Hoodoo and Blue Bottle Trees

It might look like ordinary garden decor, but this “Blue Bottle Tree” exemplifies a magical practice called Hoodoo – an African-American spiritual tradition from the U.S. Southeast. Hoodoo – not to be confused with Voodoo – originally grew popular among people of West African descent whom the dominant white culture had enslaved.

Hoodoo, also called “rootwork” or “conjure,” has traditionally been a way for the disenfranchised to achieve a sense of agency when the institutional legal, medical, and dominant religious practices failed. It has mixed West African religious traditions (especially Bakongo, Vodun, and Yoruba practices), Indigenous American herbal medicine, and Abrahamic (Christian and Muslim) traditions. Thus, it is a syncretic practice that many included with their other faith traditions, even though black American Christians who practiced Hoodoo usually hid their rootwork from the dominant white population.

The Hoodoo rituals and spells often involved healing and magical protection. In the case of the Blue Bottle Trees, the cobalt blue was thought to be able to attract and capture evil spirits – blue being a protective color, and the use of glass bottles on trees having centuries-old precedents from West Africa.

Hoodoo also developed revenge spells, which makes sense for people whose disenfranchisement usually gave them little agency in the dominant culture. Cases of “spell jars,” along with objects like eggs, feathers, and coins have been found in graveyards in South Carolina as recently as 2012. In that case, police unfamiliar with the Hoodoo traditions called upon the services of a folklore anthropologist who could contextualize what was going on.