Folk medicine is practiced by a great number of persons. On the "jobs," that is, in the sawmill camps, the turpentine stills, mining camps and among the lowly generally, doctors are not generally called to prescribe for illnesses, certainly, nor for the social diseases. Nearly all of the conjure doctors practice "roots," but some of the root doctors are not hoodoo doctors. One of these latter at Bogaloosa, Louisiana, and one at Bartow, Florida, enjoy a huge patronage. They make medicine only, and white and colored swarm about them claiming cures. ~ Zora Neale Hurston
Charm-Making
Cleansings
Crossing and Uncrossing
Crossroads Science
Divination
Floor Washes
Foot Track Magic
Goophering and Goofer Dust
Graveyard Work
Love and Relationships
Luck and Fortune
Mojo Bags, Tobies and Nature Sacks
Money and Prosperity
Protection and Defense
Spiritual Baths
Cleansings
Crossing and Uncrossing
Crossroads Science
Divination
Floor Washes
Foot Track Magic
Goophering and Goofer Dust
Graveyard Work
Love and Relationships
Luck and Fortune
Mojo Bags, Tobies and Nature Sacks
Money and Prosperity
Protection and Defense
Spiritual Baths
Hoodoo Cache
The discovery of a deliberate deposit including coins, buttons, beads, doll parts, and a bottle filled with soil under a brick floor in Annapolis, Maryland, is changing the way archaeologists think about early African-American beliefs in the Chesapeake. Identified during a salvage excavation of the eighteenth-century Brice House, the artifacts lay beneath the kitchen and laundry room floor of the slave and servant quarters.
Jessica Neuwirth, archaeologist with the Historic Annapolis Foundation, says she had hoped to find ritual objects of slaves similar to those that have emerged beneath the flooring at other local sites (see ARCHAEOLOGY, November/December 1996). It soon became clear that secreted here were not the eighteenth-century root bundles—religious symbols taken unaltered from African spiritual practice—that had turned up at similar sites. Instead, the Brice House assemblage dates to the nineteenth century, featuring coins and buttons dating to the Civil War and later. This points to the adoption of Hoodoo, a religion that fused African and American influences. Scholars had previously argued that African culture could not persist into the late nineteenth century in a region like the Chesapeake, where contact between black and white communities was constant and black population density was not as high as further south.
As archaeologists continued to dig, it became apparent that the artifacts were arranged in the shape of a cosmogram, a sacred African form comprising a circle inscribed with a cross. Other finds were clustered around the doorway and fireplaces. “Objects mark entrances, exits, chimneys—places spirits come and go,” Neuwirth says. “They are a crossroads between this world and the other world; a temporary altar. If you're a fan of the blues, then you know about going down to the crossroads.”
Source:
Hoodoo Cache. By: Himelfarb, Elizabeth J., Archaeology, 00038113, May/Jun2000, Vol. 53, Issue 3
Jessica Neuwirth, archaeologist with the Historic Annapolis Foundation, says she had hoped to find ritual objects of slaves similar to those that have emerged beneath the flooring at other local sites (see ARCHAEOLOGY, November/December 1996). It soon became clear that secreted here were not the eighteenth-century root bundles—religious symbols taken unaltered from African spiritual practice—that had turned up at similar sites. Instead, the Brice House assemblage dates to the nineteenth century, featuring coins and buttons dating to the Civil War and later. This points to the adoption of Hoodoo, a religion that fused African and American influences. Scholars had previously argued that African culture could not persist into the late nineteenth century in a region like the Chesapeake, where contact between black and white communities was constant and black population density was not as high as further south.
As archaeologists continued to dig, it became apparent that the artifacts were arranged in the shape of a cosmogram, a sacred African form comprising a circle inscribed with a cross. Other finds were clustered around the doorway and fireplaces. “Objects mark entrances, exits, chimneys—places spirits come and go,” Neuwirth says. “They are a crossroads between this world and the other world; a temporary altar. If you're a fan of the blues, then you know about going down to the crossroads.”
Source:
Hoodoo Cache. By: Himelfarb, Elizabeth J., Archaeology, 00038113, May/Jun2000, Vol. 53, Issue 3