Hoodoo is an African-American ATR (African Traditional Religion) that arose from the plantation economy that stole African peoples and forced them into labor camps on plantation farms.
A two part synchronization occurred that created the foundations of Hoodoo.
The first was between various African traditions that came with those enslaved. Southern plantation owners over time learned that they could not have too many people from the same nation or tribe together as the ability to resist in one way or another was stronger. Shared language along with practices made it difficult to force people to buy into the rhetoric that their subjugation was “natural” and “willed by God.”
Whose God? Who were they talkin to?
To deter this enslavers intentionally “mixed” different groups together. This facilitated a co-mingling of shared practices that allowed for the maintenance in various ways of West African spiritual practices.
At the same time the enslaver also forced upon those enslaved the Master’s religion. And in the Deep South it was Protestantism. So to hide their practices a second synchronization occurred where African Americans hid their practices behind the Christian God and his Bible.
Hence Hoodoo is born.
What is Hoodoo? It is a land and spirit based practice for African Americans that involves ancestral veneration, connection to the land and other forms of life, herbal medicine, water immersion, spirit possession, divination, belief in spiritual malady, and counterclockwise sacred dance circling.
And since the time of enslavement there has always been resistance by those under its subjugation, and one main mechanism deployed was Hoodoo.
NOTE: Local Native American practices and folk medicine from different European groups also influenced African-American Hoodoo. But the roots of Hoodoo are from those of African descent. AND there are other forms of rootwork, conjure, and folk magic that are NOT Hoodoo.
From the maroons who fled and created third spaces, working with the land/swamps/herbs/caves, to the fugitives who took their freedom and worked with the stars/sea/land to navigate and take what they needed, to those who were on the plantations and used herbs/food/refusal as much as they could to harm those who were harming them - Hoodoo has been (and is) a practice of Black humanity.
A reminder that we are connected to more than just what we are told and can see, cause it is the calling down of ancestors that reminds us there was a time before the colonial. A time long before the present, that we can draw upon to help us see our reality for what it is and conjure new futures for those coming after us.
Hoodoo is about memory and remembering where we come from, so we can know who we are.
This is one reason why Christianity calls the ancestors, and therefore veneration of them, demonic. To remember times and practices before the Christian white patriarch took over means the religion fed to those on the plantation and after is not only false, it is a lie.
Cause guess what, we as a people are still here. Haunting the space and places that tried to steal our life, our breathe, our freedom.
And the ancestors are here, ready and armed to help in the ongoing struggle of freedom making and taking.
Because your oppressor will NEVER free you. They NEVER have - we freed ourselves. Our ancestors in one way or another took their freedom, took their humanity. And they are asking us to do the same, by LEARNING from them (including their mistakes).
So what happens if we re-examine this history from the perspective of those who ACTUALLY were the freedom fighters and resistors? What can learn about what sustained action looks like, even under the harshest of environments?
Please listen to my Podcast “Abolitionist Dreamscapes” for more on ancestors, abolition, and the practices that sustained/sustain us. (Also on YouTube and Apple Podcast).
