Hoodoo

Background and Description

Making a distinction between the “Latin” and “English” cultural zones in America, some scholars point to the different terms used to identify African American spiritual traditions. Whereas the term voodoo was primarily used in French-influenced New Orleans, the term hoodoo was favored in Missouri. In southern Florida, with the influence of Cuban immigrants and Santería, the same tradition was known as Nañigo. Etymologically, however, scholars point out that Hoodoo is a phonetic approximation of the Ewe word Hudu, which is still used today. In West Africa, Hudu is a well-regarded religious tradition passed on through family priestly lines.

Hoodoo, in its most general sense, can be defined as a system of magic, divination, and herbalism widespread among the enslaved Africans in America. The goal of Hoodoo is to allow people access to supernatural forces to improve their daily lives in areas such as gambling, divination, cursing one's enemies or removing a curse, treatment of sickness, and many of the daily troubles of life. Some researchers, however, have attempted to distinguish the specialists within the broader field of conjure. They argue that conjurers can be divided into three categories: hoodooists, healers, and readers. According to this classification, readers reveal a client's future, healers use herbal medicine to cure illness, while hoodooists specialize in evil and its cure. The fact is that, as it is the case in Africa and the African culture in general, many priests and priestesses practice all three, making such distinctions ineffective.

How widespread was Hoodoo? Archaeologists have uncovered remains in Virginia and Maryland. Hoodoo caches in Black dwellings date from as early as 1702. Furthermore, Hoodoo and conjuring were not the domains of a single state or region. Long present in Louisiana, Hoodoo had spread throughout the South by 1860. During the 1850s, for example, Abbe Emmanuel Henri Dieudonne Domenech, a Catholic missionary, reported an encounter with Hoodoo along the Texas and Mexico border.

Although related, and in some circles used interchangeably, Hoodoo must be distinguished from the African American term, Voodoo, and in turn from the African and Haitian term Vodoun. Voodoo originated in the religion of Africans. It has its roots in West Africa in countries such as Benin, Togo, and Burkina Faso—just to name a few—and is practiced among the Fon, Ewe, and other West African ethnic groups. One of the primary sources of this religious system in the United States came from the migration of liberated and enslaved Africans who migrated from the island of Saint-Domingue at the onset of the Haitian Revolution. It is argued that African American Voodoo initially formed an integral whole and was an organized syncretic religion, as is Vodoun in Haiti or Santería in Cuba, but it gradually disintegrated while its folk beliefs persisted.

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