Hoodoo vs Voodoo: Two Different Things Entirely
By DailyDestiny Editorial Team
If you have ever mixed up hoodoo and Voodoo, this guide shows you the real difference and the history behind both. Vodou is an initiatory religion with clergy and lwa; hoodoo is African American folk magic with no gods of its own, worked for most of its history by Baptists and Methodists with a Bible on the table.
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What is the difference between hoodoo and voodoo?
Imagine you just watched a horror film full of pins and dolls. Then a friend says her grandmother in Georgia worked roots and read the Psalms over candles. Same thing? Should it scare you?
The short answer: No and no. Hoodoo and Voodoo differ the way a technique differs from a religion. Vodou is an organized religion with a creator god, spirits called lwa, ordained clergy, initiation, liturgy, drum rhythms, a calendar and congregations. Hoodoo, also called conjure or rootwork, is African American folk magic with none of those. You are initiated into Vodou. You simply work hoodoo.
The words differ too. Vodun is a Fon and Ewe word meaning spirit, carried from the Bight of Benin to Saint-Domingue and Louisiana. Hoodoo is an American coinage first recorded in nineteenth-century English, origin still argued. Newspapers then used both for anything Black and supernatural, the root of today's confusion.
A quick test: what does the practitioner belong to? A Vodouisant: a house, a lineage, named spirits. A rootworker: a Baptist or Methodist church, or nothing.
The confusion started in nineteenth-century New Orleans, where Voodoo ceremonies and everyday conjure happened a few streets apart, sometimes by the same person. Reporters covering Marie Laveau's Saint John's Eve gatherings on Bayou St. John ignored the distinction, and so did the police blotter.
Scholars have drawn the line carefully since the 1970s. Yvonne Chireau, in Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition, places conjure alongside Black Christianity, not against it. Katrina Hazzard-Donald, in Mojo Workin': The Old African American Hoodoo System, separates old black belt hoodoo from the commercial product sold by mail order after the Great Migration. Neither treats hoodoo as a branch of Vodou.
The edges blur: some Louisiana rootworkers serve spirits, and some Vodouisants work roots. The categories describe traditions, not people.
Is hoodoo just the American version of Voodoo?
No. Hoodoo is not Vodou or Vodun in translation. It formed in the American South from Kongo, Yoruba, Fon and Igbo material plus Protestant Christianity, European folk magic and Native American plant knowledge, and dropped the pantheon. Having no lwa, priesthood or initiation is much of why it survived inside Baptist and Methodist congregations.
Do hoodoo and Voodoo share any practices?
Some materials and gestures: candles, herbs, baths, offerings to the dead, ritual speech over an object. Both draw partly on Kongo practice, where the nkisi, a container charged with spiritually active matter, is clearly related to the conjure bag. The frame differs: Vodou has songs, drum rhythms and spirits addressed by name in fixed order; hoodoo has no liturgy.
Which word should I use if I am talking about both?
The specific one each time: Vodun for West Africa, Vodou for Haiti, Voodoo for New Orleans, and hoodoo, conjure or rootwork for the folk magic. For the whole cluster, say African diaspora religions, a phrase scholars and practitioners accept and nobody hears as an insult.
What is hoodoo, and what does rootwork actually involve?
Think of the last time you felt stuck and wished you could do something about it. That wish is where hoodoo starts.
Hoodoo is practical folk magic for changing a situation, built from roots, herbs, minerals, animal curios, candles, personal materials and scripture. Practitioners call it conjure, rootwork, tricking or simply working.
Its unit is the job. Someone brings a problem (a landlord, a court date, a straying spouse, a sick child, bad luck) and the worker builds a response: a mojo bag for the pocket, a candle dressed with oil and burned over a photograph, a floor wash used from the back of the house to the front door, a bath at a named hour, or a petition folded toward the worker and buried.
Materials are cheap by design, since it grew among people with no money: red brick dust, black pepper, salt, lodestone, a dime, grave dirt, a rabbit foot, red flannel. High John the Conqueror is the root of triumph over unjust power; Zora Neale Hurston wrote an essay on its trickster figure. Hoodoo has mostly been Christian, and the Psalms are the text most spoken over a working.
Rootwork earns its name literally. The root doctor's skill was pharmacological as well as spiritual, and in the antebellum South the same person often set bones, delivered babies, treated fevers and laid tricks, because enslaved people had no other doctor. That was a response to being shut out of medical care, not a recommendation to repeat the arrangement. Angelica root, devil's shoestring, calamus, five-finger grass and John the Conqueror each carry a use and a meaning at once, and none of them has been tested to a clinical standard as a treatment for any condition; several traditional roots are toxic in quantity. A fever that will not break, a child who is getting worse, or a symptom that keeps returning is a matter for a clinician, not a root.
The fullest record is Harry Middleton Hyatt's Hoodoo, Conjuration, Witchcraft, Rootwork: five volumes of interviews gathered mainly 1936 to 1940 across twelve states, published 1970 to 1978, from roughly 1,600 informants, all but one African American, with some 13,458 spells and beliefs and long interviews with root doctors. He kept their words intact, so the volumes contradict each other. Hoodoo has no orthodoxy and no authority to settle disputes.
For divination, workers read cards, bones, tea leaves, a pendulum, or a Bible balanced on a key; see Psychic Development: Exercises, Stages and How to Practice Safely.
What is a personal concern in hoodoo?
Material from the person a working targets: hair, nail clippings, a used handkerchief, a photo, a signature, footprint dirt, clothing. The logic is contact, as in Kongo footprint work. Without one, a worker uses a written name paper, which is why name papers fill so many jobs Hyatt recorded.
What does dressing a candle mean?
Anointing it with an oil chosen for the job, often with herbs or powder, while holding an intention. Rub upward toward the wick to draw something in, downward to the base to push it away. It then burns over a name paper or photograph, and how it burns, cleanly, sootily or splitting down the side, is read afterward.
Is hoodoo the same as Southern folk medicine?
They overlap heavily. Southern folk medicine (plant remedies, poultices, tonics, midwifery) was shared by Black, white and Native American communities with no spiritual claim; hoodoo adds spiritual purpose to the same plants. The root doctor treating a fever and the one laying a trick on a landlord were often the same person, working from the same cabinet.
What is Voodoo, and what makes it a religion rather than a set of practices?
If Hollywood gave you your picture of Voodoo, meet the real religion. It looks more like a church than a horror set.
Haitian Vodou ordains clergy, initiates members, keeps temples and follows a fixed calendar. Above all sits Bondye, the good god, remote and not petitioned directly. Between Bondye and the living are hundreds of lwa, each with a personality, songs, rhythms, colors, foods, days and a ground drawing called a veve.
Legba opens the gate at every ceremony. Damballa is the white serpent, paired with Ayida-Wedo; see Snake Spirit Animal: Meaning, Symbolism and Messages. Ezili Freda governs love and luxury, Ezili Dantor fierce maternal protection, Ogou iron and war, and the Gede family death and sexuality.
Priests are oungan, priestesses manbo, and ordination is taking the ason, the beaded gourd rattle of office. Initiation, kanzo, happens in seclusion in a temple, an ounfo, under a house leader whose lineage the initiate joins. Vodouisants call it sevis lwa, serving the spirits: an obligation owed, not a technique used.
A ceremony has a shape. Drummers play Rada rhythms for the cooler Dahomean-derived spirits and Petwo for the hotter Creole ones. The congregation sings, a veve is traced in cornmeal, and offerings are set out.
Then a lwa mounts a participant, called the horse, chwal, whose own awareness withdraws. The congregation talks with the spirit, which may scold, joke, prescribe a remedy or settle a dispute. Afterward the horse remembers nothing and must be told. For trance and its psychological accounts, see Channeling: How It Works, Famous Cases and How to Assess Claims.
This needs a named spirit, a song that calls it, a drummer who knows the rhythm and a ready congregation. Hoodoo has none of that and never wanted it.
Do Vodou practitioners consider themselves Catholic?
Many do, easily. Vodouisants are commonly baptized, attend Mass, and keep Catholic prints on altars where a saint answers for a lwa: Saint Patrick for Damballa, the Black Madonna of Czestochowa for Ezili Dantor. Scholars debate whether this is genuine syncretism or a mask adopted when slavery banned African religion; both readings have evidence.
What happens in a Vodou initiation?
Kanzo takes several days in seclusion inside the temple under an oungan or manbo, and its details are oathbound, so distrust any published script. The known outline: the initiate enters a chamber called the djevo, emerges with new status in the house, and belongs to that lineage, not to Vodou in the abstract.
Is animal sacrifice part of Vodou?
Yes, in some ceremonies, and it is badly misrepresented. A chicken or goat is killed with prayer, then cooked and eaten by the congregation; nothing is wasted. It is a religious feast in a farming society, not a horror film. Santeria has comparable rites, and in 1993 the United States Supreme Court ruled unanimously against Florida city ordinances aimed at them in Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. v. City of Hialeah, holding that laws written to suppress a religious practice fail the First Amendment.
Where did hoodoo come from in African American history?
Picture the people who made hoodoo: torn from many homelands, forbidden their gods, still finding ways to protect each other.
It came from the slave quarters of the American South between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, made by Africans from many nations deliberately mixed to stop them organizing, which is why it has no single pantheon. A Kongo, Yoruba, Fon and Igbo person in one quarter could not rebuild four religions, so the portable layer survived: charged objects, the authority of the dead, plant knowledge, the crossroads, and the power in a name and footprint. It is like a family recipe rebuilt from four grandmothers' kitchens, keeping what all of them shared.
Kongo material is the largest part. The BaKongo nkisi, a container packed with earth, herbs and active matter and switched on by address, is close enough to the mojo bag that Robert Farris Thompson argued the link in Flash of the Spirit. Protestant Christianity came second, especially after the revivals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, bringing Moses as conjurer, the Psalms as workable words, and river baptism. European almanac magic and Pennsylvania German grimoires came third, Native American plant knowledge fourth.
Conjure did political work too. In Denmark Vesey's planned rising in Charleston in 1822, the conjurer Gullah Jack Pritchard supplied charms meant to make the men invulnerable. Nat Turner, who led the Southampton rebellion of 1831, was a visionary preacher, not a rootworker, but the roles sat close. Slaveholders feared conjure because it created authority they could not appoint or remove.
After emancipation the Great Migration carried hoodoo to Chicago, Detroit, Harlem and Philadelphia, where it met a cash economy and became partly retail: spiritual supply shops, mail-order catalogs, branded oils and incense sold to Black customers by manufacturers often not Black. Carolyn Morrow Long documented this in Spiritual Merchants. Katrina Hazzard-Donald calls it a distortion of the older system; others see adaptation to new cities. The argument is unresolved.
Was hoodoo practiced openly under slavery?
Rarely. Enslaved people worked conjure at night, in woods and burial grounds, which kept it out of most records. What survives comes from court cases, planter complaints, and Works Progress Administration interviews with formerly enslaved people in the late 1930s. It was built to be undetectable by the people who owned the land, and largely was.
How did hoodoo and the Black church coexist?
Comfortably. Preachers denounced conjure from the pulpit while congregants carried mojo bags into service, and plenty of root doctors were deacons. Yvonne Chireau argues in Black Magic that African American Christianity and conjure were two parts of one supernatural world, sharing the same Bible, the same dead and often the same congregation.
What is the crossroads in hoodoo?
Where work is delivered, buried or left, and where a skill is traditionally gained by keeping appointments there for a set number of nights. It has Kongo and Vodun roots: Legba guards the gate in Dahomean religion, and the Kongo cosmogram maps a crossing of worlds. The blues bargain legend was Tommy Johnson's first; his brother LeDell told it to researcher David Evans in 1966, and it later moved to Robert Johnson.
Where does hoodoo sit next to Vodun, Vodou and Voodoo, and how does it vary by region?
If hoodoo from Charleston and from New Orleans sound like two different things to you, you noticed something real.
Hoodoo sits outside Vodun, Vodou and Voodoo, religions with named spirits, clergy and a calendar; it borrowed from them without becoming them. Vodun is the indigenous religion of the Fon, Ewe and neighbors in Benin, Togo and southeastern Ghana. Haitian Vodou formed in Saint-Domingue. Louisiana Voodoo was built in New Orleans by Senegambian, Fon and Haitian arrivals around Catholic saints and public ritual. How they differ is covered in Haitian Vodou vs Hollywood Voodoo: Correcting the Record.
Hoodoo itself varies across the South as sharply as barbecue, tracking migration, local plants and which denomination arrived first. Rootworkers in coastal South Carolina, the Mississippi Delta and New Orleans use different words, plants and saints, if any. Hyatt heard informants a few hundred miles apart state incompatible rules with equal confidence.
The Lowcountry of South Carolina and Georgia is most distinct. Gullah Geechee communities on the Sea Islands, isolated by water and the rice economy, kept denser African practice and say root and rootwork, not hoodoo. The hag is the night-riding spirit there, and haint blue paint on porch ceilings, window frames and door surrounds is the standard defense.
Beaufort County produced the best-documented root doctor in the American record: Dr. Buzzard of St. Helena Island, usually identified as Stepheney Robinson, whose courthouse reputation was so strong that the county sheriff, J. E. McTeer, set up in competition and later wrote up the rivalry himself.
The Mississippi Delta leans to goofer dust, graveyard dirt and the crossroads, vocabulary that reached the world on blues records. New Orleans keeps the Catholic layer: saint candles, home altars, brick dust on the step, and gris-gris for what elsewhere is called a hand.
Why does the vocabulary change from state to state?
It spread by word of mouth, so each region kept its own words: hoodoo in the Mississippi Valley, conjure in Virginia and the Carolinas, rootwork on the Georgia and South Carolina coast, gris-gris and wanga in Louisiana. Hyatt's transcripts call the charm bag a hand, a toby, a jack, a nation sack and a mojo.
What is haint blue, and where is it used?
The pale blue-green paint on porch ceilings, window frames and shutters across the Gullah Geechee Lowcountry, meant to keep haints out because a spirit reads the color as water and will not cross. Bottle trees do related work in yards from Georgia to Mississippi, catching a spirit in the glass. Robert Farris Thompson traced both to Kongo practice.
Where does hoodoo overlap with white Southern folk magic?
In the Upland South and Appalachia, where Black and white healers shared plant knowledge and printed charm books. The Long Lost Friend, John George Hohman's Pennsylvania German collection from 1820, circulated through Southern spiritual shops and appears in Hyatt's interviews with Black workers. Granny women and power doctors worked an Anglo-Scots and German tradition alongside it, and material moved both ways.
How do conjure, obeah, Santeria, and Candomble relate to hoodoo and Vodou?
Heard obeah, Santeria or Candomble mentioned alongside hoodoo? Here is the map.
Conjure, rootwork and hoodoo name one African American practice. Obeah, Santeria and Candomble are separate traditions from other colonies.
Obeah is the Anglophone Caribbean parallel, worked in Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana, Barbados and elsewhere. Like hoodoo it is a practice with no pantheon, and was criminalized early: Jamaica outlawed it after Tacky's Revolt in 1760, and obeah statutes lasted on Caribbean law books into the twenty-first century.
Santeria, properly Regla de Ocha or Lucumi, is Cuban, Yoruba-derived, and like Haitian Vodou in kind: orisha, initiatory priesthood, godparent lineages, drum feasts, and divination including Ifa, read by a babalawo. Candomble is its Brazilian cousin, organized into nations keeping Yoruba, Fon and Bantu material separate, with orixas served in a terreiro under a mae or pai de santo.
Where enslaved Africans arrived in large groups from one region, a religion survived. Where they were scattered and mixed, a technique survived.
Two more belong on the map. Palo, sometimes Palo Mayombe, is Kongo-derived Cuban practice built around the nganga, a consecrated vessel, distinct from Santeria though many Cubans practice both. Espiritismo, the Caribbean form of Allan Kardec's nineteenth-century French spiritism, brought Cuban and Puerto Rican practice the mesa blanca, a white-cloth table for working with the dead. Jamaica has obeah alongside myal, the congregational, spirit-possession side that fed Revival Zion, while Kumina preserves Kongo material more directly.
Hoodoo sits with obeah on the technique side; Vodou with Santeria, Candomble and Vodun on the religion side. You can work hoodoo on Tuesday and take communion on Sunday; hoodoo asks no exclusive loyalty. Vodou and Santeria ask lifelong obligations to a house and named spirits.
Is obeah the Caribbean version of hoodoo?
Parallel, not derived. Both grew among enslaved Africans in British colonies, both are practical rather than congregational, and both drew criminal statutes as feared routes to rebellion. Obeah has its own plants, terms and a record of prosecution far harsher than anything hoodoo faced in the United States.
Why is Santeria called that?
It began as an outsider's label, roughly the way of the saints, because Catholic saint images answered for the orisha in Cuban Lucumi practice. Many practitioners find it dismissive and prefer Regla de Ocha, Lucumi or simply the religion, much as Vodou practitioners dislike Voodoo and Candomble practitioners resist being filed under folklore.
Does hoodoo have anything to do with Wicca or modern witchcraft?
Historically, no. Hoodoo predates Wicca by centuries and comes from African religion, Protestant Christianity and Southern plant lore, not British occultism and Gerald Gardner's mid-twentieth-century revival. They have mixed in contemporary practice because people borrow freely, which is exactly what the ethics argument at the end of this article is about.
How has hoodoo itself been misrepresented and turned into a product?
If you have ever called a bad day a hoodoo, you used a tradition's own name as a joke. Most people have.
Hoodoo was misrepresented three ways: its name became slang for bad luck, the practice was folded into a horror story belonging to another religion, and the work was repackaged as merchandise.
The word went first. By the 1880s American newspapers printed hoodoo for a jinx, a losing streak or an unlucky ballplayer, and Western surveyors named eroded rock spires hoodoos, as they still are. A tradition's own name came to mean superstition.
Then absorption. Writers who could not tell conjure from ceremony filed both under voodoo, so the practice with the most practitioners in American history got the least name recognition, plus a stereotype built for a Haitian religion. Those occupation-era books and films are covered in Haitian Vodou vs Hollywood Voodoo: Correcting the Record.
The third move, commerce, changed what practitioners actually did.
From the 1920s, manufacturers in Chicago, Memphis and Baltimore sold dressed candles, incense, sachet powders, floor washes and bottled oils under traditional names such as Fast Luck and Van Van, through drugstores, barbershops and catalogs, to Black customers. Most larger companies were not Black-owned.
Dream books on the same shelves matched dream images to three-digit numbers for the policy game, tying conjure to an illegal lottery in press and police reports. A Professor or Madame on a label was usually a trademark, not a person.
Digging and preparing a root yourself gave way to buying a sealed bottle nobody could identify, like swapping your grandmother's soup for a can with her face on it. Katrina Hazzard-Donald calls the result marketeered hoodoo, a break in the tradition. Other historians see a rural practice adapting to a cash economy, as all of Black Southern life was then.
How did hoodoo come to mean bad luck in English?
Through nineteenth-century newspapers, especially sportswriting: a jinxed team, a cursed ship, a player in a slump. The geological hoodoo, the thin rock spire of Utah and the northern plains, comes from the same sense of something bewitched. Both required treating a living practice as a joke, and both outlived the joke.
Which films and books get hoodoo right?
Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men (1935) is still the best inside account; she trained under New Orleans workers and wrote up her apprenticeship. Kasi Lemmons's Eve's Bayou (1997) treats Louisiana conjure as ordinary family life, with Diahann Carroll as the worker Elzora. The Skeleton Key (2005) at least names hoodoo, then uses it as a horror engine.
Did the commercial era preserve anything?
Yes, hence the unresolved argument. Printed formulas and catalog copy carried vocabulary through the Great Migration and now record mid-century practice. Storefront spiritual shops became neighborhood institutions offering advice with purchases, and a few Black-owned businesses ran for generations. What was lost was knowing what was in the bottle.
Is hoodoo a closed practice, and who can respectfully learn it?
If hoodoo calls to you, you are probably asking the key question: is this mine to practice?
Hoodoo is best described as a closed practice with a soft boundary, and Black practitioners disagree about where that boundary sits.
One position, argued forcefully by many Black rootworkers and writers including Katrina Hazzard-Donald, holds that hoodoo belongs to the descendants of enslaved African Americans, answered one specific history, and should be studied as history, not worked, by outsiders. Another, held by other Black practitioners including some with long family teaching lines, says hoodoo has always taken in outsiders, already contains European and Native American material, and the real objection is profiteering, not practice.
Both condemn the abuses: non-Black sellers living off hoodoo products, teachers charging for certifications the tradition never issued, and books that strip out the Christianity, history and Black authorship to sell spell recipes.
Vodou's answer is clearer because it is initiatory. Nobody self-initiates into a religion whose clergy is ordained through a house and lineage.
Respectful learning is simple. Read the tradition's own scholars: Yvonne Chireau, Katrina Hazzard-Donald, Carolyn Morrow Long, Albert Raboteau on slave religion, and Zora Neale Hurston, initiate and anthropologist, whose Mules and Men (1935) remains the most readable inside account. Treat colonial-era ethnography as evidence of how observers thought, not of the tradition.
Pay Black teachers and Black-owned shops, not resellers. Take no title the tradition does not grant, and do not call yourself a rootworker if nobody taught you. If Vodou or Santeria draws you, find a house, ask about obligations, and expect a long wait; both screen newcomers slowly.
For the wider argument about closed traditions, appropriation and space cleansing, see Smudging and Space Clearing: Practices, Ethics and Alternatives; What Is My Spirit Animal? How to Discover Your Animal Guide covers borrowed Indigenous vocabulary.
Can a white person practice hoodoo?
There is no consensus; anyone claiming one is stating a personal view. Many Black practitioners say no: a tradition built by enslaved people to survive one American arrangement does not transfer to descendants of the other side. Others say it has always been permeable. Almost nobody defends a white person selling hoodoo products, teaching it for money or claiming a title. Learn the history, buy from Black-owned businesses, and do not set up shop.
What are the signs of a bad hoodoo teacher or seller?
Guaranteed results, escalating fees, and a warning that only they can lift a curse they just diagnosed in you. Certification programs, since the tradition never issued credentials. Spell recipes with the Bible and history stripped out. Lineage claims that collapse after one question about who taught them. Feeling frightened or pressured is a reason to walk away, not to pay more.
Is it appropriation to read about hoodoo?
No. Study is how a tradition is understood and defended, and every scholar quoted here wrote for a general audience. The line is between study and performance: knowing what a mojo bag is differs from making one for a paying client, and knowing what kanzo means differs from claiming you went through it.
Questions people ask
Is hoodoo a religion?
It is a practice, not a religion: no deity, clergy or afterlife doctrine, and no claim on your identity, so a rootworker could be a church deacon. Most historical workers were Protestant Christians. Secrets of the Psalms, a slim manual attributed to Godfrey Selig and adapted from the Jewish Shimmush Tehillim, has sold through spiritual supply catalogs since the 1920s as a guide to which psalm suits which problem. Some practitioners rebuilding the ancestor work the commercial era thinned out call it a spiritual system, but claim no pantheon.
Are voodoo dolls actually part of Voodoo?
No. Nothing in Haitian Vodou involves stabbing an effigy to hurt someone at a distance. Vodou uses dolls mostly for the Gede and the dead, and the doll babies in Harry Middleton Hyatt's interviews appear in love and healing work at least as often as in harm. The pin-stuck version is European: poppets appear in English witchcraft trials centuries before any American writer reached Haiti, and pulp fiction and 1930s cinema spread the image. Tourist shops did the rest.
Was Marie Laveau a hoodoo worker or a Voodoo priestess?
Both, which is why the argument persists. Marie Laveau, born in New Orleans around 1801 and dead in 1881, was a free woman of color, a devout Catholic and a hairdresser to wealthy households. She led public Voodoo gatherings on Saint John's Eve and did private work that looks like ordinary conjure. Carolyn Morrow Long's biography A New Orleans Voudou Priestess finds far more Catholic charity and less occult drama than the legend. Her daughter's activities are routinely merged with hers.
What is a mojo bag and what goes inside one?
A mojo bag, also called a hand, toby or conjure bag, is a small cloth bag, traditionally red flannel, holding materials for one purpose and carried on the person. Typical contents: roots and herbs such as John the Conqueror or five-finger grass, lodestone with magnetic sand, a coin, and something personal from whoever the work concerns. It is prayed over, named, fed periodically with whiskey or a dressing oil, and kept out of sight and out of other hands.
Can a Christian practice hoodoo?
Historically, yes; most rootworkers on record did. Harry Middleton Hyatt never counted informants by denomination, so no percentage should be quoted, but Christian material runs through his transcripts, and the Black Protestant South they came from was overwhelmingly Baptist and Methodist. The Psalms are working texts, Moses is a conjurer, and Bible verses fill written petitions. Whether you should is for your church and conscience, since many denominations forbid divination and charms. The tradition never asked anyone to leave the faith.
Should I spell it Voodoo, Vodou, or Vodun?
Vodou for the Haitian religion, the spelling from the official Haitian Creole orthography adopted in 1979 and preferred by most Haitian practitioners and scholars. Vodun for the West African religion of Benin, Togo and southeastern Ghana. Voodoo for the New Orleans tradition, which owns that spelling historically, or when quoting a source. Applied to Haiti, Voodoo carries horror-film baggage many Haitians hear as an insult.
Do you need a spiritual worker, or can you do hoodoo yourself?
Both. Households did everyday work themselves, cleaning floors, dressing candles, keeping a bag, and called a paid root doctor for serious matters: a court date, a persistent illness, a suspected crossing. Reputation traveled by word of mouth, which made fraud expensive. Today, hire a worker whose teachers you can ask about, and only if you want to; routine household work needs no one.
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Related topics: hoodoo vs voodoo, difference between hoodoo and voodoo, what is hoodoo, hoodoo rootwork, conjure hoodoo, voodoo vs hoodoo explained, african american folk magic
