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

  The tales of La Llorona are as varied as the rivers she's said to haunt. From the somber lament of a spurned lover to the chilling image of a vengeful hag, each retelling adds a new layer of intrigue to her spectral existence. Yet, amidst the cacophony of narratives, one thing remains certain: her presence transcends the boundaries of mere folklore. It is usually said that the wicked ghost La Llorona (Spanish: "the weeper") was a beautiful woman who married an unfaithful man, bore him two children, and then out of spite or despair she drowned the children in " the river" (it is always whatever river is nearest.) She then either died herself, or sometimes simply became an immortal roamer like the Wandering Jew, and now her ghost haunts waterways, weeping loudly, looking for children who will replace her own. Admittedly, I have only ever heard this version of the story in books. My grandmother when I was little told me that La Llorona was "a crazy woman, w...

  What does a catchy, if obscure, 19th-century minstrel tune have in common with a rousing Irish sea shanty? More than you might think, and it all centers around the intriguing evolution of a single word: jamboree. My adventure into the etymology of "jamboree" began as many such quests do: pinpointing its earliest use. This trek through linguistic history led me to an 1854 song titled Whoop! Jam-Bo-Ree , penned by none other than Dan Emmett, the same composer behind the iconic Dixie . This piece, originating from the blackface minstrel shows of the era, portrays a narrative involving a black man aboard a riverboat—though the specifics of his role, whether as a worker or a low-ranking passenger, remain somewhat ambiguous. (The mock-dialect certainly obscures the meaning of certain lines.)  Whoop! Jam-Bo-Ree is characterized by its playful, albeit somewhat nonsensical use of the term "jamboree" in the chorus. The song, like many minstrel numbers, was crafted to enter...

THE DEAD WOMAN'S PHOTOGRAPH Virgil Hoyt is a photographer’s assistant up at St. Paul, and a man of a good deal of taste. He has been in search of the picturesque all over the West, and hundreds of miles to the north in Canada, and can speak three or four Indian dialects, and put a canoe through the rapids. That is to say, he is a man of an adventurous sort and no dreamer. He can fight well and shoot well and swim well enough to put up a winning race with the Indian boys, and he can sit all day in the saddle and not dream about it at night. Wherever he goes he uses his camera. “The world,” Hoyt is in the habit of saying to those who sit with him when he smokes his pipe, “was created in six days to be photographed. Man--and especially woman--was made for the same purpose. Clouds are not made to give moisture, nor trees to cast shade. They were created for the photographer.” In short, Virgil Hoyt’s view of the world is whimsical, and he doesn’t like to be bothered with anything disagr...