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

There's a largely empty outlet mall near my house. Some of the spaces are rented out by non-shops -- for example there is a theatre company in one space, and for a while there was an estate sale business taking one of the units. Last time I visited, there was an art gallery in one of the units. It seemed to be locked up (maybe only open by appointment?) but in the windows were a series of Lukumi rattles. The paper in the window indicated they are by Tintawi Kaigziabiher .

  Once was a time when I was known for my Hoodoo Review blog, where I reviewed products from various occult shops and botanicas. Eventually I got rid of the blog because I was experiencing too much trouble with inconsistency in products -- that is to say, an item I had loved the first time I bought might not be made the same way when I ordered from the same manufacturer a year later. Sometimes this was due to certain occult shops or practitioners not following a set "recipe" and instead making the formulas however they felt like making them on that occasion. Other times the problem would be a decline in quality (especially from larger makers) as the search for cheapness and easiness overrode the tradition or effectiveness of older more expensive formulas. One example was the Ar-Jax brand of incense, which originally had some herbal matter in the mixture, but over time came to be made with the same plain, colored incense mixture that everything sold by Wisdom Products uses. In...

The Princess and the Frog is one of those films along with Corpse Bride and Doom Generation that everyone seems to think I ought to like and yet I really despise. The very nonsensical depiction of Voodoo was the least of its problems. Nevertheless, I love 2-D animation and recently stumbled on the blog of animator Andreas Deja, who worked on that film among many others.  On his blog he reveals that the character of Mama Odie is secretly a 2-D animator as well.  Let's hope she's better at it than she is at problem solving (seriously, why didn't she just tell them to get married -- by her --to break the curse, they could always get divorced later?) 

  Well, you live in New Mexico long enough, eventually you will see La Llorona .  Short version of the legend: she's a ghost or a zombie or something in that unnatural vein, a weeping woman. Her reason for weeping is that she murdered her children -- traditionally said by drowning them in a river, and so she is frequently sighted around rivers.  October 31st, 2021, I saw her! In broad daylight. Maybe it was just a crying lady by the river, but strictly that's all her name means. Here it goes: I was out for a walk downtown in Santa Fe, going along the river. It was around one in the afternoon. In the area up near Canyon Road I was walking on a dirt trail directly beside the river, down in the ditch. (The Santa Fe River never has much water in it, it's more like a ditch with a little trickle going through.) As I am walking, I start to hear the sound of a woman sobbing and wailing very very loudly.  I think this can be one of two things: someone pulling a Halloween pran...

 

  This simple spell to keep away the police comes from Zora Neale Hurston's collection of 1920s magic spells.  You need: 3 large John the Conqueror roots Talk to the roots and tell them you need them to keep away the police and the law. Then bury them at your gate or whatever entry would be used to access your property. 

This post was inspired by someone in a historical art group on Facebook asking, "Are there no black artists who worked in these years [1850-1950]?"  The answer to that is, there weren't many working in Fine Art due to reasons I presume I don't have to explain; nevertheless there were a few who made it. And they're often overlooked due to their artwork looking just the same as anything else from the time. Indeed, there's an assumption nowadays that a black artist must be making work about the experience of being black. Surely , you might think, he'd paint black subjects, or his art would look African-inspired! This was not the expectation of art in the 19th century, nor would it have likely been popular under the circumstances of the time. A person painting African-inspired art would have been denigrated to the level of "folk artist" and any attempts infiltrate the Fine Art world with such pieces would have been ridiculed, at best, as evidence of...