and hearing a disturbing, shrill scream that he initially took for a child being tortured. He followed the noise and eventually found he had come into contact with a Banshee, or as he later figured out after doing additional research, a female fox with a cough. (No spoiler there, that's the actual title of the episode: "I Thought I Heard the Banshee But It Was a Fox With a Cough.") What struck me most about this story wasn’t the twist ending, amusing as it was, but the folkloric richness Blindboy unpacked along the way. As he explained the origins and traditions surrounding the banshee, I was reminded of my own encounter with another famous weeping woman of folklore: La Llorona. While t...

This is a particularly useful spell when some unpleasant memory is haunting your sleep.  You need: Peace oil White candle (preferably a small chime candle or a tealight) soap and cleaning products -- you can use special spiritual cleaning products like Chinese Wash and Florida Water Soap for some extra oomph if you have them, but regular cleaning products will suffice. The morning after you wake from a dream you wish to never repeat, immediately strip the bedding and open the bedroom windows to air out the room. If you store any items under your bed, remove them to a new location at least for a few days. As soon as you have time, sweep or vacuum the bedroom with special attention to under the bed, and follow the instructions for Spiritual Cleansing of Bedding.   The next night, dress the white candle with the Peace oil, and shower or bathe with the candle burning nearby. Dab your forehead, wrists and the soles of your feet with more of the Peace oil af...

Dust Devils! Whirlwinds! Vortexes! These natural phenomena are considered powerful magic by hoodoo tradition. A minor whirlwind is created when local winds start to spin on the ground. This causes a funnel to form. The funnel moves over the ground, pushed by the winds that first formed it. The funnel picks up materials such as dust as it moves over the ground, thus becoming visible. Terms for such minor whirlwinds are usually a "devil" (dust devil, water devil, fire devil, etc.). They've been called by this name since the 19th century. Whether from the association from the name, or whether the name came because of an already established folklore, the connection is nevertheless that these phenomena are the product of a supernatural being. Consequently, the dirt that's been sucked up in one of these powerful vortexes is believed to have a special power. Acquiring some of the dust is a feat for a practitioner, but not impossible -- it requires seeing one on advance and p...

In the British Museum, there is a fascinating object -- a magical offering bowl dating back to dark ages. These kinds of bowls are often referred to as “incantation bowls” or “magic bowls,” and they were especially prevalent in regions like Mesopotamia, Persia, and parts of the Levant. Their use was surprisingly widespread, with similar artifacts turning up in ancient Egypt, as well as across North Africa and the Middle East. This suggests that such bowls may have once been a common medium for magical working and spirit communication throughout these regions. They were typically buried under thresholds, in homes, or near the foundations of buildings as a form of protective magic, intended to ward off evil forces and hostile spiritual influences. The particular bowl in the British Museum is inscribed in Aramaic, a language that was once the lingua franca of the Near East and remains a subject of fascination for scholars due to its connection to various ancient religious traditions. The ...