Category: faq

questions you’ve asked: road opening, timing, haints, czechoslovakia (!?)

Some of these are from my saved-up list of questions that people ask via email or blog comments, that I save up to answer on my blog when I get a chance, and some are implied/indirect questions that come from search terms. Don’t forget that I maintain a directory of Frequently Asked Questions and commonly requested information.

***

Q: What are some spells to remove obstacles?

It kind of depends on the obstacles. In some cases, you need Uncrossing, in others you might need Spiritual Cleansing or Van Van or Chinese Wash, and in still others you might want Road Opener. If you don’t need uncrossing, but you’re just kind of stuck and have the inertia thing going or aren’t getting the opportunities you need, then the formula you want for removing obstacles is usually going to be either Van Van or else something like Road Opener or Abre Camino. Sometimes it might be called Blockbuster, but you should ask your supplier, because depending on where they’re coming from (theoretically as well as regionally), Blockbuster might be more akin to Uncrossing or Van Van. And some folks, probably those not from the Southeast, seem to make Road Opener with quassia, which is not how I learned it in the Southeast, and in my opinion that will not do the same job (and it cannot then be called Abre Camino, because Abre Camino contains an actual herb called Abre Camino instead of quassia). In short, there may be more or less intersection with other formulas, depending on the background of your supplier and their formula, so it doesn’t hurt to ask the person selling the stuff you are going to buy.

While on this topic, I have heard people claim that Road Opener is not hoodoo. I call bullshit. While it’s true that Road Opener came into hoodoo through Latin American routes, it’s sure as hell part of hoodoo now, and there is a definite difference between Road Opener and Uncrossing. Uncrossing removes crossed conditions. There are all kinds of situations that could benefit from Road Opening that do not need Uncrossing and that may need something that is not precisely Van Van; where once we might have approached that through a combination of herbs or actions that did not go by the name “Road Opener,” what we today know as Road Opener fills a niche, is useful, and is definitely used by traditional practitioners of conjure. Saying it’s not hoodoo is imo being overly pedantic (and is generally part of some online pissing contest and/or the kind of “over-correction” that results in people saying things like “irregardless” and “I feel badly for you” – people trying so hard to be “correct” that they end up “over-correcting” and end up somewhere silly; and if you’re like most of my readers and clients, you don’t really give a crap about whether something was used in the 70s in Florida but not the 50s in Mississippi. You just want your situation remedied.) Saying it’s not hoodoo because it entered hoodoo at some later point than the mythical non-existent “originary” point is going to put you on flimsy ground to talk about Chinese Wash (once upon a time it was not used in hoodoo); Hot Foot oil (once upon a time there was only powder); the method of candle-dressing employed by hordes of workers (because it was popularized in a booklet in the 40s by a man [or maybe a woman] who grew up Jewish; Blackhawk (Native American via Spiritualist churches in Louisiana); and boldo leaf (which is in a shit-ton of modern protection formulas but crossed into hoodoo through Mexican folk practice). Honestly, it’s a ridiculous argument. [*]

What you do with those obstacle-removing formulas will, for the sake of easier communication in this blog post, be called spells. (Usually folks who ask this sort of thing want to be given what they think of as a “spell,” which will be specific instructions for exactly how to do some multi-component rite called “a road opener spell” or something like that. Thing is, hoodoo really isn’t a system of “spells” in the sense of “things that have to be done just so on a Friday before a full moon with these rhymes” or where people have spells collected in books and stuff like that. Rather, you light a candle, or sprinkle powders, or take a bath, or do some combination of those things and others that suits your supplies and your situation. Every “road opener spell” I do for a client is probably slightly different; the appropriate actions and ingredients depend on the situation. I do not have a book of spells – the idea is sort of ridiculous, and most folks I know who didn’t come to this from a different background don’t default to calling their work “spells” or telling clients they need to do “spells.” Personally, I call what I do altar work or just plain “work,” and avoid the term “spells” just because 1. it was never called that when I was growing up, and 2. it gives the wrong impression, that conjure is about collections of spells and books of shadows and stuff like that. So people who write me saying “these spells are hard to find” have, in my opinion, *the wrong idea* about how these things are traditionally done; collections of typed-up spells are hard to come by because they’re unnecessary (and when we do post “spells” for the benefit of clients who want to be given “spells”, we usually have to endure dozens of follow-up questions about what herb we can substitute for some herb we list, and what to do if we can’t get that kind of candle or a certain oil, etc, which defeats the purpose of typing the damned thing up in the first place). It’s just the wrong way to think about conjure. When we do altar work for you, we don’t select a spell from out of a book. I’ve written about this at length elsewhere, particularly in the FAQ directory; bottom line, if you want a spell explained or suggested that is specific to your situation and materials at hand, book a consultation with a professional worker who can instruct you on what to do for your specific situation.)

But here are some suggestions from Lucky Mojo. (So when you dress a candle with oil and light it, you are doing a candle burning spell for our purposes here.) If you insist on a given a set of instructions to follow just so, then Dr. E has a thorough, nice Roads of Fortune spell here. But honestly, properly dressing and fixing a candle is powerful work. So is a spiritual bath. Don’t make it harder than it has to be.

***

Q: Reconciliation mojo bag takes one month to work.

A: I’d be pretty darned surprised. The most important reply here is that there’s no such thing as one simple answer to the question of “how long will X take to work.” It totally depends on the situation (and on your definition of what success is in that situation). You can read more about timing in spells here: “How Long Will It Take to Work” and “Timing Spells, Setting Limits, and the Non-Existent Rule of 3 Days/3 Weeks/3 Months.” But I’d say one month for a reconciliation working of any type, in very many of the situations for which I’ve been consulted,  would be way too optimistic. But it totally depends on the situation and specifics of the individual case. The bottom line: There are too many variables in anybody’s case for anybody to be able to answer your question about how long the candle or mojo you are thinking of buying will take to work, or even if it will.  Spiritual work just doesn’t work like that.  The reality is that sometimes it is NOT God’s will.  And this is not a gumball machine where you put your quarter in and get a prize you can anticipate from the picture in the window.

***

Q: Sour jar take how long to work? [sic]

A: See above.

***

Q: What happen to the old fashion hoodoo that was used in the 70’s?

A: Assuming you mean the 1970s, you are actually talking about what I’d call the full flower of “modern hoodoo” (I’d distinguish that from today’s hoodoo, which I’d call “contemporary” and, if pressed, probably use the late 80s as a historical marker for… maybe). The 70s is not “old fashioned” when you are talking about hoodoo history – that is recent as hell. But for starters, you have to define what you mean by “old fashioned.” Do you mean hoodoo as it was in the 1850s? 1920s? In Memphis? Detroit? Natchez, Mississippi? Crystal River, Florida? By the 70s, you had lots of published books on all kinds of practices “cross-pollinating” with older, more rural, less book-derived practice, including European witchcraft and commercialized “Eastern mysticism,” astrology, etc. You’d had mail-order catalogs for generations at that point, and you had drugstores in large cities selling candles and things from China. The old-school candle shop owners (who had once upon a time been new-fangled!) might start selling books on meditation to help their bottom lines; the tea leaf readers might branch out into astrology to get and keep clientele; the tarot was much better known by then, even among those who had grown up reading playing cards; the era of pharmacists blending their own colognes, hair oils, and perfumes in the back from formularies were largely over and everything was imported en masse. In some areas, a cultural turn resulting from Black Pride, Afrocentrism, or Rastafarianism, for instance, might mean that the younger generation was no longer using the hair products their parents had used, or attending the churches their parents had attended, or valuing the same art, aesthetics, music, and even naming conventions their parents had valued. This ties into the other question on this page that spilled over into my footnote about “what is and isn’t hoodoo” – you can’t really say something like “here’s the originary date of hoodoo, and here’s the cutoff date for old-school conjure, and everything that was new after that is not traditional hoodoo.” I see this today in interviewing people in academic contexts about voodoo in Haiti or folk religion or spiritual practice in just about anywhere – often the grandchildren will talk to you about their interest in or return to practices that their parents won’t speak of and tried to distance themselves from. Sometimes the children have to recover these practices on their own, if their grandparents or older relatives are no longer living.

So the bottom line depends on how you define some of your terms. What happened to the hoodoo of the 70s? the same thing that happened to the hoodoo of the 60s and the 50s. It changed a bit as the world changed, as horizons changed, as neighborhoods and markets changed. What happened to “old fashioned hoodoo”? Well, how do you define old-fashioned?

***

Q: Was czech jewelry ever spelled cech?

A: FFS, wtf. Well, this is a hoodoo, voodoo, magic, and folk religion blog, but I happen to be able to answer this, and the question brought more than one person to this blog, so what the hell. (Though these search terms make me baffled at how some people use search engines – they aren’t oracles and typing complete sentences usually helps rather than hinders!) The “czech” you see when a rosary is made with “Czech glass beads” is short for “Czechoslovakia,” which as of 1993 no longer exists; that area is now divided into “the Czech Republic” and “Slovakia.”  There, they speak Czech and Slovak (get it?). In the Czech language, they have different ways of conveying sounds through orthography than we have in English. In English, we use “Cz” to represent the sound we pronounce in this case as a hard “ch,” but they use “Č” (see that little symbol on top of the C? That is *critical* to its pronunciation and therefore spelling – you cannot just leave it out or it would be pronounced differently).  So, no, it was never spelled “Cech,” but it was spelled “Čech” (with the little symbol). I imagine the person who asked this question did not realize that “czech” was short for “czechoslovakia,” or else they could have just looked it up in any encyclopedia, but I digress.

***

[*] This sort of thing becomes an issue for anyone studying living folk practice. Living practices change. Herbs and resins and dirts and flora/fauna used in Western Africa, for instance, had to change in Haiti, Louisiana, Brazil, Trinidad, Virginia – because the same stuff does not grow in all those places, just to touch on the tip of the iceberg. You can see the sorts of issues it raises in the contemporary practices surrounding Santisima Muerte in Mexico today. I maintain that, from a historical perspective, the use of gold, purple, green etc Santisima Muerte statues is an interpolation that came through modern commercial occult markets and probably has at least a little to do with symbolism and practice found in commercially-available materia magica for traditions such as Santeria. But however they came about, and however recent they are compared to the red, black, and white statues, the fact remains that living devotees of the saint who are actively, at this very moment, living a spiritual life in which the saint plays a significant role, are using them and see a need they fill. And for someone to come in from “outside” their particular community and tell them their practice is not legitimate — well, who’s the authority, finally? The academic or the practitioner? You can do a slippery slope thing with this if you want and say “well, then, since I practice hoodoo, then whatever I do is hoodoo, and nobody can to say any different.” We can — and do, in various corners of monograph footnotes, articles, blogs, and websites — debate this kind of thing ’til the cows come home. You can even accuse me of doing the same thing I’m criticizing here, when I rant about people selling stuff to “cleanse” mojo bags, or when I say “watermelon fragrance oil is not hoodoo.” Sure, there are some lines that are going to be debatable, less than clear cut, in a living, breathing tradition. (For instance, I say that if it’s the consistency of soup, you have no business calling it gumbo, but there are folks winning prizes with gumbo recipes that I would not hit a hog in the behind with. Is it chili anymore if it’s white and made with cannellini beans? When you are really hungry, do you give a crap?)

*And yet* the fact remains that when my 40 or 60 year old clients from Louisiana or Florida or South Carolina order a bottle of Van Van oil from me, they have an expectation of what it’s going to smell like, and if I send them something pink that smells like gardenias, they are probably going to ask if I mislabeled the bottle (and maybe secretly think I’ve lost my mind). They will not have the same reaction to my suggesting Road Opener oil, even though neither of us used a thing called precisely that in our childhoods (probably in part because my clients know I am not some convert who jumped off a Wicca wagon and started making Van Van oil last year, so I am not going to sell them some new age goop that does not “fit” with what we both grew up with). Similarly, while Catholic conjure doctors were a relative rarity outside of Louisiana, they nevertheless did exist, and work with some saints did extend beyond the borders of Catholicism and even those who would self-identify as Spiritualists or Spiritists prior to the internet and folk Catholics like me writing blogs. So saying “work with the saints is not traditional hoodoo” is profoundly ignorant, not to mention insulting. Folk magic is *always, always* influenced by region, including the religion, traditions, culture, and flora and fauna of the physical land upon which its practitioners live, in their physical neighborhoods. I have clients from Alabama who grew up with this stuff who leave offerings at their ancestor’s graves, and I have other clients from the East Coast who grew up with this stuff who hold their breath when they go by graveyards and paint the baby’s windowsill blue to “keep off the haints.” Workers I respect who I know to be authentic and honest say they were taught that women shouldn’t do rootwork while pregnant. I was never taught any such thing and I seem to come from a very different way of conceiving of both spiritual work and pregnancy; the theory underlying such a prohibition doesn’t fit into my worldview, religion, or practice. Those are very different approaches to working with and living with the dead, with the unborn, with liminality, and they can be traced to different regions and distinct “paths” along the diaspora and/or traditions in question; and yet, it’s too simplistic to say that one set of beliefs is “traditional” or “authentic” and the other is not. The bottom line is that there has never been any monolithic central guide to *anything* that’s a folk tradition – if there were, it wouldn’t be a folk tradition anymore. At least part of it would be codified, captured, encapsulated, isolated, no longer “in free play” in a living community. To say that things change does not mean “anything goes,” but to say that any change after some arbitrary, imaginary cutoff date is “not hoodoo” is just ridiculous.

***

For some further thoughts and conversation that unfolded from this post in the comments section over at the mirror site, go here.

Questions you’ve asked on Things You’ve Read: karma

Q: I read that if you take a spell from someone else and use it, you are sharing in the karma from the person who wrote that spell.

A:  Seriously?!  You read that?!  Good lord, stop going to that website.  That’s utter bollocks, sorry. In fact, most anything said by most contemporary neopagans about karma is utter bollocks, sorry to say. And this bit about a spell’s karma is about the height of absurdity in a vast sea of absurd stuff written about karma by folks who don’t have even a third-rate education in religion but are still gonna try to talk about it. And the information is out there, free for all, since we have libraries and the internet. Yet people can’t even be bothered to learn before they go spreading bullshit about a concept that comes from a major world religion adhered to by millions of people right this very second.

“Hmm, I could study this before I open my mouth, or I could just repeat whatever I saw on tumblr.  What a dilemma.” (cue Jeapordy theme)

First of all, karma doesn’t even work like that.  Karma has to do with ethics, action, and volition; it has to do with intention. A set of written instructions has no karma. It cannot serve as a vector for someone else’s karma. Karma is not mana or juju from a roleplaying game where an object or even a speech act accrues it or absorbs it, and it’s not a separate energy that two people could divide between them or share.

And even if a spell (or cake recipe, or auto repair manual) had or could transmit karma, the most fundamental principles of karma would dictate that the same recipe could be followed by two different people with two different ethical results depending on an extremely complex interplay of factors. In other words, two different people can take the same action — like using the same spell or pinching a baby or throwing a jellyfish back in the water — and have two different karmic results from it.

Second of all, and most importantly for our purposes here, karma has no place in traditional conjure. You are welcome to believe in it. Heck, you are even welcome to believe in the new-age bastardized Western version of it that modern neopagans will feed you when they relate it to the Wiccan Rede or so-called Rule of Three or whatever.  (It has nothing to do with either one of those things.)

What you can’t do is import that into your conjure work and call it traditional hoodoo. It’s not traditional hoodoo and it’s also not a traditional Eastern view of karma.  People will say things like, “you can’t deny the rule of karma any more than you can deny the law of gravity,” and that is just plain wrong. There are so many problems with that analogy it’s hard to know where to start.

But you can’t even begin to conceive of how karma works until you’ve taken reincarnation into account. (If you don’t believe in reincarnation, stop using the word “karma.” What you’re talking about isn’t karma – it’s some shit somebody made up.)

Presuming that karma=”as you sow, so shall you reap,” and that all the sowing and reaping happens within a short, predefined period of time in which you are an observer for the whole thing unfolding (like your single lifetime) is just preposterous. Karma does NOT mean “I was mean to the guy who asked me to prom, so when I am in college, I will get dumped/stood up/whatever and that is my karma.”  It does not mean “I will reap the rewards of good action in this lifetime” or “If i cast a ‘black magic’ spell, it will return on me.”  That is just ridiculously oversimplified.

Karma is far too complex a concept for me to explain briefly in a blog post, esp. when that blog is dedicated to the concepts, theory, and practice of hoodoo and karma has no place in traditional hoodoo. It is difficult for me to say anything about karma without drastically oversimplifying it; it is an extremely complex concept.  But I will note that the idea of “This bad or good thing happens in this life because of my bad or good actions in this life; what I reap is a result of what I sow in the present” — and this is essentially what people are saying when they try to apply karma to the practice of spellwork — is explicitly refuted in Buddhist teachings.  In fact, the teachings are explicit that one is NOT required to “repay” all the past “debt” of one’s karma; to proclaim otherwise is to deny the possibility of emancipation. In the Anguttara Nikaya, III.101 (Lonaphala Sutta), is written:

  • Monks, for anyone who says, ‘In whatever way a person makes kamma, that is how it is experienced,’ there is no living of the holy life, there is no opportunity for the right ending of stress. But for anyone who says, ‘When a person makes kamma to be felt in such & such a way, that is how its result is experienced,’ there is the living of the holy life, there is the opportunity for the right ending of stress. – trans. Thanissaro Bhikkhu

And here is another translation:

  • O priests, if anyone says that a man must reap according to his deeds, in that case, O priests, there is no religious life, nor is any opportunity afforded for the entire extinction of misery. But if anyone says, O priests, that the reward a man reaps accords with his deeds, in that case, O priests, there is a religious life, and opportunity is afforded for the entire extinction of misery. — trans. Henry Clarke Warren, in Sacred Writings: With Introductions and Notes, Charles William Eliot, ed., P.F. Collier & Son, 1910.

You might have to read this more than once for the distinction that is being made here to sink in. And you really probably have to read it in its larger context, which is why I’ve cited my sources and linked to versions you can get to and read yourself.  And reading in the larger context would rightfully include reading the Buddhist works to which the above words were a response, such as tracts that lay out karma as a strict series of cause and effect (eg, a man who steals grain will be reborn as a rat; it is this simplistic view of karma as strict cause and effect that Buddha was objecting to).

You must also understand that this is my understanding from my study and I do not speak for all Buddhists or Hindus etc. I have, however, made a rather more than typical effort at understanding what is meant by karma, since my parents gave me this name and I began making study of it by the age of 5. But you should certainly study and read for yourself. You shouldn’t take the word of ANY random internet person on this matter.  Karma is an important concept in an important religion on the planet you live on. You should know what it is.

But if your interest in this is only as a student of hoodoo or some other type of folk magic, then this is your main takeaway point: conjure has nothing to do with karma, at least not as it is typically understood in the West by modern-day neopagans (or by anyone with just a quick, surface understanding they’ve absorbed from popular culture). For that matter, most of what you’ll see on Pinterest or random blogs to do with witchcraft has nothing to do with karma, not really. It has to do with the ethics of some — not all — contemporary witches and pagans, and some — not all — of those folks are trying to turn it into some universal law, which is just utter bullshit. It’s such a profoundly wrong view it’s astonishing to me how it keeps getting circulated and then keeps getting *even worse.* (20 years ago, someone would tell you doing a compelling spell was bad karma and it would come back on you. Now, they’ll tell you it will come back on you *three times.* Or 7! or 21! rofl, wtf even is that? You can believe that if you want, but don’t call it karma ffs.)

And by the same token, the idea that there is such a spell that could give someone karma or have some effect on their karma is totally, completely absurd. That’s just such an imprecise use of the term “karma” that it’s rendered totally meaningless.

Even the general definition you will see in dictionaries, of karma as meaning that every action will return to the doer with equal impact, is a vastly oversimplified reduction that is, in many Eastern religious literary contexts, actually *wrong.* Let’s just take the context of that passage I quoted above, so a Buddhist one, and let’s run with that analogy of sowing and reaping.

While it is true that a man reaps the seed he plants, it is not only his conscious action that has a bearing on what he reaps. There is also the quality of the seed; the choice of seed; the inherent intellect of the man from birth that influences his understanding of planting; the education of the man during life that influences his understanding of planting (and the karma of his parents has an effect on all of these things); the moral disposition behind the planting of the seed (if any); the desire that informs the action of the planting (if any); the type of ground in which the seed is planted; the effects of weather patterns, soil quality, rainwater, irrigation, and environmental predation; whether he afterwards pulls out the weeds and waters the crop; etc.

Karma is important, but so are birth, personality, effort and intention, time and conditions, beauty and ugliness. If one sows a seed for good but later repents of that good, there is no good that recurs to him as a result of that sowing. If one sows a seed with no desire at all, that action has no karma. That’s how two people can perform the same action with two different karmic outcomes.

In any event, you should not presume that with limited human temporal understanding, you will have the slightest grasp of what causes and effects are at work in your life or the life of someone else. The overwhelming majority of us cannot hold on to a sufficiently enlarged perspective long enough and often enough to be able to *really get* all the intricate interplay across lifetimes and among families, etc.

In short, do not let someone give you a one-sentence or one-paragraph definition of karma.  If you want to understand it, don’t accept some modern Western, pre-digested version of it. Study it for yourself in context.

If you are not willing to do that, fine, then just drop it. It doesn’t fit conjure, which largely has its roots in a mostly traditional Judeo-Christian worldview. It doesn’t fit Wicca, which is actually way more conservative and old-fashioned about this matter than a lot of religions. It doesn’t fit anything as a “universal law.” Don’t take some half-baked crap and try to apply it to a religion, worldview, culture, or practice that has never heard of it. To do is insulting to conjure, insulting to Buddhism, and insulting to the intelligence.

on “bulsh*t” spells, scams, “impossible” magic, consultations, and budget spellwork

More questions I've gotten…

Q: "so i came across your site and ive been scammed several times [etc, snipped, the usual]  so i want to know if your legit and if you can take me serious than others and help me . if there is a spell you kno or ritual to grow taller to the height i wish too grow." 

A: Sweetie, there is no such thing as a spell to make you grow taller (or grow your body parts, or be irresistible to any person ever and always no matter what, or to reunite lovers in 24 hours guaranteed, or to get a vampire demon lover, or to get a ring with a wish-granting genie in it, or any of that other sounds-to-good-to-be-true stuff you can get on ebay), and anybody who tells you that they can make you grow taller with magic is lying to you (and making six times the money I make, because I won't prey on people who don't know better). Magic simply does not work that way.

There ARE spells to work on your personal presence, your self-esteem, the way you carry yourself and the way you appear to
others, your sense of mastery and confidence, your physical health and strength, etc.  If you are young and have not finished growing, there are ways you can focus on maintaining the peak of health and maximizing your potential. But if you are done growing, you are done growing.  If you have a medical condition and/or are undergoing medical treatments to effect your physical stature, there is work that can be done to boost the skill and wisdom of your physicians and keep your own health and receptivity at top levels.  Aside from that, you are looking for something that exists only in Harry Potter books and such.  And you should run, not walk, away from anyone who would prey on your naivete and desire in order to profit on it by promising to do something that is in violation of the basic principles of magic.

Same family as an earlier one I got this month:

Q: "what oil will make me beter looking and grow my penis?"

A: No product will increase your penis size or physically change your features, and most of the people who advertise that kind of thing are better at writing advertising copy than casting spells.  But there are spells that will boost your confidence, charisma, sex appeal, and aura of glamour, and many products in those lines, when used as body products, also are good for hair, nails, alluring scents, complexion, or stuff like that too, depending, and with a well-designed spell, will change the way you project yourself and the way people perceive you.  Buying a bottle of oil itself isn't going to do it, but you could build a simple, "pre-night-out" attraction/grooming ritual with candles, oils, and powders with things in the Attraction, John the Conqueror, Samael, Rubeus, Kaliprix, Kiss Me Quick, or Follow Me Girl/Boy type families, depending on what you're after.

Q: I read a spell site that said no real spellcaster would charge for curse removal, so how can you charge for curse removal?

A: You read one person's opinion.  If you want my opinion, here it is: what you read is judgmental, and frankly pretty ethnocentric and ignorant, and I say that no real, professional spellcaster who actually does this for a living would say something demonstrating such ignorance about the myriad magical/spiritual traditions that differ from – and probably significantly predate – their own tradition.  I don't know where you read it or what they do all day, but I do this for a living, and if I worked for free, I would not be able to do any work at all; I'd be closing up shop with a quickness.  The supplies I use cost money, no matter what type of spell I'm using them in, and I charge for my time and work, no matter what kind of work it is. I have to eat.  That doesn't make me unethical and it doesn't make me "fake." I just don't work for free – I'm not independently wealthy, and I charge for my time and work.

Now, if you are a customer or client or have been reading for a while, you already know that because I am a worker who also makes/grows most of her own product/product ingredients, and because I come from a rural background where we mixed up stuff with what we could get, not what was for sale at the drugstore with a hoodoo label on it, I am able to accommodate all kinds of budgets.  For clients who want to do their own spells, I do consultation sessions to coach them.  For clients who want to make their own oil or bath or the like, I will do consultation sessions to coach them too, and the "coaching session" is a path I recommend for clients who are hurting for money, because if you need me to stick to things you can get at the grocery store, i will.[*]  If you need to get uncrossed and you are broke, there IS help for you.[**]  However, this is not the same thing as my doing a full-blown Uncrossing ritual for free.

But I DO work with folks.  In fact, working with folks is what this is all about – being a professional worker is not about handing out "one size fits all" spells.  If you write me and want free advice, that is what you are going to get – a general recommendation for an approach that may be helpful for what you describe but may not be given any number of unknown factors that I can't look at (or, honestly, read a long email about) without a consultation.  But if you book a consult with me to talk about your case, you will get recommendations specific to your situation.  I tell folks all the time, when they ask "what is the best spell/product for me," that the best spell/product is the one they can and will use properly and that the case will be responsive to.  No point in me sending you some incense if you can't use it because you have asthma, or prescribing baths if you won't take them – nor in setting you up with Commanding work if the cards show that it will backfire, or with Reconciliation work if your case is hopeless.  But the bottom line is I do this for a living, which is part of what "professional" means. [***] 

Q: How do I avoid getting scammed by a fraud or unethical worker or reader?

Watch out for anybody who guarantees their work with a money-back refund.  Watch out for anyone who promises a 100% success rate.  Watch out for people who promise to reunite lovers within 24 hours.  Watch out for people who offer to do spellwork that fixes your problems with no effort on your part.  Watch out for anyone who offers to sell you a trapped wish-granting powerful sexy vampire genie for $100 that is bound to an antique ring that came from a voodoo priestess's house, or the pyramids in Egypt, or someone's dead great aunt who was a sorceress from Atlantis and/or related to Marie Laveau and/or the Salem witches, etc,  and who passed it down to the favorite grandchild (etc).  [Think – if you had that kind family heirloom, would you *sell* it?  And if magic were as easy as buying an enchanted item and never having to lift a finger, well, I wouldn't be working  🙂 ]  Watch out for someone who claims to be world-renowned psychic to the stars but who you can find no record of existence for that predates the one-month-old website.

Watch out for someone who never calls you on your shit.  If they think everything you propose is a great idea, all the time, and never give you another perspective, or make an alternate suggestion, or let you know that what you want is going to be hard to do, or suggest that you may have had some role in your breakup but encourage you to jump on the "everybody is out to get me" pity-party, then you may not have a fraud exactly, but you do have somebody who will flatter you to get your money and who will thus be of limited assistance in the big picture.  Now, it's possible that you may never get a reading or work done where this becomes an issue or where you'd even have a chance to see if this was happening – it depends on the nature of your case or issue.  And I"m certainly not saying your worker or reader should try to make you feel bad or small.  There is a real need for a reader / worker to be able to give you even bad news in such a way that it does not crush you or belittle you, or that is at least sensitive to the effects of the bad news.  That is not what i mean.  I'm talking about people who only ever tell you what you want to hear.

Watch out for anyone who judges all readers/workers of all paths by standards that are applicable only to a certain path or religion and says stupid things like "No ethical reader would ever recommend an uncrossing spell" or "no ethical worker would ever do hexing work" or "no ethical spellcaster would ever use animal bones" or "no real priest or priestess would ever charge money."  Those are ethics belonging to a few people, not everybody, and they are profoundly ignorant about and dismissive of/insulting to traditional Southern-style rootwork as well as many religions of the African diaspora.  How much somebody charges is not a reliable index of whether they are fake or not.  Whether they post their birth name and a physical address is not a reliable index.  Where they were born is not a reliable index.  Whether they have a psychic grandmother is not a reliable index. 

But there are quite a few things you can look for when searching for a reliable, ethical reader or worker.  Here's a page from Lucky Mojo outlining some common scams.  Here is the AIRR code of ethics, which I personally subscribe to as does every member of AIRR.  While there are good workers out there who may not susbscribe to every item on these lists exactly as written, a worker with any real experience should be able to outline some sort of code of ethics or terms or principles for you if you ask, so that you know where they are coming from — this may be outlined in a bio, or listed on an FAQ, or they may write about it less formally on their blogs or sites; the point is that you should be able to get some idea of where they are coming from somehow, either in something they've written and provide, or by asking them questions about how they work. 

Happy hoodooing!

_________________________________________

[*] This does not mean you can book a consultation and say "give me your formula for Fiery Wall of Protection" and I will go "Ok, here you are."  It means you approach me with a list of what you have and I tell you what of it you can use to make what you want.  Or you say "I need to make an inexpensive uncrossing formula with stuff I can get today, at the local market," and I will work with you, even if takes more than one trip to the grocery store or more than one email.

[**] Crossed conditions can be serious, and can prevent a person from getting ahead in all kinds of areas of life.  I will work with you to figure out some way for you to get back on your feet no matter what your budget (but seriously – between this blog, luckymojo.com, the lucky mojo forum and other forums run or hosted by real workers, and the blogs of all my colleagues that I have linked to, it is a question of a little bit of time spent researching.  You can get an uncrossing ritual with a few clicks, so it's not really reasonable to expect someone to do the research for you for free when you can do it yourself, you know?  But if you come to me with an idea already in mind and want to run an ingredient substitution by me, and you can send me a short, direct email, then I am likely to respond without your needing a consultation — if you are talking about a serious condition or emergency.  But not every desire merits reduced rate of pro-bono work.  If you are looking for Reconciliation, for instance, that is not an emergency – no matter how much you may feel like it is, sorry 🙂  Neither is lottery work. 

[***] The other part, in my opjnion, refers to ethics and bearing, as in "conducts self and business professionally," but that is 1. another post, and 2. hardly cut-and-dried, not open to interp, and not disputed at all in all circles.  Obviously the unnamed worker who said "no real spellcaster would charge for this" actually meant "no professional/ethical caster would, in my opinion and according to my code of ethics, charge for this."  How one charges has absolutely no direct, causal effect on whether or not one is capable of doing effective spellwork, though how and what one charges can sometimes be part of a matrix of warning signs.

I actually do take pro bono work, but you have to either be an existing client who I already know, be referred to me by another worker that I know, or get accepted as a pro bono client by the AIRR Pro Bono Fund and program, which I participate in.  The Association of Independent Readers and Rootworkers, or AIRR, has a pro bono fund to help clients in dire straits who cannot afford to undertake work that they really genuinely *need.*  You can read more about it here.  If you send me an email out of the blue saying "Can you help me for free," you are going to get a form letter giving you some links, but you are not going to get a personal response. This is not because I'm mean and ugly – it's because I get about 50 emails a day from people "with just a quick question."  There is no such thing as "just a quick question" unless it is about work that is currently ongoing and contracted and therefore not you asking for free spell advice. 

A *great deal* depends on impressions here; folks who write simply assuming I will read a long, involved email and reply to them with personalized recommendations are likely to try my patience b/c they give me the impression they have no idea how this job works and are not able to put themselves into my shoes for a sec.  When in doubt, ask – a simple, to the point email saying "I have some questions about what product to use to get a promotion" will probably get a response saying "Great, go ahead."  If the next email is short and to the point, you will probably get a friendly response making suggestions.  If you send me a first email that is long and tells me the whole story about something and you want advice on that complicated relationship or job situation, you are going to get a form letter telling you how to book a consultation.  Bottom line : check your assumptions before writing, that's all! and ask before sending me a long complicated email, because it would be a shame if you spent all that time typing it and I don't read it.  I owe it to the clients who have booked consultations to get back to them ahead of new stuff, you know?  And those first two question on this post? I get fifty like them every day.  If you don't want to book a consultation, that's fine – I'll put your question in my queue of things to answer on the blog when I have a chance.

faq – things to know about getting new altar work established

Here are the instructions I send out when clients book new work:

I’ll need you to send the following as a response to this email:

1.  the full name and date of birth of any people being inquired about, including yourself.  If you included this information in the “note to seller” box on the paypal payment page, then there is no need to resend — you can scroll down to see a copy of the information I received with your paypal payment.  If you have anything to add to this information below, please send it as a response to this email.  If you sent a separate email containing this information, please resend that info as a response to this email.  (The reason I ask this is that if I have to go through a bunch of emails and threads to locate your info and piece together your query, it increases the risk for confusion, omission, and misunderstanding, and it also increases the time it will take for me to prepare and send you your consultation.)  I cannot work with the same precision without full names and dates of birth.

2.  any photos you would like me to have in order to do the reading portion of your consultation.  Please do not ask me to visit websites or stalk your targets on social networking sites to obtain pictures; I need you to download any photo you want me to use and then email it to me. Also, please clearly identify every person in the photograph and let me know if I need to crop anyone out.  Please send photos as a response to this email instead of sending a new email or asking me to dig through old messages. I can work without photos if you do not want to send one or don’t have one handy.

3. a brief statement of the issue, question, or situation on which you are seeking consultation.  You do not have to give me a long litany or life story, though you may give me as much information as you are comfortable sending me.  It is quite helpful, even if you do send a lot of information, if you could please try to sum up your main concern or question in a sentence or two, to sort of introduce your additional information, so that I am clear on what is most important to you; consultations are very targeted and very practical, so it’s usually NOT a good idea to try to get twenty different very specific questions out of one consultation.  So a short statement encapsulating your main concern or goal helps me ensure I address that concern or goal specifically.  Please note, however, that as with photos and name/DOB info, I do ask you to send anything you want me to consider in your consultation as a response to this email, for the reasons outlined above.

I know you guys are eager when you are ready to start your altar work, and I know that some of you secretly think I’m being a pain in the ass when I ask you to follow the instructions you receive upon booking new work.  Why, you think, should you have to send me the photos again when you just sent them to me last month?  Why can’t I just get them out of that old email?  Why, you think, does it matter if you send the petition in one email versus another?  Why can’t I just look in the other email?  Why in the world am I so hung up on people replying to messages instead of sending second messages with a different subject line?  If I don’t see the info in that message, surely I know I can just click the other message that was sent just a couple of minutes later, right?  What does it matter if the petition is four sentences versus two?

Emails

Most of these problems would be solved if people would stop for a second, and imagine an inbox filled with fifty versions of “hi do u do spellwork and can give me a free spell about my boyfriend plz hurry its an emergency and no1 will help me please help”.”  Then they could recite the following mantra: “I am not her only client.”  And maybe “She has a system for a reason.”   So NO, I do not see one email and immediately cross-reference it with the other fifty emails you’ve sent me in the past eight months.  I get a vast number of messages every day, and I deal with an awful lot of paper.  I do not take on more work than I have room or time for, but even so i cannot reasonably be expected to keep every little detail in my memory or to remember which of those messages had the photo in it. I will be happy to go digging for that info and match up all the different threads and emails, but you are going to be waiting for no good reason while I do it.

The instructions I give folks when they book new work are given for a reason, and it’s not because I’m just cranky or on a power trip.  I’m not cranky at all when folks follow the instructions.  But some of the stuff some clients have pulled lately – woohoo, takes my breath away.  So I am going to type a post about it once and for all, because I am simply NOT going to write another email explaining it.  I will just give this URL to people who ask me if the instructions apply to them.

So here are some guidelines that anybody should keep in mind when establishing new altar work, whether they are working with me or not.  This article is part of the “how to be a good client” series (aka, how not to get fired by your rootworker).

When sending personal concerns:

* DO send me hair, fingernail clippings, bits from a napkin or straw that the target’s saliva got on, small scraps of clothing that have been pre-trimmed into small, usable sizes, photos, and/or dirt taken from a target’s foot track.  Send these things in small plastic bags, and put the name of the applicable person on the bag. Put something in the letter or note accompanying the concern that clearly gives me your name and your email address at the very least, and ideally includes a copy of the receipt for your work, our email exchange about what you were sending me, a copy of the contract, or *something.*

* Do NOT send me loose, unlabeled personal concerns, and Do Not send me sexual fluids.[*]  If I am making you a mojo bag, then I do not need a big hunk of hair, or an entire shirt, or an entire sock, or an entire soda can, so please trim the concern down appropriately.  No, I do NOT want the plastic  bag full of used pantiliners you’ve been keeping in your freezer, and I do NOT want the wad of tissues you’ve been collecting in your nightstand drawer next to the lube.  If it would be put in a biohazard bin at the doctor’s office, then I DO NOT WANT IT.  If your neighbor would want to wash his hands after touching it, then please stop and think before sending it to me in the mail.  I swear, some folks do not extend to us rootworkers the courtesy they would extend to the guy who cleans the bathroom at the gas station.

If you stop for just a second and think and try to put yourself in your worker’s shoes, you might realize that we get dozens of envelopes from clients every month.  I might have fifteen honey jars on my altars right now.  I might have six or ten client files in my “pending” area waiting on personal concerns to come in the mail.  If you think I’m going to open an envelope with nothing in it but a wad of cloth or tissue and 1. know immediately what person in what case in what file to put it with, 2. just cheerfully reach in and touch GOD-KNOWS-WHAT with my bare hands, you are just not thinking, and you are not being a smart client.

You are especially not being a smart client because I KNOW that if we discussed you sending me personal concerns, then I specifically told you to send non-bodily-fluid concerns, AND to send the concerns already in pieces or sections small enough for me to use with no further alteration, AND to send them in separate plastic baggies.  I KNOW I told you that if there is more than one person involved in your case, then you need to label the baggies – unless you want me to GUESS.  Do you really want me to guess when it comes to your rootwork? 

Please folks.  The instructions are not there to make your life harder or as a means for me to be a bitch. They are there to help you get the best, most accurate, and quickest service (and they are there to keep me from getting overwhelmed, grossed out, or stricken with hepatitis or something).  If you got an envelope full of crusty tissue or random dirty clothing in the mail, would you touch it?  No?  Then what makes you assume that I will?

SO. When sending personal concerns, do not send biohazard material.  Send concerns pre-trimmed into small, usable pieces appropriate to their destination if instructed to do so; at the very least, before you send that entire t-shirt, ask your worker what he or she needs and can use. You do not want a cranky worker, and you don’t want a sick one either.  If you follow the instructions, you will get quicker service and your work will be accurate, and things will go smoothly, and I will have more time to prep and tend your work.

When booking work or light settings with emailed “concerns” or petitions:

When you book a light setting, service, or consultation with me, you get, as a reply to your payment receipt, an email outlining the next steps you should take.  If you do NOT follow these instructions, then it is going to take a lot longer for your work to get started. That booking acknowledgment email will always ask you to send your photos, petition, info etc as a response to that email.  Just hit reply.  That is the goal, to have you just hit reply.

This keeps your info in the same thread, associated with the payment that initiated your new case/booking.  Some clients think that because they have been clients for a while, they can ignore the instructions, because surely they don’t apply to them – they’ve been a client for so long, and we were just talking about this case in another thread just yesterday, and we are friends (etc).

Especially established clients who are booking additional light settings:

But it’s actually *worse* when it’s established clients that do not follow the instructions.  If it’s a new client, I probably only have a couple of emails tops from them in my files.  I can match the petition to the payment with a fairly quick search, most likely.  But not with established clients.  Y’all established clients who have asked me “Do I need to send you the photo again?”, I want y’all to stop a sec and think of all those emails you’ve sent me over the last weeks or months or years.  Really think.  Now, imagine I get an email from you vaguely referencing some work I vaguely remember you mentioning before. I can’t be sure of the details without those other emails in front of me, though, because I’m NOT A MENTAT, and you haven’t associated the email with the payment that initiated your new case, and you haven’t hit reply to the instructional email I sent you, so it does not pop up in my inbox with the nifty tagging-and-flagging system I have set up so that I immediately know when a client petition or photo I’m waiting on comes in.

No, you don’t follow the instructions so that your email gets my *immediate attention* because it is a *pending file* on a paid case which means I may be opening my email specifically to look for *your email* so I can start *your work.*  Instead, you send a second email with a new subject line, or for some completely illogical reason, you send it as a reply *in another thread entirely* where we were talking about the case that was not at that time open yet, or talking about how your last light setting went, or something else.  If you send it as a reply in another thread, like the one that evolved from your last light setting, that thread might be tagged-and-not-flagged, because the tag is “work completed.”  That means it is most assuredly not getting flagged as a top priority in my inbox. Meanwhile, your pending work is pining away in my file waiting to be responded to so that it gets a bright yellow tag next to it telling me I can start your work.

Each new booking is a new file and a new beginning, in terms of organizing your info:

I encourage clients to think of the payment acknowledgment email as the beginning of a new file.  It does not exist prior to that email, and it is created when payment is received.  All the stuff that pertains to that case needs to be kept in that file.  Can I go through old emails and move old info to the new file? Sure. But you probably don’t have fifty open rootwork cases, nor twenty rootworkers clamoring for your attention, nor a stack of papers by your elbow waiting on new info to come in so orders and bookings can be processed.  So it makes sense for you to put the info you want to associate with that new case in the proper file – reduces the risk of error, omission, and confusion.

How my inbox tagging and flagging system works:

The way orders are processed means that if you do not send the info as requested, as a response to the email in the same thread that your payment acknowledgment is in, but rather send it in a new email (or worse yet, in an old email thread that already has a label like “work finished and filed” on it because we were having a conversation in the thread associated with a light setting I did a month ago), then your message containing photos, petition etc are just floating around in the inbox with the hundred or so emails I;ve gotten in the last few business days.  Meanwhile your new booking is still in the “pending” file with a label showing that I’m waiting on the info from you to begin.

I answer regular incoming emails in the order they are received, and I get a boatload, y’all.  But emails coming in that are related to a current, open case for paid rootwork damn straight get opened ahead of other emails.  When you send the info according to the instructions, then they pop up flagged in my inbox so that I know to go straight to them because they relate to pending altar work.   The instructions are there to help the client get their work faster and ensure  there are no mistakes, and that the proper petition, photo, etc is associated with the proper light setting every time.  I swear to God that is why they exist. I swear to God they do not exist because I want to drive my clients away with my nitpicky rules.

Bottom Line:

The instructions are there to help the client get their work faster and ensure  there are no mistakes, and that the proper petition is associated with the proper light setting every time.  I don’t ask y’all to hit reply because I need to reread my own booking acknowledgment instructions that I sent you; I ask y’all to hit reply because I need the info to come in associated with the current altar work, not the altar work you booked on Sep 4 and that was closed out on Sep 24.

And as for “I’m sure you still have the photos, so I won’t bother resending them,” it just does not work that way.  We USE the photos you send us. We write on them, put oils on them, set things on them. They get bent, they get sticky, they get wax drips. They may be burned, bent, folded, spindled, or mutilated, depending on the work.  And as for “I’m sure you can just reprint them,” it just does not work that way either.  I’m going to use a recent light setting client as an example really quick here – I just opened her file in my gmail account. She’s been a client for a bit over a year.  There are 55 email threads in her file.  Some have two or three messages in them.  Some have 35 messages in them. Some have 70 messages in them. Most have between ten and twenty.  And just for fun, she writes from one account but makes paypal payments from another account.

Do you really want me to sit here and spend twenty or thirty or forty minutes going through several hundred messages looking for that petition or that photo, redownloading it, and reprinting it?[**]  Or would you rather take ten extra seconds to attach the photo again so that I can spend that twenty or thirty minutes *starting your altar work*?  It really is up to you!

Brought to you by your friendly neighborhood rootworker who has just written all this out for the very last time 🙂  Happy hoodooing, and I’ll try to put up a more entertaining and less didactic post as soon as I get caught up with all these light settings that have been “pending” for four, five, even seven days waiting on client petitions or photos:-)

[*] There are reasons for you to send me things associated with sexual activity in some rare cases. Most of the time this stuff can be handled or added on your end.  But in those cases where you are sending a concern even remotely related to sexual fluids, I guarantee you are going to get very specific instructions ahead of time, and we are going to discuss it in detail, and if you then do not follow the instructions, you have just wasted all that transit and waiting time sending me stuff I will not touch, never mind use.

[**] Yes, I have tried creating folders on my computer and collecting client info in them as it comes in, so for returning clients I can just go to the folder to reprint a photo or double-check the spelling of a target name.  But y’all don’t always keep the same hair color, or the same names for that matter, and you don’t always keep the same targets, and you don’t always keep the same petitions, and over the years I have found that having clients simply give me the info they want me to use in any new case is the best option.

Image magic, doll babies, and the principles of affinity in conjure – part one

Rootworkers and practitioners use image magic all the time – perhaps when they don’t even realize that’s what they are doing. For instance, when you carve a candle with a target’s name and another with yours, and move them closer to each other over the course of a week across your altar, you are having one candle stand in for you and the other stand in for your target, and what you do to the candles you are symbolically doing to you and the target. They may not look like you, but you might carve them with your name, or put a photo or a personal concern under them.

Same with photos – you place one photo face down underneath a plate or behind a mirror or your headboard, or put it under St. Michael’s foot, or place it face to face with another photo, and you are working image magic. Same with a skull candle on which you carve your target’s name to influence them powerfully on a deep unconscious or subconscious level, or when you use the same type of candle with your own name to help you quit smoking or form some new habit – or when you baptize a lodestone before using it in altar work. The idea is to use, or create in order to use, some kind of “magical link” between the actual person and the image, item, object etc that is being manipulated in the spell. Bodily personal concerns are the strongest traditional means to do this, and this kind of work has been done in hundreds of cultures for thousands of years.

The principle is the same as for doll-babies or poppets (as they are often called in European-derived traditions, or voodoo dolls as they are called in the movies and in tourist traps on Bourbon Street). For a long time, I did not see much doll-baby work being done by younger people anymore; when I did see it, it was usually for malevolent magic and every once in a while for love magic.

 

I’m happy to say I’m seeing more of it again, for whatever reason.

Incidentally, this terminology of a “magical link” is not terminology that every conjure practitioner or root doctor uses, and if you start talking to a rootworker about “magical links,” they might not always know what you are talking about. But it’s the same principle behind using their hair or nails in a mojo that is targeting somebody in particular. When a spell or trick calls for “personal concerns,” this is basically something that can link the ritual object to the target person. I have seen some folks say that certain herbs can be used in place of a target’s hair in some spells, for instance, and while I guess you can try it and see how that works for you, I personally would not take that one to the bank. See, when you “get” the theory behind this, you’ll get why these concerns are called for and why an herb cannot truly replace a target’s hair. The personal concern is a link to the person, in many cases pretty much standing in for the person in the spell. If you don’t have a bodily concern like hair, then you can make do with things like name papers or their business card, but it’s not the same as the hair. And so while I guess you could make do with a root to use in place of hair, by itself that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me – unless you were baptizing the root in their name and/or carving their name into it, in which case the root is no longer just a root but is also working as a poppet or doll baby of sorts.

Now, as to the type of concern. Bodily concerns like fluids, hair, nails, etc are often called for, and I have had some clients assume that that means the mojo or ritual object has to have the target’s DNA involved for it to work. That is not really the case. Now, bodily concerns are obviously going to be stronger than, say, the person’s business card or their company logo printed off the internet, because they are part of that person. And that is why some workers will tell you that if you can’t get hair or nails, that you can do well with an article of clothing, or the insole (or some other part) of their shoe (and in the case of shoes, that usually has added resonance given the importance of the foot and things related to the foot in foot-track magic). But that’s not to say that the underlying principle is that the spell has to use the target’s DNA. In fact, as you might note if you are familiar with foot-track magic, some spells specifically call for the person’s foot track. Literally. Like you go where they have walked, and you get a spatula or flat-headed shovel, and you scoop up their footprint out of the dirt, and you use that dirt in your spell. That isn’t going to have their DNA in/on it, most likely, so you can see that DNA is not the point. It happens to be the case that many good personal concerns may also have the target’s DNA on them, but that doesn’t mean a good personal concern has to use/have their DNA. It is possible to work on a target without using a bodily personal concern at all (baptism of the object is one typical way to do this).

Another set of questions I get reveals some fuzziness around the “theory” behind personal concerns in spells. In large part, it’s generally safe to say that personal concerns stand in for the person you’re working on. When you are working on a relationship, there is by definition more than one person involved, so ideally personal concerns would stand in for every person involved. See, one way of looking at a mojo bag is as a little tiny magical environment that you manipulate to represent the larger environment, and the personal concerns are little tiny representations of the people involved. (It’s the same principle behind a moving candle spell or lodestone spell – the altar in that case is a mini magical environment that you manipulate to bring changes in the larger environment.) So a mojo bag for a relationship generally has two targets. If you are making a mojo for love and you are after a girl, she is the target for this in one sense, because you are having a portable spell, basically, made for you, in the form of a mojo bag. You are putting the love-drawing and “love me now”/love compelling elements in the environment of the mojo, and surrounding her with them by putting her personal concerns in.

 

But all of this is in the service of getting you two together. So it will be stronger to also have your personal concerns inside the environment, even though you aren’t the target in the sense of there is no work aimed at you to change your emotions or behavior. Those ingredients in the environment having been given “instructions” to draw her (through her stuff) to you (through your stuff). We have to tell our herbs and powders and oils what to do, where to go, which is why we call the target’s name when we sprinkle powders, for instance (so that you don’t hot foot yourself, or hot foot the wrong neighbor, if a non-target person comes in contact with the powder). I give the “instructions” while I make the mojo, through prayers and invocations, sometimes through a petition paper as well, and you give instructions by praying over it or meditating on your goals or however you work. Of course you are carrying the bag, so you’re involved that way, but carrying/owning the bag is not actually the same thing as being inside the bag in the form of your personal concerns, of being inside the little magical environment you’ve created to carry around and bring influence to bear in a certain way. You’ve put her in the bag with the herbs and curios etc to get a certain result – but the certain result is her being influenced towards loving you etc, whatever the specifics of your petition are. So it makes sense to be as close to her as possible in this magical environment; it makes sense to put your personal concerns together in the bag (in the case of hair, twined together perhaps, or embedded into the same piece of blessed beeswax, touching; sometimes a bag will have a root for each person, baptized for that person, and each root would have hair tied around it or would be dressed with bodily fluids or the like).

So since you are carrying the bag, and it’s your bag, and you will be handling and talking to and feeding the bag, then it’s not like there is no element of you involved in it – never mind that I will be calling your name as I prepare the bag. But it works better if you are IN the environment with her, not just carrying her around in the environment. Some of this might seem like common sense, or like it doesn’t really make a lot of difference in practice most times, but not everybody has really thought about it, so I write this post to help you frame ways to think about it in case you haven’t. This becomes more important in some kind of spells, like those to bind a person’s nature. When you are making a mojo bag for a relationship, and you are including a tissue that has the mingled sexual fluids of you and your target, then that makes total sense and it’s no big deal that they are mingled. In fact, it’s good that they are. But if you are working on a target to tie their nature so they can’t be unfaithful to you, you really would want to be careful NOT to use a cloth or tissue that had mingled sexual fluids on it, because you are going to work on that object and symbolically work on the target through it. You don’t want to tie a knot in a handkerchief with both your sexual fluids on it unless you want to tie your own self down too; you want the handkerchief to just have the target’s fluids. (And while we are in the realm of symbols, of course, you should understand that that is not to say “and therefore this stuff works only symbolically, and thus affects only intention or predisposition or feelings, and not physiological stuff, so there is no danger in putting my own sexual fluids in there – I am calling the target’s name and influencing them to be faithful by symbolically tying this handkerchief, so it won’t have any affect on my own intentions or feelings.” That clean division between physical and emotional, between bodily and spiritual, just isn’t there in conjure; old time workers often warned that leaving a person “tied up” through spellwork could have detrimental physical effects. Any naturally flowing system – and a human being is a naturally flowing system in this sense – gets changed deeply when obstacles, blockages, reroutings and diversions happen to it. Work on tying natures is closely related to work on stopping up bowels or urine, on blocking up a menstrual cycle or stopping a womb, etc – it is potentially dangerous work that can have potentially fatal consequences, and so in my opinion it really should not be undertaken lightly and should not be undertaken by the inexperienced. If you are new to spellwork, don’t start here. Learn your way around with less potentially dangerous work first – and while you’re at it, you may learn that there are easier and/or less dangerous ways to accomplish your goal. I do not believe that there is no justification for certain types of work, ever; I think even work to maim and kill is sometimes justified. But it is dangerous work, and it’s dangerous not just to the target – it’s dangerous to the person doing the work as well. But I suppose that will have to be another blog post.)

It’s important to note that not all mojo bags or container spells work like this, where you and your love interest would both be in the bag. Some mojos are made to be “magnets,” where YOU are the target in the sense of the herbs etc are being instructed to work on you – to amp your glamour and sex appeal, to make you more magnetic and smooth-talking, or whatever. But once you get in the habit of thinking about the how and why of the ingredients and the manner of creation and working, you will begin to see what you should do and why you are doing it. Always think about what symbolic job the ingredients are doing, and what/who the target(s) is/are, when constructing your work. This will help you avoid some common traps, like “beginner syndrome” in which you figure if three herbs are good, thirty must be better, or “everything but the kitchen sink” syndrome, where you expect a single mojo or vigil light to do seven different jobs on fifteen different people, to banish evil AND draw luck AND make your neighbors stop fighting AND soften your landlord AND keep enemies away AND draw friends. If you want something to do that many jobs, you can’t expect it do any of them very well.

So when I have clients send me seven different kinds of personal concern, thinking (I suppose) that if one is good, four is better, I often have to (politely) check their exuberance. If you have a target’s hair, there is no need to also include their business card, not when we’re talking about personal concerns in general. (It would be different if you were working on them in a way that related to their business or job, of course – I can think of times when you might want both hair and a business card .) But in general, there are lots of options for personal concerns, and they generally fall somewhere on a scale of good to better to best, and if you have something from the “best” area, there is usually no need to also add something from the “good” or “better” category. A list of personal concerns in order of desirability for most spells in general might look like this:

• hair, bodily fluids, nail parings, skin

• used / previously worn, unwashed clothing, shoes that have been worn, insoles from shoes, foot tracks, dirty towels, napkins, drinking straws etc (think “things that their saliva or sweat has gotten on pretty good)

• original signatures

• handwriting samples

• washed/clean clothing, personal property or objects owned or touched by the target

• photographs

• business cards, newspaper clippings mentioning their name

• name papers
 

Obviously, there is going to be some variation here, and certain kinds of spells will call for certain concerns, and in cases like that, you should probably trust that the spell does that for a reason, and use the recommended concern if possible. Some spells will call for more than one type of personal concern for various reasons, as well, so there is often some combination. And for various reasons, different workers in different contexts might rearrange the list I’ve given here and change the order of things. And also, depending on the spell or working, you might choose inherently inert objects (a plastic doll or a wax candle shaped like a person or a body part) or inherently powerful objects (roots, herbs, lodestones) to be baptized and called by the person’s name, to stand in for them in the spell or working. So plenty of things might complicate the above list or cause you to choose based on something other than the order of “proximity” or “inherent magical link” to the person. But in general, the higher up the list something is, the less you have to manipulate it or do extra stuff to it in order to get it working as a link to that target person in your spell. Hair already has a magical link between it and the target; you don’t have to do anything else. A piece of paper or doll has to be magically linked to the target before it can be used to affect the target.

In understanding image magic and the principles of working on somebody at a distance (giving their doll baby a bath versus actually having them take the bath physically themselves, for instance), we also have to consider other major players in conjure and spellwork, and how they interact with and fit into what we’re doing. We are concerned with the spirits or souls of ourselves and our targets, but we also have to consider the spirits of the herbs, the personages of saints and intelligent spirits, elemental spirits, God and the Trinity, etc. That will be part two of this little series on image/affinity magic.
ETA: And Mother Mystic has a post on this topic that I recommend.

***

Image one – creation of a doll-baby containing the target’s personal concerns (under the lodestone) and a fixed, baptized lodestone), which will be paired with a similar doll-baby to represent the other “half” of the couple

Image two – a moving lodestone spell, in which the lodestones have been baptized in the targets’ names

Image three – a sample name paper showing two names, in which one party is to be dominant over the other party.  As such, it does double duty as a sort of (drastically concentrated type of) petition paper; it’s a petition paper in that it is invoking a particular effect besides just standing in for a person. Writing your name across another person’s name gives you dominance over the person. So in a way, it’s a symbolic kind of shorthand for the petition “may so and so be dominant over so and so,” though the act of making the paper is itself a miniature bit of spellwork and thus a bit more than just a petition or just a namepaper.  A name paper standing in for a single person as a personal concern might just have a name on it and be much simpler.

PLEASE NOTE: all photos in my blog are MY personal property, and are copyright Karma Zain, unless otherwise noted (in cases where I use an image in the public domain, for example, or an image licensed under a Creative Commons license).  You may NOT take, download, “borrow,” repost, or reuse these images without my express permission.  Just like taking my writing and reposting it without my permission (barring using small, properly attributed portions in the context of a quote or review that would fall under “fair use”), in taking my images you are stealing from me.  You are especially not advised to take my images and then put them on your blog or facebook, where I will eventually find them and be more than a little ticked off (no, I can’t look at every web page in existence, but my wonderful readers, colleagues, clients, and friends will let me know when they stumble upon such things).  Sorry to spoil an otherwise lecture-and-soapbox-free blog post, but I just stumbled across a photo of some bottles of oil that I posted to this blog last year, taken and put up in a self-proclaimed rootworker’s facebook album.  I have to assume this person got the image from someone else who had stolen it from me, because I cannot imagine that they would be nuts enough to steal from me and then allow me access to where the stolen material is being hosted on purpose.  Surely.

status update and info about usps trace requests + new stuff

Power is back on and DSL is back up. I’m getting caught up as I can, but there is a lot of backlog.

Please understand that the southeast, especially GA and AL, have just suffered what they are calling the fourth-worst tornado event in US history, so if your order has not arrived as you expected, please be patient just a little bit longer, as anything that’s had to go out of or go through the southeast may have suffered a slight delay. (And please, I beg you, if you are waiting on an order, try to have some perspective here – lives have been lost and livelihoods have been destroyed. If you can spare a prayer or a donation for the people who have lost lives and homes and jobs and loved ones, there are a lot of people who could use your help and prayers).

It’s highly unlikely your package has been lost, but if it’s been 20 days past the label ship date (30 for international) and your package has still not arrived, email me with a "package trace request" and I’ll put in a USPS trace for you. (They will not put in a trace prior to 20 business days; the estimated delivery times shown at usps.com and at ebay are only estimations, and packages are not considered lost until 20 business days are passed, so prior to that there is nothing I can do. At 20 business days, though, I’ll be happy to burn up the phone lines for you and find your package). All of this information, by the way, is in the FAQ and in the payment acknowledgment email you received when you completed checkout and payment (which also contained a link to the FAQ pages).

I’ve listed a leather and sterling mercury dime bracelet and a new memento mori rosary. New Seven Rays of the Archangels rosary coming up hopefully tomorrow.

questions you’ve asked – on item instructions in general and saints candles in particular

Q: Why won’t you tell me what day of the week to light my saint candle on? [Implied: it’s a simple question, and I feel that the purchase of a $15 custom item from your store that it took you an hour to make, custom, just for me, creates an obligation for you to answer any question I have about how to use it even though you don’t know me or my situation from Adam’s housecat.]

A: So many tears would be prevented if folks read the FAQ before purchasing; the FAQ clearly states that this is simply an impossible thing for anyone to expect of me, which if you put yourself in my shoes for a few minutes and imagined that I get twenty emails just like yours every day, there is no way that I would have time to make these custom items.  The FAQ states:

Do your items come with instructions?

Not unless the listing states that they do; there is more than one way to use my products depending on the spell you are using. If you need guidance on general principles of spellcraft, or on using hoodoo oils, powders, etc in general, visit my blog for tips, tricks, and links to reliable, educational internet resources. If you require specific guidance or feedback and want my personal attention on your use of my products or on the spell you are casting, you can purchase a consultation session at my website. It is not humanly possible for me to answer every email I receive asking for free spell advice and for instructions on how to do X,Y, or Z with my products. If you need a spell, your single best resource is probably luckymojo.com – they have hundreds if not thousands of hoodoo spells listed.

If you’re going to order a candle or oil and then get mad at me when I can’t answer questions about the specific spell you’re using with it, then I wish you wouldn’t order from me. I don’t advertise that service and don’t offer it; I do not offer free spell consultations. There are *hundreds* of spells out there. If you need one-on-one guidance, you might consider hiring a rootworker if you don’t know where to begin in doing your own research.

In part this is a problem of time. I spent at least 20 hours a week just answering emails (this does not include typing up light setting reports and consultations; this is essentially work I am not being directly paid for). It is not humanly possible for me to give free, custom advice to everybody who buys an item from my store. I would be out of business in no time because my power would be cut off and I would be starved to death.

But there’s an even bigger underlying issue here. The author of the email containing this type of question presumes that there is one simple answer to the question, “What day should I light my saint candle on?”

In fact, there is NOT one simple answer, and you can’t really blame your rootworker or product supplier if you bought an item without a spell in mind and then find yourself not knowing how to use it. There are a thousand spells and not all are equally suited to your situation; it requires an assessment of your case in order for your worker to advise you, and such assessments take time, and they are not automatically included in the purchase price of a $15, custom-finished, custom-painted, and custom-fixed candle.

Would you go into Lowe’s, buy a few pressure-treated cypress boards, and then bring them back to the cashier and say “Should I build my deck with the steps facing north or west?” I sure hope you wouldn’t. And if you did, I sure hope you wouldn’t get mad at the employee who said, “Actually, had you asked first, that isn’t the material I would have recommended given that you don’t know what you’re doing yet.”

An offer to customize according to client preferences does not automatically equal unlimited post-purchase support and troubleshooting.

But let me illustrate why this is not a question of me being stingy and withholding a simple answer (leaving aside for the moment that if it were simple, you could have found it in five minutes with Google). Let’s say, for instance, that the client purchased a fixed St. Gerard vigil candle. Client then writes and asks, “What day of the week should I light it on?” Here are (some of) the problems embedded in the question that make it NOT something with a simple answer (AND all of this is leaving aside the fact that I only have so many characters allowed by ebay in my response to your message sent on ebay, so i couldn’t type all of this even if I wanted to – and I don’t want to).

First of all, not everybody treats a vigil light for a saint like a vigil light for a hoodoo condition. Some folks will set a love light on Friday, because somebody told them to, or they read it somewhere, or it’s customary where they come from to do love work on Friday, or because Friday is associated with Venus through a long chain of complicated etymological, linguistic, and historical reasons [1] and Venus is the goddess of love.

Note First Huge Problem: this reasoning does not fly with somebody working that candle in an orthodox Roman Catholic tradition. Goddess of love? Surely you jest?!

If you work with St. Gerard as a Roman Catholic, doing a novena, you would light it whenever. If you were my great-grandmother, you would light it on Sunday, because she started all her novenas on Sunday with only a few exceptions.

If you work with St. Gerard as an image or aspect of the lwa Baron Samedi, then you would light it on Saturday.  I do not know what religion you are when you order this candle; I can’t tell you “the right answer.”

Let’s just say the for the sake of illustration that a petition to a saint would be set according to the same principles as a non-denominational love-drawing or other type of “condition” candle (NOT a wise assumption, but let’s just follow the thinking for the sake of argument). The answer obviously depends in part on what you are petitioning the saint for.

If you decided to use hoodoo guidelines to work your vigil or novena, and you were setting the light for the purpose of having a child, and you needed an eager, cooperative, loving husband and a couple in synch with each other, you might set it on Friday, since it’s the day for love but also the day for general attraction work. OR maybe you’d set it on Monday, since in some traditions it’s associated with the moon, which in some traditions governs fertility. Or on Sunday, since that is the traditional day of blessings in some religions/paths. Or on Tuesday if you wanted to focus on your husband’s virility, as Tuesday is the day of Tir or Tiw, the Germanic counterpart of Mars and known in Scandinavian traditions for strength, victory, battle, and other “virile” attributes [2]. OR you might set it on Wednesday, named for Odin, in turn associated with Mercury, because Mercury days are when you’d work to remove obstacles. Or on Thursday because it’s associated with Jupiter who you tap for any kind of abundance or success work.

I hope you get my point.

You want to get hung up on a day? Fine. Light in on October the 8th.

But it’s March, you say, and you want to do the novena now. Ok, no problem. Then LIGHT THE DAMN CANDLE NOW. If there is ONE DAY associated with a saint, it’s generally the saint’s death day, which generally becomes the feast day. So if you are hung up on certain days, then you are going to be waiting for one chance a year to light that candle.

Another problem inherent in the question is that not everybody uses days of the week to determine when they will set a light, regardless of the type of light. In general, I do not, unless the need for the light is not pressing but is something like a pre-booked set of lights over the course of a few months to improve communication between two people. In a case like that, I might set it on a certain day of the week – but I might not. It depends on a number of different factors. Some folks are more concerned about the planetary hour of the day, or the phase of the moon, or whether or not Mercury is retrograde, or what the sun and moon signs of the targets are. It’s complex. However, that does NOT mean you have to be all complicated in your approach in order to get results. If you purchase a fixed light, it’s fixed – I did everything that MUST be done short of lighting it. Anything else you choose to do is up to you and the framework you are working within.

Bottom line: There IS NO ANSWER to the question “on what day do I set the St. Gerard light” other than “that is up to you and the spell or framework you’ve chosen to work within.” Instead of presuming your rootworker is being mean or stingy, take a sec to listen to what they are saying and chill out with the getting peeved because you didn’t get the answer you wanted. Maybe you didn’t ask the right question.

Other bottom line: if I were independently wealthy and had all the time in the world, I would LOVE to just talk to folks about conjure and religion and spirituality and folk magic all day long. I would LOVE to. But I have to pay my bills just like you do, and I just plain cannot answer questions about individual specific situations and spells for free. If there is something that MUST be done in order for your product or object or item to work, I will let you know, I promise. If you MUST feed it with oil, I will tell you so.

But if it gets into the realm of preference or religious background or worldview or framework, then we are out of the realm of “must” and into the realm of “do your own research or book a consultation, or go ask those super-friendly, super-knowledgeable folks I’ve linked to for help.” I swear on my great-grandmother’s Bible than I do not insist on this to be a bitch – I insist on it because I get 100 emails a day and I have to pay my bills and feed my ever-hungry teenager and fill orders and do consultations for paying clients. If you think about it for a minute, what I’m saying here is not unreasonable – and I promise I charge a whole lot less than your lawyer does for a consultation.

Finally, again, if the shoe does not fit, do not wear it! If you are reading this, then you are the type that reads and probably finds the instructions and FAQs, and so this probably does not apply to you at all. I’ve written it up for the sake of new customers who might not understand my position here, and also by way of illustrating just how complex the choice of some aspects of conjure work can be – and how personal. When I say “one size does not fit all,” that does not mean it’s a free-for-all and that anything goes. Changes and tweaks and additions and modifications are done according to a certain logic that makes theoretical sense according to the conjure practitioner who has internalized this theory or logic. Changes and choices are made for a reason.

But that does not mean that all adaptations or changes will be the same in every case, and it furthermore does not mean every worker will do it the same way. I come from a Catholic background, but a worker who comes from a Protestant or non-Christian background may be making choices according to a different set of considerations than the ones I’m using. All changes and choices are logical and coherent within the operative framework; not every aspect of every worker’s framework is the same, though.

NOW, having said all that and it being nearly 3 am and me still needing to type up a couple of light setting reports and contracts before I can sign off for good for the coming week-and-change, HAPPY HOODOOING! I love y’all, and thanks for reading, and thanks for shopping with me, trusting me with your spiritual supplies needs, and giving me the honor of helping you achieve your goals with rootwork and/or advice. Don’t forget to “like” my business page on facebook!

As a reward for those of you who do read, and who have stuck with this post to the end even though you knew all this already, here’s an easter egg for you: at the Spring equinox (aka feast day of St. Cuthbert, Bishop of Lindisfarne, aka 2nd Sunday in Lent, aka a Fire Festival, aka just-after-the-full-moon, aka the 20th of March), I will select randomly from among those who have left a comment in response to this post, here on livejournal.  [Ed.: this post was originally posted on livejournal; entries have been imported into WordPress but not comments.] I will send the winner a free bottle of extra-special, only-made-once-a-year spiritual oil. I won’t say what it is yet, and in fact I don’t have a name for it yet, but I promise it will be awesome, and I promise it will be rare, and I promise it will be multi-purpose and in the general range of blessing/abundance/prosperity, and I promise it will be hand-made by me with all the attention that all of my spiritual oils, powders, etc get. Just leave  a comment on this post right here to enter.

I do allow anonymous comments, but in order to be able to win something, you have to put either a unique username or a first name and last initial in the comment so that you would recognize your unique name/nickname if I were to announce it.  If you are John S., there is probably somebody else out there with your first name and last initial, so give me something else, like a nickname or city/state, ok?

Have a great March and thanks for stopping by!

[1] In the language of the Anglo-Saxons, Friday was Frigedæg, named for the Germanic goddess Frig. This came about because the language of the learned in Europe at this time was Latin, and so all correspondence, records, prayerbooks etc used when the Germanic settlers were converted to Christianity were initially in Latin. Thus what we now call Friday was then called “dies Veneris,” or “the day of Venus,” as this is how the imperial calendars in the Roman empire worked – all days of the week were named after planets (which in their turn were named after the gods). English-speaking clerics translated this into the vernacular as “the day of Frig,” as they mapped the Roman deities onto Germanic deities in cases of translation like this. So if I were working within some sort of British and/or folk tradition, I might make my choices based on the fact that this is currently Hrepmonað, named for the goddess Hreðe (not that we actually know much about her, as her name was preserved by a Christian monk who was happy to see the worship of the pagan gods pass), and/or that today is Quiquagesima Sunday, when the homilies focus on when Christ was said to have healed a blind man, and/or that the full moon is coming up on the 19th and the moon is currently waxing, and/or that the Equinox is coming up, etc.

If I were coming from a more typical Protestant background in my conjure work, I would probably not be working with St. Gerard at all.  He’s not a household name in non-Catholic circles like St. Expedite is, and it might be more common to call on the angel Gabriel for fertility stuff in some circles, given his role in the Annunciation.

See, working with the saints is not actually shot through-and-through traditional Southern-style rootwork. I grew up petitioning the saints and dressing the Infant of Prague in fancy robes and putting the baby Jesus statue in the arms of the Joseph statue and putting a crown of woven flowers on the Virgin Mary statue in May. But I grew up in a rare family – a deep-South Catholic family. Outside of those areas like Louisiana where Catholicism was everywhere, there actually aren’t all that many Catholic rootworkers, and of the thousands and thousands of saints that the Catholic church recognizes or has recognized, only a small handful are widely known in hoodoo. That’s why it’s pretty easy to find out what day folks might set a light for love drawing in general, but not so easy to find out what day folks might set a light to a Catholic saint that hasn’t quite made it into the “mainstream” like St. Expedite has. It’s hard to find “the rules” on days to set saints’ lights in conjure because there are no rules.  You will find differences in how novenas to even popular saints like St. Expedite are handled, some folks saying Wednesday, some Sunday, etc, some a red candle, some a blue candle, etc.

[2] The word “virile” itself comes from the Latin word meaning “man,” so when I say courage/battle/strength are “masculine” attributes, I’m being etymological here, not sexist.

name papers and “crossed writing”

I sometimes get questions about how to make name papers, especially of the "turn the paper and write your name crosswise over the target’s" varieties.

A while back, I took a photo of what such a sample paper might look like, and I’ve been meaning to post it.  My impetus for doing so today is that in unrelated work, I found a digital copy of an 1832 letter to Mary Custis Lee from her aunt that illustrates on a larger scale exactly this sort of writing.  The digital archive of which it’s a part describes the letter thus:

The letter is an example of a "crossed" letter, meaning that it was written in one direction, rotated, and then written cross-wise to save paper. Sometimes the respondents would write across the original letter and send it back. See also a letter in the collection from Robert E. Lee to his children.

 

The letter has nothing to do with conjure per se, but it’s just pretty darned cool and I wanted to share it.  You can see the full letter here, at I Remain: A Digital Archive of Letters, Manuscripts, and Ephemera.

Anyway, here’s the sample "crossed names" name paper I made to upload:

ugh, I forgot to rotate the photo.  But you get the idea.

Bonanza FAQs

Alright, folks, I’m finally learning my way around Bonanza a little better, and I can give you some more insight into how to make your purchase there as smooth as possible. This first FAQ deals with shipping and how NOT to over-pay.

How do I make a purchase without paying too much for shipping?

The way bonanza’s settings work, you have to “make an offer.” If your offer is for the full displayed default total, your offer will be automatically approved and an invoice will be automatically sent. BUT if you add things to your cart and then let the computer do the math, you may end up paying too much for shipping, because it won’t let me do the math one way for First Class and a different way for Priority. If one of your items is $5.75 for Priority Mail, and the rest of your items will fit into the same box, then they can ship at no additional cost. But we both have to take a few extra steps to make this happen.

If you want First Class shipping in the US, AND if your calculated shipping total is less than $5.75, follow these steps: Select your items and add to cart. Make an offer for the default amount, changing nothing. If you change nothing, your offer will be automatically accepted and you can then pay via PayPal.

If your shipping total is greater than $5.75, and/or if you want Priority shipping, follow these steps: Select your items and add to cart. You will have the option to “make an offer.” To the total cost of the items in your cart, add $5.75 for shipping to the US. Add $14 for shipping to anywhere else in the world. Submit your offer. If your stuff will fit in the small flat rate Priority box, I will accept the offer and you’ll get an invoice.

In the event that the items you want will not fit into a small flat rate Priority Mail box, or there is anything else about the offer that won’t work for whatever reason, I will submit a counter-offer, explaining what I had to change.

If you KNOW that your items won’t fit into a small flat rate Priority box, but will have to go into a medium box instead, you can add $11 to your item total and I will automatically approve that offer. If you aren’t sure, submit an offer with the lower shipping amount; I’ll know if your stuff will fit or not when I see your cart and I’ll make adjustments. Don’t worry – if I make a change to your offer showing a higher amount than you planned on, you will have the chance to back out.

Note: If you are not in the US, this won’t work. You’ll need to let me look at your cart contents and figure out the best shipping option depending on size, bulk, weight, amount, etc. So international buyers whose stuff is larger or bulkier should add stuff to their carts and make a best-guess shipping offer; I’ll adjust it and explain what I’ve done and why. Alternately, you can write me first with a list of what you want and I can tell you what the shipping will be, and then you can add it to your offer; that will save time.

Is bonanza just a little bit more trouble than your other options for shopping with Karma Zain?  Yes.  But the savings can be significant, so especially if you have a larger order, it can be worth the time it takes to follow a few extra steps.

Commonly Requested Altar Work and Services

Since the new web design and store are not quite ironed out yet (sigh), I thought I’d write a post describing some of the more commonly requested types of altar work and spellwork.  I find myself answering the same questions over and over again and typing up the same info about price ranges and what spells include, and so I’m posting this so I’ll have a URL to refer people to so they can see photos and get an idea of how I work.

One day this stuff will have its own page with photos on the website, but this’ll have to do in the meanwhile, and in the meanwhile you can book any of the following services using the paypal menu at my userinfo page.  PLEASE NOTE: If you are a new client or customer, meaning I have not already done altar work or a reading or consultation for you, and you want to book something other than a light setting, *I use contracts for all rootwork and altar work beyond light settings and mojo bags.*  I will have to write one up for your case and you will have to agree to its terms before I will accept your payment and begin work.  The contract spells out what you can expect and when, and it gives the fee for the altar work. This fee will not change; I will not write you a week into the work and say "I see you are miserably cursed; send me $1000 for a cleansing of your aura" or any garbage like that.  If something comes up in the course of the work that makes me think we need to adjust fire, I’ll contact you about it, but I will never take it upon myself to adjust contracted work without your agreement, and I will never say "I had to do X so you owe me another X amount of money."  If you are a new client and would like to see a sample contract before booking, I’ll be happy to send you one to look over so you can get an idea of how I work and what sort of responses you can expect from me.  If you are new to hiring a professional worker at all, you might have a look through my list of posts on client education, client info, frequently asked questions, etiquette and ethics, hoodoo education, principles of magic, and questions you’ve asked.

Please note that I do not take all cases that cross my "desk."  In fact, I turn away more cases than I take (largely because most of the queries that I get are for reconciliation in, or work on, a troubled relationship, and this means that a great number of people seeking spellwork are 1. desperate and hurting and 2. not coming from a background of familiarity with the principles of magic but are rather led to magic out of desperation over their love life, 3. have often tried other "spellcasters" before who operate a certain way and thus they expect everybody to operate this way, and thus they 4. often have unrealistic expectations and 5. get really offended and/or refuse to believe that there is not something unique about them, or their ex, or their case when a worker suggests that their expectations are unrealistic and/or success in their case is unlikely).  For the record, I do take the occasional reconciliation case.  I’d say I take 1 out of every 85 that come my way.  I require a consultation before I can say whether and how I can help, but often I know whether I will take the case or not based on the contents of the initial contact email, truth be told.  There are a lot of workers out there who are a lot more patient than I am about educating spellwork newcomers about the principles of said spellwork, so folks seeking reconciliation are usually going to be happier with one of those folks anyway.  For more on reconciliation, follow the tags.

So, my putting up a list of work that I often do doesn’t mean you can just push a button and that’s the end of it, the universe sends everything you want your way and it lands in your lap with a bow on top.  It doesn’t work that way.  If you are new to hiring a professional spiritual worker, and especially if you are new to conjure and hoodoo, please educate yourself before hiring me or any other worker to do spiritual work for you.  There are a ton of scam artists out there, and there are a ton of newcomers to the world of professional spellwork for them to scam every day. Don’t be taken in.  Perhaps counterintuitively, some of the major signs of a scam artist often include the infamous "Satisfaction Guarantee" and the less infamous, but once upon a time quite common, "Pay Half Now and Pay the Rest Only When You Are Satisfied" appeals.  These would appear to be a good thing – why they aren’t is too long a tale for this already-long post, but one of these days I’ll get around to posting about it. (This is not to say that these automatically mean scam, but combined with a few other signs, they ought to be Giant Yellow Lights for anyone.  Check out your worker’s rep.  Put the internet to work for you.)

Email consultations.  Read more about them here and here.  Turnaround time is typically about 14 working days.

Vigil Light Setting with Report .  You send me a one or two sentence petition, and the full names of any people involved in the petition as well as any photos you want me to use.  I fix, dress, and burn a customized 7 day vigil light for you, reporting on the results of the burn via email upon its completion.

Three-day taper settings (MWF), no report.  These are commonly used for maintenance of a honey jar or sour jar that you have working on my altars, though they can also be booked if you just want a petition set on my altar with a standalone taper light, three times a week for one week.  I report generally upon the work when it’s completed, but do not give a play-by-play on a daily or even weekly basis with this service.

Email followup on previous consult or ongoing work.  If you need a checkup on work you currently have contracted with me, or a followup on an earlier consultation, or even a checkup on work you’re doing for yourself that you’ve consulted with me about before, book a followup consultation rather than a brand-new one.

Email Readings.  Turnaround times are currently in excess of eight weeks, so I discourage new clients from booking them.  I can recommend a number of good readers who aren’t booked up as bad as I am and who can get back to you sooner.  If you don’t mind the queue and your question is not urgent, then you can book an email reading with me.

Custom Honey Jar, with 1 month work on my altar.  You send me info about your situation, and I make a custom honey jar for you and work it on my altars for four weeks, setting lights on it three times a week (MWF, no light setting report).  Does not include shipping; at the end of the month we can discuss what you want to do next.


Uncrossing or Spiritual Cleansing via pendulum and censing on my altars.  A photograph of the person to be uncrossed or cleansed is necessary, and a personal concern such as hair is highly recommended.  Contact me for instructions on how to mail the personal concerns.   If you want a 7 day run of spiritual cleansing or uncrossing work, then book seven of these.  If you need these timed to coincide with work you are doing on your end, such as a series of uncrossing baths, then please contact me before booking to make sure I can meet your needs in terms of scheduling.  Sometimes my altars are full or I have other work going on that has a tight schedule or timing to it.


Fiery Wall of Protection Spell.  Standard, for one person.  Includes creation of protection mojo (technically a paket, as it cannot be opened once it’s ritually tied as part of its creation, and it’s a good bit larger than a mojo bag), shipping cost to a US address, and cemetery disposal of the ritual remains associated with your enemy or troublemaker. Please contact me before booking for options for having the spell worked for multiple protectees, as well as for options if you prefer a different type of disposal of the remains or prefer to have them mailed to you to dispose of yourself.  Can be worked without personal concerns, but they are highly recommended; contact me for instructions on how to mail them.  *If you are a brand-new client, especially if you are new to hoodoo, I strongly recommend you write to me and tell me a bit about your situation before purchasing this service.  This may not be the best spell for your case, and/or we may want to do a different type of ritual disposal depending on what you need protection from.*  If you are trying to call down hellfire and brimstone on your neighbor for parking on your side of the street, or you want to send an enemy to the graveyard spirits because they were rude to you at a party, I will probably refund your money and refuse the case.  So feel free to write first.

Moving Lodestone Attraction spell.  Includes creation of mojo bag and shipping, along with lodestone food and instructions, to a US address.  Suitable for those trying to draw a specific lover, to draw a new and unknown lover, or to bring two people together for other, non-romantic purposes (such as making a new friend, strengthening a friendship, getting an influential person to take your side in something,etc).  Personal concerns are highly recommended; contact me for instructions on how to mail them. 

Basic Binding spell, 7 day, with remains shipped to you with instructions for disposal. Binding spells of this sort are done to hold an enemy down to prevent him or her from taking further action against you.  Personal concerns are ideal but this can be worked even if the enemy’s name is not known.  You can use this spell even if you have multiple and/or unknown targets.  You should not, however, expect the same sort of results if you are working without a link to your target as you’d get it you were targeting a specific person with their personal concerns.  If you are trying to bind two people together for a love spell, or trying to bind a partner’s nature sexually, you must have a consultation before I will agree to take your case.  I do not accept the majority of love cases that people write to me about, but even if I will not take your case (and statistically there is a very good chance I won’t), I will probably be able to recommend another reader or worker to you who might speak with you about it, so don’t be afraid to write.

Basic Reversing spell, crossroads disposal.  These spells are to send nasty junk back on the person or people who are aiming it at you.  It is not, in itself, an uncrossing spell, and it is not, in itself, a revenge spell.  It is not really a complete protection spell either, in a lot of cases.  So it often needs to be done as part of a more complex set of actions or steps.  It may not be the best solution for your case, so please feel free to inquire before booking this service.  This spell uses a jumbo reversing candle set on a customized, fixed mirror and prepared with all the necessary reversing materia magica.  At the conclusion of the working, the remains are disposed of by me at a crossroads.  I have to drive out to the country to do this spell right, so do not expect your report within a few hours of the candle going out.  As with the above Binding spell, this can be done with or without personal concerns and known full names, but personal concerns are always better.

I do lots of other different types of spellwork, but these are by far the types of spells I do most frequently.  Even if you don’t end up going with something listed here for your spellwork, this should hopefully give you an idea of what to expect and what kind of fees are involved in typical cases.  Many customized workings will involve modifications to the basic types of spells mentioned above.  And while other workers’ preferences in setting up their altars, fee structures, contract terms, turnaround times, reporting styles, preferred methods etc. will vary, traditional rootworkers will usually offer similar types of spells, so this can be a good introduction to your research on having a rootworker cast a spell for you.

Some altar work, such as most light settings and mojo bags, does not require a consultation – or rather does not require you to book a consultation before I can begin your work.  You should always just write first and give me a (brief) intro to your situation, asking if this or that spell is right for you, if you need a formal consultation, if I have anything to recommend. Sometimes I can make a recommendation that won’t require you to book a consultation.  Most light settings and mojo bags can be booked with our trading a few emails, informally, rather than your having to order a formal consultation. And some types of altar work can be be booked the same way.  Anything involving  hexing, crossing, breakup, hot foot etc, OR involving an existing romantic relationship, is probably going to require a formal consultation, though.

But write before you purchase – you never know.