“Voodoo Hoodoo” is the unique variety of Creole Voodoo found in New Orleans. The Voodoo Hoodoo Spellbook is a rich compendium of more than 300 authentic Voodoo and Hoodoo recipes, rituals, and spells for love, justice, gambling luck, prosperity, health, and success. Cultural psychologist and root worker Denise Alvarado, who grew up in New Orleans, draws from a lifetime of recipes and spells learned from family, friends, and local practitioners. She traces the history of the African-based folk magic brought by slaves to New Orleans, and shows how it evolved over time to include influences from Native American spirituality, Catholicism, and Pentecostalism. She shares her research into folklore collections and 19th- and 20th- century formularies along with her own magical arts. The Voodoo Hoodoo Spellbook includes more than 100 spells for Banishing, Binding, Fertility, Luck, Protection, Money, and more. Alvarado introduces readers to the Pantheon of Voodoo Spirits, the Seven African Powers, important Loas, Prayers, Novenas, and Psalms, and much, much more, including:Oils and Potions: Attraction Love Oil, Dream Potion, Gambler’s Luck Oil, Blessing OilHoodoo Powders and Gris Gris: Algier’s Fast Luck Powder, Controlling Powder, Money Drawing PowderTalismans and Candle MagicCurses and Hexes

Reveals the stories and secrets of hoodoo doctors, voodoo women, and conjurers who serve the adherents of voodoo and hoodoo through North America

From the earliest slave narratives to modern fiction by the likes of Colson Whitehead and Jesmyn Ward, African American authors have drawn on African spiritual practices as literary inspiration, and as a way to maintain a connection to Africa. This volume has collected new essays about the multiple ways African American authors have incorporated Voodoo, Hoodoo and Conjure in their work. Among the authors covered are Frederick Douglass, Shirley Graham, Jewell Parker Rhodes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ntozake Shange, Rudolph Fisher, Jean Toomer, and Ishmael Reed.

Hoodoo, voodoo, and conjure are part of a mysterious world of African American spirituality that has long captured the popular imagination. These magical beliefs and practices have figured in literary works by such authors as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Ishmael Reed, and they have been central to numerous films, such as The Skeleton Key. Written for students and general readers, this book is a convenient introduction to hoodoo, voodoo, and conjure. The volume begins by defining and classifying elements of these spiritual traditions. It then provides a wide range of examples and texts, which illustrate the richness of these beliefs and practices. It also examines the scholarly response to hoodoo, voodoo, and conjure, and it explores the presence of hoodoo, voodoo, and conjure in popular culture. The volume closes with a glossary and bibliography. Students in social studies classes will use this book to learn more about African American magical beliefs, while literature students will enjoy its exploration of primary sources and literary works.

Poetry. Afro-Caribbean Studies. "D.S. Marriott 'dares to dream' in this book...by refolding beautiful romantic lines...into new relation with the real that haunts him, which he attends through mourning and recasts in an art full of loss. These poems do indeed seem to 'contain the whole of death, even before / life has begun', but they engage no refusal, just the overturning of willful stasis and a lyric luring of the undone into poetic doing, to light. HOODOO VOODOO's last section's dark streaming of figures through landscapes...is presided over by 'Ghede', or Guede, after all--best known as the loa of death in Vodou, 'Papa Bones', but also a figure of fertility, of the crossroads between life and afterlife: a trickster, a door, a manipulable sign (as well as a protector of children). Marriott's deployment of such mythological materials and even 'hoodoo' itself in his theatre of 'real ghosts', fears and emergent desires enacts his forging of new relations with the past and his many interlocutors in this book, as well as his Rilkean 'refusal to refuse', a seeming double negative that opens a new way through the many locked doors and crossroads his speakers encounter in these poems. I'm overwhelmed by the beauty that is this book"--Romana Huk.

"New Orleans has long been America's most magical city, inhabited by a fascinating visible and invisible world, full of mysteries, known for its decadence and haunted by its spirits. If Salem is famous for its persecution of witches, New Orleans is celebrated for its embrace of the magical, mystical, and paranormal. New Orleans is the historical stronghold of traditional African religions, spirituality, and voudou in the US. There is a mysterious spiritual underbelly hiding in plain sight in New Orleans, and this book shows us where it is, who the characters are, where they come from, and how they persist and manifest today"--