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

We exist in an unprecedented era. There is now internet , a creation which allows text and images to be instantly transferred from person to person. People can have jobs and never ever see their employer or go to an office -- they might not even live in the same state or the same country as the person they work for! This has an impact on traditional magic spells. Most of your classic old time hoodoo "get a job" or "get business" spells assume you will be interacting directly with the boss or with customers. Some traditional operations of this type include: To have a successful job interview, wash your face with sugar before going to interview. To get a job, sprinkle some salt on the person interviewing you and on the floor of the business. To get customers, wash the floor of the shop with a mixture of your urine, sugar and bluing. For a successful job application, dress your resume with powder such as Steady Work or Van Van . For business success, sprinkle magneti...

Many sources online say the oldest pumpkin pie recipe is from the 1670s, but that's because they're specifically seeking American recipes. This 1650s recipe is from a cookbook by "Monsieur Marnette" called  The perfect cook: being the most exact directions for the making all kinds of pastes, with the perfect way teaching how to raise, season, and make all sorts of pies, pasties, tarts, and florentines, &c. now practised by the most famous and expert cooks, both French and English. If you like historical cookery the whole text is worth looking at here, at Early English Books Online.  To make a Tart of the mellow of Pumpkins, Gourds, or of Melons.  Take the mellow of a Pumpkin, or of a Gourd, or Melon, cut it into peeces as small as a Nut, let them be half boyled in the same water which they will yeeld, over a gen∣tle fire, and have a care sometimes to turn and stirre them that they may not burn, or stick to the pot. And that you may have the less trouble with them,...

Sugar spells are everywhere these days. People know you can “sweeten someone up,” and if you poke around online for five minutes, you’ll find love spells that ask you to write a name on a paper and put it in a jar with sugar, honey, syrup, or a piece of candy. It’s not just popular — it’s practically its own genre. But the real history of sugar in hoodoo is a little deeper, and as always, a little weirder. Traditionally, sugar was used to sweeten someone toward you — whether for love, kindness, better treatment, or even to grease a boss’s attitude at work. You’ll find older spells that use sugar to make a judge lenient or to keep someone from being angry. What’s rarely mentioned outside the tradition is that the type of sugar used could be significant. Yes, really. In older hoodoo practice, sweeteners were sometimes matched to the race or skin tone of the person being targeted. Molasses - thick and dark, was typically used if the person was Black. White sugar - for a white person. Hon...

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...

  Blindboy Boatclub is an Irish artist and author, who has a weekly podcast on which he talks about pretty much whatever he thinks is interesting. Sometimes the topic is Irish folklore.  On a recent edition of the Blindboy Podcast , he recounted an eerie experience of being out for a walk and hearing a disturbing, shrill scream that he initially took for a child being tortured. He followed the noise and eventually found he had come into contact with a Banshee, or as he later figured out after doing additional research, a female fox with a cough. (No spoiler there, that's the actual title of the episode: "I Thought I Heard the Banshee But It Was a Fox With a Cough.") What struck me most about this story wasn’t the twist ending, amusing as it was, but the folkloric richness Blindboy unpacked along the way. As he explained the origins and traditions surrounding the banshee, I was reminded of my own encounter with another famous weeping woman of folklore: La Llorona. While t...

This is a particularly useful spell when some unpleasant memory is haunting your sleep.  You need: Peace oil White candle (preferably a small chime candle or a tealight) soap and cleaning products -- you can use special spiritual cleaning products like Chinese Wash and Florida Water Soap for some extra oomph if you have them, but regular cleaning products will suffice. The morning after you wake from a dream you wish to never repeat, immediately strip the bedding and open the bedroom windows to air out the room. If you store any items under your bed, remove them to a new location at least for a few days. As soon as you have time, sweep or vacuum the bedroom with special attention to under the bed, and follow the instructions for Spiritual Cleansing of Bedding.   The next night, dress the white candle with the Peace oil, and shower or bathe with the candle burning nearby. Dab your forehead, wrists and the soles of your feet with more of the Peace oil af...