Hoodoo (spirituality)

Hoodoo is a complex set of spiritual observances, traditions, and beliefs—including magical and other ritual practices—developed by enslaved African Americans in the Southern United States from various traditional African spiritualities and elements of indigenous North American botanical knowledge. Practitioners of Hoodoo are called rootworkers, conjure doctors, conjure men or conjure women, and root doctors. Regional synonyms for Hoodoo include roots, rootwork and conjure. As an autonomous spiritual system, it has often been syncretized with beliefs from religions such as Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, and Spiritualism.

Hoodoo, frequently associated with conjure, is a compilation of religious beliefs and practices, centered on ancestor worship, justice, and rootwork, a botanical practice used for both healing and causing harm. It is mostly influenced by West African spiritual practices, incorporating Indigenous herbalism and European grimoires. While there are a few academics who believe that Hoodoo is an autonomous religion, those who practice the tradition maintain that it is a set of spiritual traditions that are practiced in conjunction with a religion or spiritual belief system, such as a traditional African spirituality and Abrahamic religion.

Many Hoodoo traditions draw from the beliefs of the Bakongo people of Central Africa. Over the first century of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, an estimated 52% of all enslaved Africans transported to the Americas came from Central African countries that existed within the boundaries of modern-day Cameroon, the Congo, Angola, Central African Republic, and Gabon.