St. Martha Altar Service Begins Tonight: Steady Work, Fair Pay, Balance of Power, Peaceful Home, Domination

This work begins the night of July 29th, the feast day of St. Martha, but there are several different modes of different lengths running concurrently here, so you absolutely can book late, as long as you see slots still available for the service you’re interested in.

St. Martha in the Bible

Famously depicted in the Bible as getting stuck with all the cooking and cleaning while her sister Mary sat at Jesus’ feet and listened to him teach, St. Martha is the patron saint of servers, cooks, domestic workers, housewives, and those in the hospitality industry – those who are behind the scenes making important things go even when nobody notices.

Her devotees will call on her for intercession when they need steady work, especially in these fields, or when they are having difficulty with their work, for instance if pay is slow in coming or a boss or manager is being unfair. She’s often called on to help with peace in the home, as well, as an extension of her association with the domestic sphere.

St. Martha the Dominator

Some legends have her leaving Bethany for France after Christ’s death and resurrection. William Caxton’s 1483 English translation of the Golden Legend tells how she tamed an infamous monster through her confidence in the power of God, her faith in the sign of the cross, and her skill in using the domestic tools with which she was familiar and comfortable.

And this was no garden variety baby dragon. It was really more of a sea monster, half beast and half fish, the offspring of the infamous Leviathan and some Galician beast. It was bigger than an ox and had the strength of a dozen lions (or bears, take your pick). It regularly sank ships and ate people.

Martha, being a badass, made short work of the beast by tying it up with her girdle (which can be understood in context as her belt). She didn’t need a sword or armor.

The Golden Legend explains in detail how the creature defended itself from attack, and boy is it disgusting.

These extra-scriptural legends account for much of her fame and reputation as a patron saint. She is called on for assistance by those who need to get the upper hand in any kind of relationship in which they find themselves “at the bottom of the totem pole.” In conjure and in the folk traditions of Latin America, she’s earned the title of St. Martha the Dominator, and she’s often called on when women want to dominate a man.

But in this role as dominatrix, she is also petitioned to help employees get better treatment from their employers, for instance, especially if they are household employees like kitchen servants or nannies. So she is a great ally for all types of situations in which you are the underdog, or you might be taken for granted, or there’s a built-in power imbalance in a situation.

Read more about St. Martha, her history, and working with her in general at this main article.

In orthodox Roman Catholicism, she is also the patron of dietitians, hemophiliacs, housewives, landlords, waitresses, servants, cooks, and women workers.

I’ve heard folks say she’s helped them with sibling issues in their family, like jealousy, or manipulative attention-grubbing, or rivalry. I’ve also heard her called on by people facing difficulties in managing their households because of strife or poverty; along with St. Joseph, she is a wonderful ally if you have a lot of mouths to feed and you are running short of money and resources to take care of them all.

My St. Martha formula is created from this sort of three-dimensional perspective of St. Martha rather than focusing only on her role as a dominator, and the same is true with this service I’m offering. While it’s suitable to use if you’re asking her help in getting the upper hand with a boss or returning a straying spouse, it’s also suitable to use if you’re setting lights to honor or thank her, if you want to invoke her aid for something specific, or if you’re seeking her help for something more general like patience or pragmatism.

Even when the difficulty is internal rather than interpersonal, St. Martha can help. If, for instance, you need help accepting the fact that right now in your life, you have to be waiting tables if you want to be able to stay in this town and have a shot at an acting career down the road; if you’re struggling with disappointment, envy, or resentment related to your current station in life; or if you need help accepting the things you cannot change while you’re figuring out how to change the things you can, then St. Martha can be a very strong ally for you.

Learn more about the service and the available options at the Seraphin Station shop.

questions you’ve asked (in search terms): ratings, goofer dust, saints

Q: Who is rated the best on AIRR of hoodoo rootworkers? I have a complex problem that needs solved, who can do rootwork?

Every worker at AIRR can do rootwork. Every worker at AIRR has a minimum of two years’ experience working for the public, professionally; most have much, much more than that. We all handle complex cases all the time.

There is no rating system, and “ratings” and “awards” are two of the warning signs for scam artists and unethical practitioners. Anybody claiming to have received a spellcasting award or to have been voted #1 in something or other is lying or is misrepresenting the nature of the organization doing the awarding. There is no such organization that awards such things, tracks workers, assembles ratings, or anything like that.

I’ll just touch on a few of the numerous underlying problems with looking for ratings.

First of all, what are the established criteria by which to “rate” a worker? If you named yours, I can guarantee you that the next person to name their own will have different criteria and/or will weight them differently, and I guarantee that you two wouldn’t agree on what counts as meeting or exceeding the criteria in every case, too.

Every case is unique, every worker works a different way, and so much depends on “fit,” on communication and on the worker and client “clicking.” If you go read one of those forums dedicated to folks reporting on their experiences with spellcasters, you will quickly realize how ridiculous and often contradictory the various members’ criteria for rating or judging a spellcaster are.

Put simply, there are no rankings and there is no organization that would track such things. There are no criteria by which to “rate” workers that are logical, fair, verifiable, and able to be applied across the board. Workers, like doctors and lawyers, have different specialties, different criteria for taking cases and accepting clients, different styles, and different ways of working. There is no such thing as “the best worker” any more than there is such a thing as “the best lawyer” or “the best doctor.”

There are LOTS of criteria for choosing a worker or lawyer or therapist or financial advisor or anything else, and if you look at customer comments/ratings on some of those sites, you’ll see pretty quickly that “customer satisfaction” is usually the biggest thing people base a rating on. But that’s a pretty nebulous thing to go by, and it’s actually not a characteristic of the worker him/herself. On being told that the thing they’re pushing for is not going to happen, so the worker can’t take their case and they should consider letting it go, one client will leave 5 stars and mention the worker’s honesty and ethics. But another will be angry, leave 1 star, and write, “a fraud! couldn’t do the work, not a real worker!”

To be blunt, a client is often not in a position to rate a worker on anything other than bedside manner and communication style, which are part of the picture but certainly not the whole picture. The more a client understands about spiritual work and the more experience they have with it, the better, but even so, different people will have different criteria and priorities. You just can’t apply statistics to this kind of thing.

And workers have different skills, specialties, setups, policies, and preferences. For instance, if you are looking for a phone reading so you can have reconciliation work done, well, I usually don’t do phone readings and I usually don’t take reconciliation cases. I’ll tell you out of the gate I’m not the worker for you. If you want some good old fashioned smiting on your deadbeat ex, some workers don’t do work like that and some will (after a reading or intake appointment or consultation or something). I will do that kind of work if it’s justified, if it will benefit the client ultimately, and if the client is not a total stranger to me or comes recommended by a colleague.

But I have no patience with frantic lovers who think their breakup is an emergency and who will label messages “urgent” and then say “he didn’t call me last Friday!!!” You will not want to come to me about that kind of thing. The kind of client who would label this urgent is also the kind of client who rarely pauses to consider that their worker could be dealing with an actual emergency with a client whose child is being abused by the custodial parent, or who is facing eviction, or whose spouse has just died and left him with tons of secret debt which is all past due. So no, I’m not going to consider your boyfriend’s texting frequency an emergency, sorry. But there are other workers who work with those clients well and have the patience to deal with them and educate them about how reconciliation and return-a-lover work works.

Most professional workers will be able to tell you something about themselves, their way of working, and their philosophy and communication and reading style; you should find one who appeals to you and drop them a line. I’m sorry to say that that’s the only way to do it – there is no ranking system and no way to rate rootworkers in any kind of across-the-board system, no way to get reliable statistics (be wary of anyone who says they have a percentage success rate – that’s a warning sign that I’ve written about in another “questions you’ve asked” post), and no way to tell whether they will take your case or what they will say or do until you talk to them. I know some very good, very experienced workers who have a reputation for being “testy” or “bitchy.” I have been included in that number, in fact, before. But I have plenty of clients, some of whom actually like me. It takes all kinds!

For some people, being treated with kid gloves is more important than the truth or the bottom line (and what constitutes “kid gloves” or even “respect” varies wildly from person to person). For others, they can take a blunt response if they know the worker is being honest and has their own best interests at heart. No two clients will have the same criteria that are ranked in the same order of importance anyway. One client can get along famously with one worker and their best friend can be turned off by or dislike that worker. (Same with clients on the worker’s end.)

But I can tell you that every member of AIRR has been trained, vetted, investigated, and tested; interacts regularly with at least some of their AIRR colleagues; adheres to AIRR’s code of ethics; and will participate in mediation if the client has a legitimate problem with a contracted service. (“She hurt my feelings” or “my lover hasn’t come back yet” are not legitimate problems.) Also, you can always contact a worker and, if they can’t or will not help you, ask them for a recommendation to a colleague. We are all colleagues and we know each other – if we think another worker will be a good fit for your case and your personality/communication style, we can probably suggest someone. But while some of us may like or dislike certain types of work or specialize in a handful of things and stick mostly to them, none of us is across-the-board “better” or “higher-rated” than another. There is no such thing as a legitimate rating system. And when someone contacts us expecting such a thing, we are cautious because we know they will need some educating on the basics if we take them on as a client.[*]

Why did my goofer dust fail?

There are way too many moving parts in any given working for anybody to be able to answer that without more information, or for any query you type into Google to be able to supply you with an answer. You might have made or deployed it wrong, you might have done everything right but your target has thorough protection from such tricks, or you might have done everything right and your goal is simply not the will of God.

How to make Martha the Dominator work in three days?

First of all, I would caution you that you can’t “make” a saint do anything. Second of all, don’t micromanage stuff like this. If you go to a lawyer for a problem, you tell him your problem, and he takes your case, and then you let him do his job. You don’t dictate the terms and you don’t tell him what day your court case is going to be and what the sentence is going to be, and if you tried, he’d at best laugh and he might just show you the door. You don’t go to a doctor or therapist with a problem and then tell them how and when to fix the problem; if you do, you’re a fool.

You don’t go to a family member or friend and ask for a favor and then demand that they carry out that favor according to certain details; you ask for the favor, and you politely let them know what you need (“I really need to have the car by 3 pm so I can pick X up at the airport and then I could return it on Sunday, if that’s ok with you”). They may tell you to get stuffed, or it would be fine but you need it back that night, or whatever. You need to prioritize your request and stick to the most important parts of it. Don’t get hung up on the how and why and details that don’t matter as much.

martha dragon You petition a saint for their intercession, and you let them know what you need, and then you get the hell out of the way. If they grant your petition, you thank them. If they don’t, well, maybe it was the will of God, or maybe you were a jerk. Maybe there is a good reason that you can’t have what you asked for in the way that you asked for it. Maybe 3 days is unrealistic, and you screwed yourself by insisting on it – they could have done it in 7, but since you were a jerk about the 3 days, now they aren’t going to do a damn thing, because you need to learn a lesson.

The saints answer prayers, but sometimes the answer is “No.” You still treat them with respect because you have a relationship with them. If you didn’t have a relationship with them before you asked a favor, then that was your mistake right there. What would you think if a new person moved into the neighborhood, knocked on your door, and asked to borrow your car for the weekend? You’d think “who the hell is this guy and what is his problem? He can’t even introduce himself first?”

Sure, there is a long tradition of “compelling” saints and spirits through such measures as turning a picture upside down, whipping a statue, taking something off their altar to return when they come through, etc. But you had damn sure better know what you’re doing, have a pre-established relationship with the saint, and know that you aren’t risking extreme wrath if you go that route with this saint (not every saint is petitioned/treated this way). Traditionally, such coercive measures were used in emergencies – if the monastery crops were failing and people were starving and the continued existence of the Church and thus the saint’s home was threatened, it might be appropriate to set the statue on the floor and be a bit more emphatic about your needs. If it is not an emergency, though, and if you don’t already know what you’re doing, I would think twice about taking this route.

***
[*] I don’t mean to imply that the only ethical, experienced workers are AIRR workers. There are good workers elsewhere too, and I count plenty of non-AIRR readers and workers as colleagues and friends. I just happen to know the ethics and vetting of AIRR workers, so I can speak in detail and in confidence about them.

St. Martha (aka St. Martha the Dominator)

St. Martha was and is a popular saint for several different types of conditions, though in modern conjure and hoodoo, she is probably most often called on for assistance by women wishing to dominate their men.

I have finally gotten around to listing a St. Martha the Dominator mojo bag. ETA: I’ve also listed a St. Martha the Dominator honey jar spell kit. The listing has a bit of info on St. Martha, and reads:

St. Martha the Dominator is called on for domination – usually when women want to dominate their man. But in the rich and varied medieval traditions surrounding St. Martha, she is also called on for assistance by those who need to get the upper hand in any kind of relationship in which they find themselves “at the bottom of the totem pole.” Back in the day, employees would call on St. Martha to get better treatment from their employers, for instance, especially if they were household employees like kitchen service or nannies.

In medieval lore and in her iconography, she is shown as a slayer of dragons, and in this capacity she is a great ally for all types of situations in which you are the underdog and you need to find a way to “top from the bottom.” Be warned, though: many old-school workers who work extensively with saints in conjure have said that if you call on her to dominate somebody in your life, and she doesn’t take to the way they are treating you if they are treating you real bad, she will run them off and out of your life. If your partner is beating on you or emotionally torturing you, or if your boss is engaged in discriminatory, unjust, or illegal practices against you, please don’t try to use St. Martha stuff, or conjure in general, as the only means of improving things. If you are being hurt or misused, call a hotline or shelter, or your HR department, as befits your situation. If you don’t know who to call and you are in danger, contact me and tell me where you are, and I’ll help you find somebody to call. Do not rely solely on conjure or the saints to protect you from physical harm; the Lord and the saints help us in practical ways, and sometimes the best spiritual act involves picking up the phone.

You can read more about the medieval hagiography of St. Martha in The Golden Legend, or Lives of the Saints, which explains some of her iconography, such as her appearance with a dragon or serpent.

There is a tradition that she doesn’t like men and won’t work for them, but I don’t think that’s always necessarily true – I do think it depends on the case though. Most stories I’ve heard about working with St. Martha, when they involve successful domination, have involved women dominating men, but the reverse is not completely unheard of; in fact, Madame Lindsey in Algiers, LA, one of Hyatt’s informants, gives a lovely variation of a sweetening/honey jar family spell with which a husband may invoke St. Martha to keep his wife doing her wifely duties (see Vol 2., p. 1503).

This is for use in situations where a wife is not taking care of the house and children. You make a name paper by writing her name on it seven times, and then you put it in a white teacup or saucer, over which you pour three teaspoons of orange water (aka orange blossom water, orange hydrosol), for faithfulness to her marriage vows. Next you add honey and milk. Set it where she won’t find it, in front of an image or statue of St. Martha. Burn pink candles on it.

The informant instructs Hyatt to set a pink taper on this, but it’s not entirely clear precisely how – there’s some confusing stuff about a cork and the candle floating, and the informant says “Yo’ set dat [taper] right on dere an’ po’ yo’ oil an’ light it- right befo’ St. Martha.” Pouring the oil suggests she means something other than dressing the candle. She may be referring to a homemade unenclosed oil lamp, where the cork/taper combo suggests some sort of homemade wick, or it may refer to a homemade floating candle.

In any case, obviously there is always more than one way to do these kinds of things. I personally add a dollop or glunk of St. Martha the Dominator condition oil to the orange water/honey/milk mixture – and I don’t use very much milk, because I don’t want to risk the smell of sour milk in my altar room, which is often warmer than the rest of the house because of the number of candles burning in it. If you add more honey than milk, it can act as a natural preservative *for a while* – but you probably would not leave this setup in place indefinitely, at least not unless you made this a container spell instead. If you do it this way, the layer of liquid should be shallow enough that a candle with a wide enough base should stand upright in this saucer and burn with no problem (I think you’d have more trouble with a taper. I recommend a candle with a flat base that is at least an inch wide, probably wider, so it will stand up on its own, though I supposed you could always use a taper in a candle holder and set the candle holder in the saucer or cup).

So – a spell for a man to dominate his wife. Yet this coexists with a tradition that Martha doesn’t like men. What gives?

Well, I think one of the key things here becomes a bit more clear if you read about St. Martha in scripture — see Luke 10:38-42, John 11:1-53, and John 12:1-9. She was a woman in a time when managing the household, and being a servant to all guests and visitors, was the proper role of women. I think Martha is called to work on a wayward wife in the above rite because of her association with the proper running of a household. I do not think that a man could work this St. Martha rite on a woman who was not his wife or committed partner, and I do not think this rite could be worked to get a woman to do something like commit adultery (or do anything else that didn’t have to do with obligations related to the running of a household). I think the key is that it is worked by a husband on a wife, and it’s worked in relation to the running of a household and raising of children.

But I would not call on St. Martha to try to force a wife into doing unjust things, and I would not recommend that a husband who is not holding up all his vows with love and respect try to ask Martha to dominate his wife. I imagine he might get the smackdown for his presumption. St. Martha in the medieval tradition is quite atypical of female saints, whose defining characteristic was often their virginity. While St. Martha was probably a virgin, she took a much more active and independent role as a Christian than was typical. For a discussion of medieval saints’ lives and gender which illustrates St. Martha’s uniqueness, see Daas, Martha, “From Holy Hostess to Dragon Tamer: The Anomaly of Saint Martha,” Literature and Theology, Vol. 22, Issue1 (2008), pp. 1-15. Daas writes,

The official version of the life of Saint Martha depicts her as Christ’s hostess and one of his first followers. Her popular appeal, however, stems less from her biblical role, than from her position in medieval legend. In the Middle Ages, Martha is reinvented as a Gallic saint whose most celebrated feat is taming a dragon. It is this legend that has often displaced Martha’s original role, both in text and in iconography. Unlike most depictions of female saints, Martha’s power derives from her soul, not from her body. The denial of corporeality as the source of holiness defies the traditional role of the mulier sancta. Martha, as depicted in the texts of the Middle Ages, is a holy person, not a holy vessel. In this article, I am positing a third ‘category’ of female saint: one not defined by her corporeality, that is, her virginity or her physical martyrdom, but by her character, which I claim is indicative of the influence of popular spirituality on the more formal teachings of the Christian church. (p. 1)

In short, there’s more to Martha than her cooking skills; keep in mind that while she was a householder, she was *not* a wife. So don’t overdo it on the “housewife” thing.

There’s a famous painting by Diego Velazquez which puts into sharp contrast the experiences of Mary and Martha in the household. Martha is in the kitchen – she’s sweaty from the work, her hands are chapped and rough from manual labor, her face is flushed from the heat, and to top it all off, her sister is not only not sharing the burden, she’s getting the privilege to sit at the feet of Christ and listen to his words, which Martha also desires. Somebody has to feed the guests, and Christ’s words to Martha could very well sting anyone who gets stuck in the Cinderella role. But I advise people to look long and hard at this painting and read the scriptures carefully and with open heart before asking St. Martha to dominate a wife. Look at the look on her face. I suggest you be of pure heart and clear conscience before you do the above rite. This is, after all, a woman who’s said to have defeated a deadly dragon with prayer and immobilized it by binding it up in her apron or girdle strings. Then she called on the villagers to descend on it and tear it apart limb from limb.

My 1956 Missal gives her feast day as July 29. A novena leaflet that I have for her gives a prayer to her as follows:

St. Martha, I resort to thy protection and aid and as a proof of my affection and faith I offer this light which I shall burn every Tuesday. Comfort me in all my difficulties and through the great favor thou didst enjoy when the Savior was lodged in thy house,. Intercede for my family that we may always hold God in our hearts, and that we may be provided for in all our necessities, I ask, St. Martha, to overcome all difficulties as thou didst overcome the dragon at thy feet.

As a Novena, this prayer would be said for nine Tuesdays, along with the Our Father, Hail Mary, and Glory Be.

In orthodox Roman Catholicism, she is the patron of dietitians, hemophiliacs, housewives, landlords, waitresses, servants, cooks, and women workers. Will she help a man in any of these roles? I have certainly known her to. Her iconography often features keys, a broom, a ladle, and a dragon.

Catholic Online has a lovely summary of Martha’s role in scripture, which goes some way towards explaining why I’ve heard folks say she’s helped them with sibling issues in their family, like jealousy, or manipulative attention-grubbing, or rivalry. I’ve also heard her called on by folks who are facing difficulties in managing their households, because of strife or poverty; along with St. Joseph, she is a wonderful ally if you have a lot of mouths to feed and you are running short of money and resources to take care of them all.

Cat at originalninjacat has a great post on St. Martha, which discusses the commonly-encountered belief that St. Martha doesn’t like men. And Mama Star at oldstyleconjure discusses her work with St. Martha and gives instructions for a novena.

on the hyatt material, informant motivations, professional rootworkers and hoodoo suppliers

Recently, on a mailing list I subscribe to, there has been some discussion of whether the Hyatt informants wouldn’t sometimes deliberately mislead Hyatt by giving the spells slightly wrong so that they couldn’t be reproduced. The thinking is that if they gave out the “real” spells or formulas, then “anyone could do it.” Here is what I recently wrote on that matter.

This idea of “anyone could do it” discounts the fact that many of the rootworkers Hyatt interviewed believed they had a gift from God, a gift from an accident of birth, a special insight into human nature (e.g., Zorro the Mentalist – and he did, too!), or some other ability for any number of other reasons. It also discounts the fact that many of Hyatt’s informants were not “professionals.”

I personally would hesitate, as a student of the Hyatt material, to make judgments on the informants’ motivations based on an incomplete picture of the way that informant had of working in and being in the world. This is not to say that I personally haven’t had the sense that Hyatt was being teased here and there, because I certainly have, and I doubt I’m alone. But there are all kinds of seemingly contradictory things in old school conjure — take the recent discussion on St. Martha,* for instance, or the use of sulphur in an attraction spell. This doesn’t necessarily speak to an incoherent “system” or a worker deliberately misleading Hyatt — I can think of one, though I can’t tell you right now which volume it came from, who kept saying something along the lines of “you get this because you’re a man of God” to Hyatt. The idea that everybody was out to protect their trade secrets is really not a fair reading for many of the Hyatt informants. A ton of these informants are folks who heard something, who know some tricks, but have absolutely no reason to protect this information – because for them, in their neighborhoods, it was common knowledge (just COUNT the different versions of hotfoot recipes). And, just because something is common knowledge doesn’t mean that a professional would never be called on because somebody knew the ingredients and steps – I mean, we could all change our oil in our cars if we decided to learn, but some people are better at this, have more practice at this, and have better materials and tools on hand for this than we do, so we tend to have those professionals do it, even for such mundane matters that can presumably be learned by anyone — NOT the case with rootwork in many workers’ purviews, this idea that “anybody can do it.” Take the informant from Vicksburg, MS who takes Hyatt to see a root doctor — Dr. Fargo — whom Hyatt describes as a “psychotherapist” and who owns his own druggist department and has a white horse that comes when you whistle. You can’t do what Dr. Fargo does, and I dont’ care how many tricks you read about.) So this idea that professionals are out to protect themselves in Hyatt material strikes me as way off the mark in more cases than not. (Here’s Hyatt in v. 3: “The lesser people we welcomed because they sometimes supplied a few excellent rites, and they were always valuable in flushing out the experts” (2227).)

These informants are giving material that is difficult to understand if one comes from an alien mindset, and many 20th century urban folks who come to this from other magickal traditions do in fact come from quite alien perspectives. Granted, we can’t really recreate a mindset and worldview from interviews, and we especially can’t if our only exposure to this material is from this list — we are only getting bits and pieces of a HUGE body of work, and it’s removed from many of us in time as well as culture. But IMO that’s all the more reason to withhold judgment — and that includes saying “I tried it and it didn’t work so it must be deliberate misinformation.” Which is the height of hubris, really, when you think about it.

I’m not trying to say every informant had the same motivation, by a long shot. Just that the mindset of “these are all great secrets that nobody would give up to the unwashed” can in many cases be an uneducated mindset. I mean, many of the spells “Nahnee the Boss of Algiers” gives are a little different from similar spells from other folks — but I would take a Nahnee trick to the bank any day, even if the spell instructed me to paint myself in whipped cream. Nahnee’s stuff is pretty hardcore. Whether or not it matches up just so with what you may have read elsewhere, her stuff indicates a coherence, a reflection of many years of practice and work, and I guarantee you any differences with her are differences for a reason. Yep, she recommends parsley for a “return to me” trick, and I know what a lot of folks think about parsley being a copout of an herb for rootwork, but I would not presume to “correct” Nahnee the Boss of Algiers. And if I tried a trick of hers and it didn’t work I would be grateful for the lesson.

Also in terms of motivation, we might consider that some of these informants (for instance, the Agent for Curios starting on p. 1075 in v. 2 ) had nothing to lose by giving out spells, because — as many of the spells we see, including those that have been posted to the list lately, highlight — the spells call for ingredients by brand name, and/or mention specific suppliers. If you’re in the supplier business, why NOT give out spells telling people what they need to use? Worst case scenario is they buy it from somebody else, best case is they buy it from you. Many of Hyatt’s informants were not professional rootworkers, and I think this “deliberate obfuscation” idea might come from a supposition that most of them *were* professionals. This is simply not the case. The times, they were a’changing, when Hyatt was interviewing.

* re. St. Martha – she is often called on to help women rule their roosts, so to speak, but there are cases where she is called on by men to control women, as well, to get them to tend to their household duties.