Free Hoodoo Resources: Old Texts, Archives and Tools for Students

The best of hoodoo’s written record is free, if you know where it sits. This is our list: the old texts, the archives, the scholars and the tools we send our own students to.

Everything here is free to read or use, and every link goes to the real thing, not a pirate PDF or a shop dressed up as a library.

The Student Library · The Hyatt Files · Hyatt map · Dictionary · Roots and herbs · Free resources · Hoodoo books
In the Store: Oils · 7-day candles · Figure candles · Roots and curios  |  Tables: Psalms · Candle colours · Saints · Minerals and curios · Oils, powders and waters · Timing

Start here

The questions students ask us most, and where to go first.

• Where do I begin? Read the free overview by Jeffrey E. Anderson (below), then our dictionary, then pick any entry in The Hyatt Files and hear the old workers in their own words.
• Which books can I trust? Our Hoodoo Books page has the free books you can read tonight and the ones we rate enough to own.
• Which Psalm is for what? Our Psalms by Purpose table, with the King James text from the Bible links below.
• When should I work? Our timing table, plus the moon and planetary hour tools below.
• Is hoodoo the same as voodoo? No. Hoodoo is African American folk magick and rootwork; Vodou is a religion. The Rutgers piece and the Anderson essay below lay it out.
• Where did it really come from? The slave narratives and the early folklore reports below. That is the record, in the words of the people who lived it.

The old record

Primary sources. The people who did the work, or saw it done, speaking for themselves.

• Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives, 1936 to 1938 (Library of Congress)
  More than 2,300 interviews with formerly enslaved people. Search it for “conjure”, “root” and “hoodoo” and you will find the conjure doctors, the charms and the fixes, first hand.
• North American Slave Narratives (Documenting the American South, UNC)
  The full narratives published up to 1920, including Henry Bibb’s, with its famous accounts of the conjure men he went to.
• Drums and Shadows (Georgia Writers’ Project, 1940)
  WPA interviews along the Georgia coast: rootwork, graveyard practice and the African ways that survived, told by Gullah Geechee people.
• Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro (Newbell Niles Puckett, 1926)
  The big survey before Hyatt: charms, cures, signs and conjure across the South. Free PDF and text.
• The Conjure Woman (Charles W. Chesnutt, 1899)
  Stories by a Black writer who grew up around North Carolina conjure, and it shows.
• Superstitions and Folk-lore of the South (Chesnutt, 1901)
  Chesnutt’s own essay on what he saw: goopher, root doctors and the trade in tricks.

The first folklore reports

The earliest field reports on conjure, from the Journal of American Folklore, free as PDFs. Short, sharp and full of detail.

• Conjuring and Conjure-Doctors in the Southern United States (1896), from the Hampton Folk-Lore Society.
• Negro Conjuring and Tricking (Julien A. Hall, 1897).
• Conjuring in Arkansas (1888).
• Cures by Conjure Doctors (1899).
• Modern Conjuring in Washington (1899).
• Observations on the Practice of Conjuring in Georgia (Roland Steiner, 1901).

The books the old workers kept

The grimoires that found their way into Southern conjure, and that Hyatt’s informants talked about.

• The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses (De Laurence edition, 1910)
  The edition that sold by mail all over the South. Seals, names and Psalm workings. Our Hyatt Files entry shows how the old workers used it.
• The Seventh Book of Moses (sacred-texts)
  The same text, easy to read page by page online.
• Pow-Wows; or, Long Lost Friend (John George Hohman)
  The Pennsylvania German charm book that crossed into hoodoo: charm prayers for protection, healing and binding.
• Egyptian Secrets of Albertus Magnus (Esoteric Archives)
  The charm book named in the same breath as Moses by the old rootworkers.

The Bible

Hoodoo’s working book. The old workers used the King James Version.

• King James Bible Online
  A clean page for every Psalm and chapter. Good for printing a Psalm to read or carry.
• Blue Letter Bible
  Search every verse for a word: “enemy”, “money”, “fire”, “bind”. This is how you find scripture for a working.
• Bible Gateway
  The KJV side by side with other translations, when you want to see a verse from every angle.

Timing tools

• Moon phases for your town (timeanddate)
  Waxing for drawing, waning for sending away.
• US Naval Observatory moon tables
  Official phase dates from 1700 to 2100, for checking an old date as well as the next one.
• Planetary hours (Lunarium)
  The planetary day and hour for any date and place.

Roots and plants

Hoodoo names and botanical names do not always line up. These help you know what you are actually holding.

• USDA PLANTS Database
  Botanical names, pictures and where each plant grows in the US.
• Native American Ethnobotany Database
  Recorded traditional uses of North American plants, many of them the same roots hoodoo uses.
• Resources of the Southern Fields and Forests (Francis Porcher, 1863)
  The plants and remedies of the old South, in full.
• A Modern Herbal (Maud Grieve, 1931)
  Over 800 plants with their lore and uses. A quick reference.
• King’s American Dispensatory (1898)
  What the doctors of the day used each root for. Useful next to what the root doctors used it for.

Read the scholars

• Hoodoo (Jeffrey E. Anderson, World Religions and Spirituality Project)
  The best free overview there is: history, beliefs and practice, with sources.
• Clearing up misconceptions about hoodoo (Rutgers)
  Katrina Hazzard-Donald, author of Mojo Workin’, on hoodoo, voodoo and the commercial trade.
• Hoodoo in St. Louis (National Park Service)
  Hoodoo in the old river city, from the archaeology and from William Wells Brown’s own account.
• Root Doctors (NCpedia)
  A short history of the root doctors of the Carolinas.
• Ginseng, Hoodoo and African American earth-based traditions (Smithsonian Folklife)
  Roots, the WPA narratives and the living tradition.

Listen and watch

• At the Intersection of Hoodoo and Ancestralism
  Dr. Yvonne P. Chireau, the historian behind Black Magic and hoodoo consultant on the film Sinners.
• Hoodoo: Healing and Harm
  Chireau again, on the Memento Morbid podcast. Free to stream.
• To Study Hoodoo, Study History
  Juju Bae’s interview with Chireau, on A Little Juju Podcast.
• Mojo Workin’: Hoodoo as Refuge and Response
  Hess Love at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.
• Hoodoo Plant Mamas
  Plants, roots and Black spirituality. Over 60 episodes.

Need supplies?

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Learn the work