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Body Fluids In Hoodoo

BODY FLUIDS IN HOODOO:
by: an anonymous coward.
MENSTRUAL BLOOD, SEMEN, and URINE
by and (c) 2002 catherine yronwode

In the folk magic of virtually every culture there are
spells that make use of all of our bodily effluvia and
detritus, including the amniotic sac (caul) of a baby, spit,
semen, tears, urine, feces, head hair, pubic hair, and nail
clippings. However, due to taboos surrounding menstrual
blood, semen, and urine in some urban cultures, the use of
these particular body fluids in spell-casting can be
problematic for those unfamiliar with the larger history of
folk magic. In light of the universality of bodily effluvia
and detritus as tools of magic, the singling out of
menstrual blood, urine, and semen is most rationally
approached on the basis of their intended effect (generally
spells of sex and love) than on the basis of their origin
(human bodies).

The frankest discussions of the uses of these substances in
magic will be found in ethnological treatises on folk-magic;
the "ceremonial high magicians" of the late Victorian era
(including Aleister Crowley and his cohorts) were too
prudish to deal with this matter as anything other than an
antinomian and rule-breaking rite. They found it
exhilerating in proportion to the degree to which they
judged it to be daring, provocative, and naughty -- and
their 20th and 21st century followers have continued in the
same vein, especailly as the possibility of blood-born and
sexually-transmitted diseases has made working with these
substances seem dangerous. In folk-magic, on the other hand,
menstrual blood, semen, and urine are straightforward tools
of spell-casting and the knowledge of how to deploy them is
routinely passed from one family member to another.

MENSTRUAL BLOOD

In the African-American hoodoo tradition, as well as in
Sicilian folk-magic, menstrual blood served to a man in his
coffee or tea is a sovereign recipe for capturing his sexual
attention. No ritual, prayer, or invocation is necesary; you
simply add some menstrual blood to the man's coffee or tea.
The idea is to get your scent into the beloved's sphere of
consciousness. This is nothing more or less than
pheromone-magic, and as such it partakes of biology as much
as it does of occultism. My Sicilian grandmother believed in
its efficacy completely.

I have done this often, with uniformly good results. I have
directly fed gobbets of menstruum to my lover, from my
fingers, as one might feed a pet. This was done to bind him,
but to avoid the sneakiness of slipping it into his drinks
-- i want him to KNOW how much i want him to be mine, and to
know that i am working the spell on him right out in the
open. (As the old slogan for the Steak-and-Shake drive-in
chain reads: "In sight -- it must be right!")

VAGINAL FLUIDS

Women who are not menstruating due to pregnancy or
breast-feeding, who have had surgery that terminated their
cycles, or who are past the change obviously do not have
menstrual fluid to use in sex-spells. Their best alternative
is to use vaginal fluids gathered after masturbation during
the full moon. In hoodoo and Sicilian folk-magic, vaginal
fluids make a good substitute for menstrual blood in coffee
or tea love spells.

I have used menstrual blood or vaginal fluids with equal
success when anointing idols (statues of deities), amulets,
and curios -- for instance, when dressing lodestones in
spells for sexual attraction and bonding.

URINE

In European -- especially Italian -- folk magic, as well as
in hoodoo, urine is occasionally used in women's coffee and
tea love spells, as a quick substitute for menstrual blood,
when the intention is to tie or bind a lover. Men also can
put urine in a drink to tie a woman, although this is not
mentioned so commonly.

In hoodoo, one of the oldest traditions is for a male
gambler to have a female lover urinate on his mojo bag or
lucky hand while he is at play. If the gambler and his
partner can retire to an alley to perform the act while the
game is in progress, so much the better. This is called
"feeding the mojo," and the use of the word "feed" is, of
course an indicative link to African magico-religious
thought, from whence this custom derives. (Lodestones are
also "fed" in hoodoo -- with magnetic sand.) Women players
rarely ask a man to urinate on their mojo hands, so, for
whatever reason, it is female urine that is considered lucky
in this case.

Urine can be a vulnerable spot in a man or woman's
periphery. An enemy who gets your "water" can cause grave
damage to you by stopping it up in a bottle with red pepper
and graveyard dirt. The result will be urinary tract
problems, ranging from cystitis and nephiritis to
prostatitis and kidney stones. The only way to take off such
a condition is to find the bottle and destroy it, letting
the urine run out into a fire.

Conversely, urine has its strengths -- a man can use his own
urination to cure a case of impotence that was put on him
through magic.

SEMEN

Men can make use of their sexual fluids in love spells. Josh
Geller (dclxvi@best.com) gave this simple formula for an
orgasmic spell utilizing semen:

Masturbate to orgasm and preserve the resultant fluids. You
should be concentrating on your desired result at the point
of orgasm. Take some of the resultant fluids and insinuate a
bit of them into the food or drink of your prospective
victim.

For every man who uses his semen to attract a woman,
however, there are probably a hundred women who capture a
man's semen to rule and control him or to keep him faithful.
The most popular way to do this in hoodoo is by making a
knot-spell on the man and keeping it tied up in a nation
sack. For this purpose, the semen can be fresh or gathered
from a discarded condom -- or even stored in the freezer
until needed. Most of the rootworkers who have told me about
how to capture semen have noted that it is important that
the woman not have an orgasm when capturing semen, because
then she might get "mixed up in the spell," and fall victim
to her own conjurations. "Hold yourself aloof," was how one
woman put it to me. "Don't let yourself get mixed into it
when you collect his stuff."

FROM FOLK MAGIC TO SEXUALIZED SPIRITUALITY

Karezza is a sexual-metaphysical system in which heightened
states of spiritualality are believed to occur if both
partners become highly aroused but hold back from having
orgasms. However, even in the most ascetic forms of karezza,
intercourse during menstruation -- not involving blood per
se, but taking advantage of the woman's typically increased
level of desire at that point in her cycle -- is perceived
as a "rite" in the mystical sense. One karezza writer, John
William Lloyd, who advocated abstinence from orgasm,
declared that during "the woman's time of great desire"
(e.g. at the outset of her period) she should be allowed to
have all the orgasms she wants and that the man should go
along with her and come too. So Lloyd recognized the
menstrual period as qualitatively different from the rest of
the woman's cycle, in terms of the performance of a
spiritual sex act.

WHY DOES IT WORK?

The use of urine or menstrual blood in wirchcraft, stregha,
hoodoo, and other forms of folk-magic is a codification and
amplification of the natural biological process by which a
female attracts a male. Note that in token of this,
urine/menstrual bood magic is almost always a subset of love
or lust magic.

Some people think of urine as a "territory marker," equating
its magical deployment to the way that male dogs and other
carnivores use it to drive off male rivals, and so they
don't appreciate the fact that a lot of the urine magic
encountered in folklore involves WOMEN'S urine, not men's.
However, the basis for the utilization of urine in women's
sex-attracting spells makes ready sense to anyone who has
ever raised goats -- because smelling and even tasting the
urine of a doe goat is the prime way that a buck goat has
for determining the female's readiness for mating. This is
true of many other mammals as well.

Are humans more like dogs (males using their urine to drive
off rivals) or like goats (males tasting female urine to
assess readiness to mate)? Well, here's a clue: in humans,
there is a notable difference between the sexes in regard to
the body parts they sniff to get a whiff of attractant
pheromones. Just as female humans are attracted to male
underarm scents (rich in androstenone) so are male humans
attracted to female vaginal scents, a complex compound of
uterine menstruum, vaginal secretions, and lingering urine
odors known collectively as "copulins." The composition of
these copulins changes throughout the woman's monthly cycle,
but they are basically attractants for males, not territory
markers. They may function as territory markers to other
females, of course.

AVOIDING "CAPTURE" BY MENSTRUAL BLOOD OR URINE

Bcause men are thought to be so susceptible to the magical
deployment of women's menstrual blood, vaginal fluids, and
urine, in some cultures they are taught to avoid eating
anything served to them by an unmarried woman which might
contain these bodily fluids. It is common for a man to
refuse or only warily accept dark-coloured beverages like
coffee or tea or foods with brown or red sauces such as
barbeque, lasagna, or spaghetti from a woman.

Some folks believe that the power of menstrual blood is
inherent -- that is, it will work just the same whether it
is deliberately added to foods or beverages as a magical act
or ingested accidentally. For those who feel this way, any
contact with menstrual blood may result in bewitchment. Nona
C. Wright tells how this advice was passed along in her
husband's family:

My late husband, who was African American, used to tell me
his grandmother warned him never to indulge in oral sex with
a woman during her period because it would make him bound to
her for life. I always took it as his quirky sense that one
could use menstrual blood in love spells. But in hindsight
this seemed to be a very powerful thing to him as he swore
he would never do it. To him it had to do with giving up his
free choice to be with someone and somehow being under their
power or control.

TAKING OFF A MENSTRUAL BLOOD OR URINE CONJURATION

What can a man do if he suspects or knows that an
unscrupulous woman is putting menstrual blood on him? What
can a womando if she suspects or knows that another woman is
using that stuff on her man or on a male relative?

Well, you can't stop her if she's already done it, but to
take the mess off you have a couple of choices:

1) A doctor can perform a purification on the man -- such as
washing him in a bath of rue herb tea, smoking him with
Uncrossing Incense, and then dressing him with Van Van Oil

and/or

3) If the man has been rendered impotent by the enemy woman,
he can perform a specific spell of his own, such as drawing
cross-marks on his penis for nine days or psissing into a
red ants' nest to restore his manhood.

and/or

2) The man or a root doctor workering on his behalf can get
back at the enemy woman and reverse the spell by capturing
some of her menstrual blood and laying a trick for her, such
as stopping her blood up in a bottle with 9 pins, 9 needles,
and 9 rusty nails, then hiding the bottle in a hollow tree
where she will never find it. That'll serve her very well.
She'll get "female trouble" and will have to leave that man
alone.

SUBSTITUTES: THE MAGICAL LINK

I am often asked what a person can use for this type of
rootwork if bodily fluids cannot be gotten. In descending
order of strength, according to hoodoo folk magic, here is a
list of substitute magical links:

Genital fluids: menstrual blood, semen, vaginal fluid Other
biological concerns: urine, feces, sweat, blood, spit Hair:
pubic, head, armpit, beard Person's unwashed clothing:
underwear, socks, handkerchief Person's foot track lifted
from the dirt "Shed" body items: nail clippings, baby teeth
Person's handwriting on paper Something Person owned or wore
Something Person touched, e.g. butt from smoked cigarette
Photo of Person Drawing or silhouette of Person Person's
business card Person's full name written on paper 9 times

These items can be used for good or for evil; all that is
indicated here is the relative strength of the tokens that
represent the person. In practice, they are often combined
to increase their power. For example; you may get the
person’s business card and then write their name on the back
9 times, or you may get their handwriting on paper, write
their name on the back 9 times, and fold the paper around a
hair you stole from their comb or brush while you were using
the bathroom in their house.



The following documentation on the use of body fluids in
hoodoo spell-casting comes from "Hoodoo - Conjuration -
Witchcraft - Rootwork," a 5-volume, 4766-page collection of
folkloric material gathered by Harry Middleton Hyatt,
primarily between 1935 and 1939. For a further documented
series spells using salt in the German-American and
African-American folk-magic traditions, see the page on
Protection Spells.

IMPORTANT: If this is the first time you have encountered
Hyatt material at this web site, please take a moment to
open and read the supplementary page called "Hoodoo -
Conjuration - Witchcraft - Rootwork" by Harry Middleton
Hyatt.



MAN'S SEMEN IN PILLOW CAUSES IMPOTENCE {TIES HIS NATURE}

10262. Ah heard dey said yo' could take yo' discharge an'
put it in a rag an' put it where no air kin git to it, an'
put it in yore pillah, an' he cain't do nuthin off nowheres
else, an' he'll have tuh stay home.

[Fayetteville, N. Car., (1443), 2614:7.]



HAIR -- PUBIC {AND MENSTRUAL BLOOD}

3207. Well the other is, you can take hair from around your
privates and use in a way, say a man or a woman, if she is
running around and you are in love with her or something and
you want to stop her. Say you use that {her public hair} to
stop her.

(Do you know how they would use it?)

Take it -- you have to get it during intercourse see and get
it and keep it to yourself. Take it and put this hair in a
bottle and stop it up, and the other {menstrual blood} goes
with it -- take a cloth or a rag, anything she uses. Take
that and...

[Informant was so long trying to finish sentence, that I
suggested:] (You carry it with you, is that the idea?)

No, you can stop her to make her stay where you are, have no
connection with nobody but you...

[I stop machine and let him talk (see dots) and then attempt
to summarize.] (By taking some of her private hair and a
piece of her monthly cloth, and putting in in this bottle
and stopping it up, and keeping it on your person. Wearing
it.)

No, Sir, place it in a secret place right over the door
there or anywhere you can hide it -- up over her, where she
goes through.

(That will keep her from running around with men?)

Yes.

[Fayetteville, N.Car., (1393), 2503:8.]



IF A MAN GIVES HIS URINE TO A WOMAN IN A DRINK SHE WON'T
HAVE ANY NATURE FOR ANY OTHER MAN

10273. He takes and give her his urine to drink unbeknownst
to her, like in beer or wine, and she won't even look at
another man, won't have any nature towards any other man.
That urine keeps her mine [mind] on that one man, her
husband, when he is gone away from her, on a visit or
somepin.

[New Orleans, La., (809), 1139:6.]



URINATING INTO RED ANT NEST CURES IMPOTENCE

10271. If a person got chew fixed so yo' ain't got no
manhood wit churself, yo' jes' go an' make water into a red
ant's nest. It will freshen right up ag'in. Ah've lost mah
nature mahself dat way an' ah've gained it back dat way.
Dat's true about dat.

[For more ants, see Nos. 3111-3112, p. 2342, v.3.]

[Waycross, Ga., (1145), 1869:6.]



ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: The Harry M. Hyatt material on this page
was transcribed by Landa (chicomex@goldstate.net).

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