By Hess Love

“Five days a week,” she started her sermon. “Aunt Hetta had us up in that church no less than five days a week,” my grandmother would say on random Sunday mornings while we sat at home: seemingly churchless by choice. Our congregation tightly made of herself, my grandfather, their stories, and me. During her childhood, my grandmother was a church kid; she would grow up to be my first teacher within the tradition of Conjure. 

When I say this people picture candles and graveyards, overt imagery birthed from Hollywood caricaturization of Voodoo, and other such mess and mockery. Further divorcing her churchy childhood from what the world would see as my secular one—our upbringings didn’t have irreconcilable differences, rather intangible syncretisms that only Black folk privy to the old ways could see clearly.

My preliminary Hoodoo learnin’ started with the foundations of rootwork. My grandmother would send me in and out of the garden to collect various “grasses”—when she knew that I didn’t like bugs. She would explain her petitions when I found her diaries and writings on slips of paper, and teach me the power of the written and spoken word. She would hoop and holler at me anytime the broom came too close to her feet while I was sweeping, and believed me when I told her that I saw my mother’s spirit within the frame of my bedroom door some time after she had been killed. She knew exactly why “Beloved” was the most frightening thing her horror obsessed granddaughter had ever seen. Of course there was more than this—lifetimes more. 

It was years after her death when I learned that all of the tradition she entrusted me with had a name: Hoodoo. It was Hoodoo/Conjure that she was teaching me. Not just old time ways and superstitions to be taken with enough grains of salt to repel spirits, but a system of beliefs that had been collapsed into the mundanity and supernatural experiences of our everyday lives as Black people. My story is not unique.

Throughout the waves of people introduced to the Yoruba divinities of Oshun, Yemaya, Oya and other Orisha, via the resurfacing of their aesthetic in recent popular culture, were those that chanced upon practitioners with integrity. Those guided to the correct channels run into a community of people who enlist this sage advice about where to begin within ALL African and Diasporic Traditional Religions: start with your ancestors. Many people, like me, found themselves searching within the crevices of their grandmother’s hands. 

When we start with our ancestors, we learn that *this* is not new. This—this thing that is the primordial essence of the holy ghost; possessions that are kindred to us even though we don’t give them other names beyond “spirit”. The ancient energies that find themselves wherever we are, no matter where we are within the Diaspora. *This* is African Traditional Religions: we’re not new to this, we’re home. 

The Black church is seen as home, and for many it is. For those which it isn’t, at the very least, it is a significant boarding house of social, political, and spiritual history for Black people in the States. A home that, for the souls of Black folk, is legitimized by the Africanisms some churches try to bury—but still spring forth like kinky edges that refuse to be tamed. Before the brick-and-mortar of Black churches that were built as sanctuary (after cosmetically converting to Christianity), we made church before they “allowed” us to: in tobacco fields, at riverbanks, secret cabin meetings at night, within the trees and wilderness of parts of the Underground Railroad, in the song of Negro Spirituals that didn’t always know of Christ, in hands that applied dampened rags (christened with more than just water) to bloody backs and privates while the rest made worry and work after a whipping. Our Blackness was our first church home.

To these new church buildings we took our animal bones, herbs and roots, teas and tinctures,  our ring-shouts and stomps, the possessions, our music, the power of our word, and watched them transform and cloak themselves under anointing oil, the holy ghost, gospel music and utilizing the Bible to deliver or heal a spiritual crossing. 

When many people on either end of the spectrum talk about the processes in which our ancestors became Christian, they gloss over the sociopolitical and systemic weight of Christianity that was measured by our ancestors. It wasn’t always unquestioned absorbing of those teachings, although sometimes it was. Christianity wasn’t always physically beat, whipped and choked into our ancestors in a literal sense, although sometimes it was domestically, but often systemically. Our ancestors took calculated measures towards what was presented, and didn’t always have a passive history when confronted with Christianity. Often taking the trickster utilization of language via storytelling,  our ancestors recognized and employed the Bible as a sociopolitical compass towards understanding, navigating, and manipulating structural whiteness.

 “Our people were not ones to let good technology go to waste, be it material or spiritual tech” said Gerard Miller, Conjurer & Herbalist.  This nation had already been settled upon Christian beliefs and structure, although it hid it’s baptismal certificate to claim divorce between church and state. To seemingly assimilate into this practice would gain our ancestors (enslaved and “free”) the ability to be mobile within the system.

It was not a means of liberation or actual spiritual salvation, but a political move that came with as many cons as it did benefits. Benefits such as the ability to congregate within a space, a place to strategize, pass messages, and uphold cultural keeping in-between plates of greens and yams. For its own survival, the colonial world allotted no structural benefits towards African Traditional practices. To do so would give space to systems that were carried over and rebirthed in the blood of resistance. 

The adoption of Christianity was, for our ancestors, to utilize as many systemic abilities and benefits as they could; whether that Christian practice be honest, or knowing/unknowingly pseudo. The “syncretization” of African Traditional practices as the bedrock of our supposed Christianity was to keep our hearts from being on our sleeves. The process of syncretism had many lifelines: as a political move, as a congregational shelter, and as a place to be connected towards some aspect of the divine (without being demonized or prosecuted for utilizing the more naked and honest Traditions that had us connected to divinity in the first place). 

For centuries, before the start of mass conversion to Christianity (which had small start up attempts until a few score prior to Emancipation),  Christianity was generally seen as something enslaved Africans weren’t human enough for. This attitude switched when prominent missionaries sold plantation owners (and other captors of enslaved Black folk) on the benefits that Christianity would afford towards keeping enslaved Black folk “in line”: spiritually, emotionally, and intellectually subservient and unquestioning. 

There was no theological gap for Black people between the time we were stolen from Africa (while traditional beliefs reigned,  conversions to Abrahamic beliefs were occurring on the continent before the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade, as well as during and after) and the time the majority of white folks in the Americas became invested in using Christianity as a means to carry out a spiritual coup. The choppy waters of the middle passage did not erase our spirituality. Much of it sailed with us and adapted to the lands that we were forcibly docked on and auctioned around. 

We are not visitors to African Diasporic Traditional Religion, it is our home. “American Christianity” (like someone who doesn’t call before they come to your house) “visited upon us,” remarked Diazy October Latifah—Njuzu Priestess, Practitioner of Black Belt Hoodoo, and ethnoAstrologer. 

Our first Religion was/is Hoodoo (often named simultaneously/synonymously as Conjure): “a magico-religious tradition started and maintained by Africans enslaved primarily in what is now called the Southern US. Congo-Bantu in origin, with significant contributions made by enslaved Senegambians and Eastern Nigerians (people from the Bight of Biafra),” explains Myesha Worthington—Conjurer, Nganga, Priestess and Hoodoo Historian. Theologian Rev. Dr. Theophus H. Smith names Conjure as a “pharmacopeic tradition of practices.” Those definitions of the Black Religion of Conjure/Hoodoo hold true. As an expansive living tradition, “Hoodoo is ever changing, evolving, and responding to the sociocultural environment as well as undergoing modification by it’s practitioners” notes sociologist Dr. Katrina Hazzard-Donald in her book, “Mojo Workin’: The Old African American Hoodoo System”.

As an African Diasporic Traditional Religion, Hoodoo has been systemically and socially loosed of it’s “religion” category by way of criminalization; birthed from demonization of African Indigenous practices by white society. On top of having to survive under the rigid covenants of Protestantism. Hoodoo was criminalized: from drums being banned in response to the Stono Rebellion that had its roots in Conjure (similar in fashion in how the Haitian Revolution that is said to have Vodou at it’s epicenter), to rootwork/herb doctoring and other Hoodoo medical interventions being banned in Virginia, on down to the origins of various “witch trials” around the Americas that was founded upon fear of Indigenous practices and saw Black and Brown people as the first ones tried and burned at stake. 

In what would be, and is now, the “United States of America”, Black people have spent more time being practitioners of African Traditional Religion than we haven’t. Christianity for Black folks has, historically, seen more utilization as a spiritual cloaking than it has as a doctrine practiced and preached in dogmatic earnest. 

The waters of syncretism are receding to reveal the bones. The fluid of spiritual beliefs, creation, and living traditions are eroding mountains and making themselves known. This “holy” water, simultaneously life-giving and life-holding, serves as an antithesis to the cultural drowning we’ve experienced under the baptisms of Christianity. 

Many Black people in the states believe themselves disconnected from our ancestral practices, while simultaneously having more African Diasporic Traditional leanings than they realize.  While many of us were not allowed to learn about the happenings that would be socially collapsed into “witchcraft,” we did see the ways that our families used the Bible as a source of sorcery. The pictures of Ancestors, candles, artifacts from loved ones past, figurines and African artwork that seemed to congregate all in one spot(s) made for casual altars. Many weren’t allowed to read Harry Potter, maybe, because it was “witchcraft”; but they did have an altar. Their people were adamant about having Black Eyed Peas for New Years Eve. We’re generations deep in spiritual double consciousness. The ways that we know and unknow ourselves is simultaneously fascinating and frustrating. Only “unknowing” because of fear and systemic attempts to disbar us from being practitioners, or privy to the ways that Conjure permeates our lives at the very least.

For some people, the current “return” to African Traditional Religions is an uncomfortable ebbing of the tide. Those spiritually insecure have insisted that this return to unadulterated African Diasporic Traditional Religion is a “trend.” Their projections speaks more to them attempting to soothe their own disconnection and fears, rather than being a truth to the witnessing of our supposed disconnection as whole. Ahistorically citing the interest in African and Diasporic Traditional Religions as “new”  (as supposed result of Beyoncé’s “Lemonade”) and listing the newness as reason people are leaving the church. Sloppily positioning Christianity as thee religion that we were born into, due to supposedly being thee religion of our ancestors. 

Writers like Audre Lorde, visual artists like Basquiat, abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, Rock & Roll legends like Muddy Waters, cultural anthropologists like Zora Neale Hurston, and beyond, have conjured experiences of African Diasporic Traditional practices within their creative fruit long before Beyoncé was wearing a yellow dress while wielding a bat in the “Hold Up” video. 

Christianity is not something that we were born into. The womb of African Traditional Religion had been punctured and our parts ripped out. Not born, but making ourselves apparitions and disruptions within the practice. Christianity, however, was something that this nation was born into. With careful prying hands pulling out heads of state and limbs of domestic and international terrorism to follow. 

We are not born into Christianity. We are not twin to this nation. What we are is born into is the lineage and survival of our ancestors, accumulated into our very existence. We are our ancestors and our ancestors are us: nothing is new. We can never appropriate African or Diasporic Traditions that are ours. We can, however, handle things roughly if we don’t first exorcise ourselves of whiteness. 

Our blood knows that nothing is new. The way that our hearts beat in rhythm when we hear drumming knows that nothing is new. Why is it that our grandmothers dream of fish when someone is pregnant if African water spirits around fertility and maternity (like Yemaya) were new to us? What’s “new” about us besides the construct of whiteness and all the tools it utilized? There are only things that we have yet to uncover within ourselves, it’s necessary to go back to what our ancestors have taught us. Sankofa.

Reading Suggestions:

“Mojo Workin’: The Old African American Hoodoo System,” Katrina Hazzard-Donald (2012)

“Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black Americans,” Theophus H. Smith

“A Veneration Prayer To Invoke The Ancestral Spirits,” Daizy, TheAfroMystic (2017)

“Roots, Hoodoo, and Conjuration: The First African American Religion,” Myeshxa, CognacXConjure (2019)

Listening Suggestions: 

“A Little Juju,” Juju Bae (Podcast)

“Mama Rue’s,”(Podcast)

---

Comments