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

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...