Mojo (African-American culture)
A mojo (/ˈmoʊdʒoʊ/), in the African-American spiritual practice called Hoodoo, is an amulet consisting of a flannel bag containing one or more magical items.
[8][9] Beginning in the twentieth century, the word mojo underwent semantic change in American culture in movies and songs and came to refer to sexuality and virility.
[2][10] Central and West Africans all practiced the spiritual art of creating conjure bags for protection, healing and to communicate with spirits.
Some of the Mandingo people were able to carry their gris-gris bags with them when they boarded slave ships heading to the Americas bringing the practice to the United States.
[18] In West-Central Africa, Bakongo and Yoruba people created medicine bags using leather or cloth and placed feathers, animal parts, roots, herbs and other ingredients for protection.
[19][20] In West-Central Africa, people wear nkisi, wanga, and other charm bags to ward from and reverse evil and to cure illness.
However, the practice became African-American when Black people in America used American materials and reinterpreted them applying a Christian or Islamic interpretation with Bakongo cosmogram concepts.
The last items touched by the dead are also placed inside mojo bags to carry the spirit of the deceased with the living for protection.
[31][32] At Hermitage plantation in Nashville, Tennessee, archeologists discovered continued West African traditions of using hexagonal glass beads for fertility and other spiritual purposes.
Other charms found were mojo hands, lucky roots, raccoon penis bones, ceramics, and blue beads.
These items found in a slave cabin showed enslaved African-Americans used local roots and created mojo hands for protection and healing.
[1] Mojo reaches as far back as West African culture, where it is said to drive away evil spirits, keep good luck in the household, manipulate a fortune, and lure and persuade lovers.
[40] Ingredients can include graveyard dirt, roots, herbs, animal parts, minerals, coins, crystals, good luck tokens, and carved amulets.
[41] To house spirits of the dead inside mojo bags, jars, packets, and other containers and charms, graveyard dirt from a deceased person's burial plot is used.
The conjurer prepares the graveyard dirt with certain incantations, prayers, Biblical or Quranic scriptures and other ingredients to instruct the spirit to heal or protect a person.
Enslaved and free Africans upon arrival to the United States used North American herbs, roots, and animal parts to create conjure bags.
[45] An oral account from Patsy Moses, a former slave from Texas, mentioned the use of red flannel cloth to make conjure bags using frog bones to protect from an enemy.
[46] Other Texas slave narratives showed that red flannel cloth was commonly used to make mojo bags incorporating frog bones, snake skins, and roots to protect from their enemies and remove curses.
After four years, the minister did not feel comfortable depending on the spirit of a mojo bag and not the Christian God to grow his church.
He owned a conjure Hoodoo store and provided medicinal and spiritual healing to his clients using charms and herbal remedies.
In Africa, petition papers with Quranic verses along with herbs, roots and other ingredients are placed inside a leather bag and concealed by wearing them under the clothes.
During the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, many West African people were taken to the United States and enslaved on plantations and continued to practice their traditions by sewing mojo hands into their quilts.
The African-American cook had a mojo bag with a "lizard's tail, rabbit's foot, a fish eye, snake skins, a beetle, and a dime with a hole in it."
[57][58] "For Hoodoo practitioners looking to sell their goods, it has therefore become more profitable to rely 'on stereotypes of…[H]oodoo to attract their primarily white clientele' (ibid.)
Additionally, white shop owners seem to dominate the mainstream Hoodoo market, undermining the ability of African-American people to rely on their religious beliefs to assure their economic empowerment.
"[43] African American practitioners from the Millennial and Gen Z generations are incorporating new techniques such as the use of various crystals in the creation of mojo bags and using tarot cards for divination to consult with spirit.
Once prepared, the mojo is "dressed" or "fed" with a liquid such as alcohol (whiskey, rum) perfume, water, or bodily fluids.
In the song, Wells explained he traveled to Louisiana and saw a Hoodoo practitioner to make him a mojo bag to get back his girlfriend who left him for another man.
[66][67] In the 1930s, Zora Neale Hurston documented African-Americans in the South creating mojo bags using roots, herbs, and animal parts in the Hoodoo tradition.
[70][71] Other slave narratives explained how African Americans in slavery and freedom made mojo charms to stop nose bleeds and reverse and prevent illness.
