Path: Supernews70!Supernews73!supernews.com!news.he.net!pushkin.conxion.com!ultra.sonic.net!not-for-mail From: catherine yronwode Newsgroups: alt.lucky.w,alt.religion.orisha,alt.magick.tyagi,alt.magick.alt.pagan Subject: Re: Cooking pot magic Date: Sat, 11 Jul 1998 17:18:03 -0800 Organization: Lucky Mojo Curio Co. Lines: 118 Message-ID: <35A80ED7.68FD@luckymojo.com> References: <99fbbca9.35a7c2d7@aol.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: d55.pm8.sonic.net Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0Gold (Macintosh; I; 68K) To: Jukebaby@aol.com Xref: Supernews70 alt.lucky.w:2519 alt.religion.orisha:1673 alt.magick.tyagi:16088 Jukebaby@aol.com wrote: > > My friend, Willa, knows voodoo and such but does not practice it and will not > tell hardly anything about it. She says she can't and won't. I know that she > has a frying pan that has something to do with it. Willa's grandmother was > born missing a hand and she was a famous practitioner in her area, I guess. > (Willa learned from her.) Willa said her grandmother didn't use the pan but > used oak fire in a fireplace. I've been looking thru your material on the web > and, so far, haven't found anything referring to using this. Can you point me > to something about it? Are do you know anything about the use of fire for > conjuring....and why she would use that particular type of wood? > > Gaile Hi, In replying to your question, i am also pisting it to the usenet groups alt.lucky,w (world-wide folk magic, including hoodoo) and alt.religion.orisha (African diaspora religions and magical folkways, including Santeria, Vodoun, Palo, and hoodoo) I am missing some context here...i am unsure if your friend Willa practices Vodoun -- the Haitian synthesis of West African religion centered on worship of the Loa (gods), or if she practices good old African-American hoodoo, also known as conjuration, witchcraft and root work. If the latter, i think i can answer; if the former, someone in a.r.o. (Craig?) will probably have to help me out here. Also, i am going to exclude any mention of European and European-American customs regarding "witches' cauldrons," as i think these, while fascinating in their parallel development, won't shed much light on your specific query. I am a complete outsider to African religions, but as i understand it, there are rituals in several of them (the Congo religion Palo for sure, right Craig?) that involve the use of consecrated pots in which sacred objects are placed (?) and which are, when consecrated, the residences of indwelling gods or spirits. Since your friend Willa used a frying pan and did not make a ritually consecrated pot in the Palo style (what are these called, Craig?), i am going to assume that she was practicing hoodoo or folk-magic. Hoodoo strongly reflects the Congo ancestry of its practitioners. It contains remnants or survivals of Congo religious practice, often not clearly understood as such by its practitioners, most of whom identify themselves as Protestant Christians. The use of pots and pans in hoodoo is well documented. During the 1930s, a folklorist named Harry Middleton Hyatt collected almost 14,000 separate oral history accounts of hoodoo from 1,600 African American practitioners. Among these, he found numerous instances of divination, diagnosis of magical illness, cure of magical illness, and consultation for decision-making by coffee pot, cooking pot, and cooking pan. He was intrigued and somewhat amused by these -- especially the coffee pots, which seemed so "mundane" -- but apparently he did not know about the African antecedents to these customs, and so he did not know how valuable these glimpses into African religious and cultural survival really were. I think if Hyatt were alive today, he would be extremely interested in pursuing some of the "Congo connections" to hoodoo. In any case, the uses for pots, pans, coffee pots, or such in hoodoo are varied, so it is unlikely i can guess what your friend Willa uses hers for. I am going to guess divination, though, because that is an area about which folks are fairly guarded and unlikely to reveal their thoughts. She might also be using it to cure magical illness. Cooking pot mgaic in hoodoo is usually performed by a professional practitioner or consultant (root doctor, tweo-headed doctor, hoodoo woman) for a client. One such rite involves boiling a whole silver dime (or filings from the edge of a silver dime) in water (or milk) and drinking the "silver water." There are many variants of how this is done; it can also be combined with a rite of cooking pot divination in which the boiling dime is closely watched for evidence of certain movements which indicate that "enemy work" is the cause of the client's suffering. Now as for the oak wood fire. Oak is specified i think because it burns hottest and best of all the American hard-woods. Urban people kinda don't know this, but among rural people of the era before gas stoves became common, specifying an oak wood fire was not necessarily an indication of magical intent -- it meant a good hot fire with an extremely even temperature and none of the sparking, sputters, flare-ups, or "pops" that a pine wood fire will entail. I have old cookbooks, for example, that call for building an "oak wood fire" when baking. However, that having been said, red oak is sometimes used in hoodoo medical practice (as it is in Appalachian folk-medicine) for a tea or for medicated bath-water. It contains tannic acid, which is the basis of its use in that regard. But since an oak wood fire was specified, i assume the intent here was to get a good fire, that's all. Okay, that leads us to rural hoodoo fireplace magic. This is definitely related to African cooking pot magic; and again, Hyatt has some striking instances of it. The fireplace was conceived as a site of magical energy, an aspect of hoodoo that has almost completely died out among urban people. Rites centerred on the firelace involve the boiling of the silver dime, explained above, urinating around the four chmney corners for protection or to lift a curse on someone (in that latter case, the practitioner tells them to urinate around their own chimey corners, of course), and the mixing of wood ashes and / or chimney brick dust with other ingredients to create magical formulas for harm, protection, and compelling others to do one's will. Burial or innurment of a magically-charged object (e.g. one's enemy's hairs, 9 needles, and 9 pins in a small glass bottle; or conversely one's lover's menstrual cloth) in the fireplace can wreak destruction to that person or cause them to love you. I hope this casts some light on the subject. I look to others to supply more information on Santeria, Vodoun, and Palo customs regarding pots, and fires. catherine yronwode Lucky Mojo Curio Co: http://www.luckymojo.com/luckymojocatalogue.html The Lucky W Amulet Archive: http://www.luckymojo.com/luckyw.html Sacred Sex: http://www.luckymojo.com/sacredsex.html The Sacred Landscape: http://www.luckymojo.com/sacredland.html Freemasonry for Women: http://www.luckymojo.com/comasonry.html Comics Warehouse: http://www.luckymojo.com/comicswarehouse.html check out news:alt.lucky.w for discussions on folk magic and luck