Red Brick Dust – My Secret Family Recipe (with bonus tidbits on 18th century Louisiana Creole culture)

If the elaborate preparation rite’s too much for you, you can always just snag some Authentic Louisiana Creole-style red brick dust at Seraphin Station, instead.

Stumbled across a set of instructions for making red brick dust the other day. It had 10 separate steps and required a mortar and pestle, some rum as an offering, hand/wrist strength, patience, and a whole lot of praying.

Y’all, I’m gonna give you my secret recipe for red brick dust. And this is authentic — my ancestry on my father’s side is Louisiana Creole through and through. My father was the first generation in our lineage *not* to be born in Louisiana since my 5th great grandfather in 1752. New Orleans cemeteries are positively jammed with ancestors, on both my father’s paternal side (French Creole) and my mother’s maternal side (Spanish Creole, many of whom settled in Florida after coming through the port of New Orleans but ended up buried in New Orleans anyway given how the Catholic Church and its diocese system works – and one of these ancestors made her living in Pensacola by running a brickyard). [*]

And this is how we do it in my family. I’ve never shared this with the public before. You ready?

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When Angels Are Saints and Saints Are Angels

Seraphin Station

I very frequently see folks online say things like this: “Though technically speaking Archangel Michael is not a Saint [sic], sometimes this entity is venerated as one.”

I’m not linking to the source for that because my goal is not to single anyone out for being wrong. Thing is, this is not an uncommon misperception. It’s pretty easy to find multiple websites and blogs that say something to this effect – even those of folks who are otherwise pretty well-versed in folk religion and/or folk magic. If this were just a couple of blogs and not a pretty widespread point of confusion and error, I wouldn’t be going to the trouble to write about it.

I get that not everybody comes from a Catholic background. But if you’re going to write about saints in the context of hoodoo and folk religion, you should do your research before you make assertions…

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custom ghuede/ancestor box

This is nearly finished (something unique to this loa and therefore not for public consumption still needs to be added), but I wanted to photograph it because it’s a new "feel" for me on a Ghuede box – less flash, more Victorian, more "mourning cabinet" type of thing.

This is NOT for sale; it’s a custom piece.

What’s cooking in the hoodoo kitchen; voudon news

I have finally begun experiments with hoodoo soaps. Because my time (and my workshop space!) is really limited these days, I’m sticking right now to liquid castile soaps rather than bar soaps. If there are any requests for a particular formula, let me know and I’ll try to get those formulas out first. One day I’ll get the bar soap and candles figured out. I will probably need an apprentice, first, though.

In voudon news, Fet Gede is coming up, the time of year when the Ghuede family of loa are honored en famille. There are more Ghuede than anybody can count. The more well-known include the Barons (Samedi, La Croix, Kalfou, etc) and Manman Brigitte. Many houses and temples have their own house Ghuede (if you haven’t visited Harvey’s Hangout, maintained by Kenaz Filan on behalf of their house Ghuede, you should).

Ancestors are honored too, so if you’ve been slacking on the ancestor honoring, Nov 2 is your time to catch up. My grandfather has informed me that since he’s already dead, he’ll have “a pack of Pall Malls thank you dahlin’ what can it hurt.” He also wants a dog treat, but not for himself. Apparently he’s hanging with Old Sport (Old Sport sounds like an aftershave, but was the name of a dog he had in Alabama when he was a boy. He always maintained that this dog could climb trees).

Yeah, the problem with honoring the loa is that they eventually take over every spare nook and cranny of your house. I am putting my foot down at a separate altar for Old Sport. He can share.

In other news, I’ve made some good “graveyard friends” in my New City, and a number of the Formerly Living have consented to come on board to help out. The local cemetery I frequent is amazing; I go at least once a week, sometimes just to sit and read. I have several times found the bones of small animals in nooks and crannies there (mostly of the squirrel variety) and have collected some cypress shavings and some blackberry leaves. So I imagine I’ll have some formulas coming up pretty soon that use local cemetery flora.

New voodoo oils

Sale on select candles

A kick-ass Erzulie Dantor choker, if I do say so myself

Road Opener oil

A new Blessing formula (sans the olive oil base, with a far superior scent to the previous version)

On graveyard dirt, “sinners,” and working with the dead

I’m on a list dedicated to discussion of the Hyatt material, and there’s been a thread with people opining on what one informant meant by getting dirt "from the grave of a sinner." Some believe this is shorthand for a murderer, others that it could be anyone who lived rough and probably died that way. Some have chimed in with questions about just what the relationship between the living and the dead is when you are getting and using graveyard dirt. I chimed in with some personal experience that I thought I would share here for a perspective on that relationship.

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I would just like to add a bit of personal experience here. My "uncle" (a more complicated blood relationship than this, but we called him Uncle when he was living) was clearly a sinner. He was considered such by the family, and by the community, and by himself. The family was Catholic — he was an unrepentant womanizer, drinker, reprobate, and layabout. (He’s buried in Pensacola and spent some time in Jacksonville, which is the location of the original post’s informant, just for giggles).

Now he never killed anybody, but he can be counted on for mischief, particularly if the mischief involves married couples or causing damage to someone’s home (he is especially good at making electrical systems go haywire). He may have changed his mind about some things post-death — I was a child when he died, so I can’t really say much except what I heard and what little I remember. But in working with him (and by that I mean his graveyard dirt), what I learned was two things. One is that he
wasn’t always like this, all unreliable and kind of famous for going as the wind blew. He got messed up in the spirit while he was living, somehow. From piecing together family stories I think it was in WWII. I know he spent a scary time alone or isolated and that he had to swim while he was hurt. He came back from the military and he never was the same. I didn’t know this when I started working with him, and I can’t prove it, but I *know* it.

Another thing is that there is some stuff I might ask some Random Non-Murdering Carouser to help me with, but won’t ask Uncle, because he won’t do it. That doesn’t mean he won’t help at all, just that he’s got a different perspective now — and heck, maybe he’s looking out for me, who knows. I"m saying all this personal stuff to say, that imo, it’s about the relationship, and about listening and paying attention, not about sending some zombie or dog after a job you have for it. I could just as easily file Uncle under "the grave of a soldier" as "the grave of a sinner," and in fact there are some rumors about some fights he got in that had really bad consequences for the other party. But he isn’t just a soldier OR a sinner; he’s him. And I think if you’re working with graveyard dirt, what you might ought to give some attention to is the fact that you’re working with *somebody,* and that somebody is not some mindless jarred commodity to let out and seal back up.

So this makes me think about the kind of train of thought that would be behind an instruction like "go get dirt from the grave of a sinner." This isn’t "end up in a city you never been before and get some random dirt." This is "go down and get some dirt from old Joe Smith, you know, that one what died when his wife’s lover shot him up." I think it’s safe to presume that many of these informants would know the circumstances of death of at least some of the folks that had been laid to rest in the last few years, or at least would have heard some stories, and in many cases may have had a family link or even a personal relationship with the deceased. So I think there is something to considering just what KIND of sinner you’re talking about, and something to considering just WHO it is, finally, you’re talking about working with. If you don’t know from your own or neighborhood memories just who is buried in your town, it’s probably a good idea to go "meet and greet" before taking up any work. I know I’m not the first one to say this, and [list owner] just said something similar probably better than me, but it
bears reiterating — pulling this stuff out of the cultural context it’s embedded in and working it from an "alien" perspective is a really bad idea, especially for the "big guns" stuff. I wouldn’t dream of working with graveyard dirt from someone not blood related to me until after I had crossed a few familial and personal bridges with the dead. Just my three copper cents.

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FYI, this thread began discussing this informant’s material: [Jacksonville, FL; Informant #598; Cylinders 771:2-776:1]