Mojo Bags
Some good info on mojo bags and how they are made.
HOW A MOJO BAG IS MADE
Although most "Southern Style" conjure bags are made of red blue flannel for a peaceful home mojo, and so forth. Leather flannel, some root doctors favour the colour-symbolism employed in hoodoo style candle-burning magic and thus use green flannel for a money mojo, white flannel for a baby-blessing mojo, red flannel for a love mojo, pale bags are also seen, but far less frequently than flannel; they are associated with West Indian obeah, another form of folk magic closely related to African-American hoodoo. Mojo bags can also be made in leather -- either split hide (modern) or fine chamois (shammy) leather (more old-fashioned. In the 1970s, i also purchased mojo bags made in Bull Durham tobacco sacks, and items that were effectively the same as a house-mojo (that is, one to be secreted in the home, not carried on the person) made of white handkerchief cloth, complete with white cotten hand-crocheted lace edging. As early as the 1920s, mail order spiritual supply houses also carried mojo bags made in the Himalayan double-drowstring style, with Chinese characters stamped on them, under the names "Chinese novelty bag" -- and these lucky mojo bags contained the usual African American mojo hand ingredients, including lodestones an magnetic sand.Not all lucky mojos are made in the form of bags, either. A square of red flannel can be tied around the ingredients with a string, forming what i call the "flaming bomb" or "flaming comet" form of mojo hand. In my youth, this form was seen mostly in the work of toby-makers who were men and did not know how to sew. It is a more common form in the West Indies, i am told. In common parlance of the time, this was called a "wrapped" or "folded and wrapped" mojo hand. hand.And what is contained in the mojo hand? Well, that varies a lot, based on what the wearer hopes to accomplish by carrying the amulet and what the maker finds effective or customary to use in preparing it.A mojo bag carried for love-drawing will contain different ingredients than one for gambling luck or magical protection.The objects most commonly found in mojo bags are roots and herbs, minerals, petition papers, name papers, plus a variety of animal parts such as hair, fingernails, bones, or dyed feathers -- green for money, red for love, orange for change or warning, blue for spiritual peace -- rattlesnake rattles, dried frogs, swallow hearts, and bat wings. (Modern urban practitioners may substitute a toy plastic bat for the latter). Coins, metal lucky charms, crystals, good luck tokens, and carved stone amulets may also be added for extra power or for their symbolic value.Generally there are at least three items in a mojo hand. Some root doctors try to ensure that the total number of ingredients comes to an odd number -- usually 3, 7, or 9, but sometimes 5, 11, or 13. On the other hand, just as many root doctors don't bother counting the items at all; they just compile the traditional items they like to work with, according to the situations, conditions, and needs of their clients.Some conjure workers who do like to count out 3 ingredients will make sure each item is singular and distinct -- say, one root, one personal item, and one mineral. To other, equally proficient workers, the count of 3 may include one personal item, one petition paper, and two paired minerals counted as one; or one animal curio, one petition paper, and half a handful of mixed herbs and seeds, in which case, no matter how many varieties there are in the herb mixture, the mix itself is counted as one item. But not all toby makers count their ingredients out, and if you were to have purchased as many conjure bags as i have over the years, you would soon understand, as i have come to understand, that there is no canonical "sacred number" used in making a mojo bag.Some root doctors are known for their use of favorite or "trade mark" ingredients -- one man i knew, for instance, put tobacco snuff in every bag he made; another was famed for his "Good Luck Herb Mixture" and used it in almost every bag i bought from him, as well as selling it in the form of incense and baths; a third man was known to me for his consistent and otherwise unexplained inclusion of a coin -- usually a modern penny -- in every bag he made. But the use of such "trademarks" is not too common, in my experience; most makers vary the contents of their bags quite a bit, depending on the case at hand, and there is no canonical list of "sacred ingredients" used in makng a mojo bag.Some root workers top off their mojo bags with parchments upon which are printed medieval European grimoire seals and sigils of talismanic import, particularly the Jewish-derived seals from the Greater Key of Solomon and The 6th and 7th Books of Moses, both of which are sold as sets of seals printed on parchment paper, and are used without reference to the rituals given in the texts of the original grimoire books.
FIXING AND FEEDING THE MOJO HAND
Fixing the mojo is not merely a matter of dumping a bunch of items into the bag. It involves a ritual -- which will vary from maker to maker -- of filling the bag and then awakening it to life. It may be "smoked" in incense fumes or the smoke from a candle, or breathed upon or into, to bring it to life. Prayers may be said, and other methods may be used to accomplish this essential step.The mojo is then wrapped or tied. In all my years of practice PRIOR TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE INTERNET, i never purchased a lucky mojo bag made of cloth or leather by an African American practitioner in or from the South that was not tied, snugged-up, wrapped, or sewn shut in some way. However, i did purchase several mojo bags made for me by Anglo Americans serving the African American community that were not tied or sewn shut. Go back to the Bantu word "tobé" to see why a toby is tied shut.Of course, traditional methods of tying or snugging up a cloth mojo hand vary according to the inclinations of the individual, family, regional, and/or personal training received by any given practitioner, but my younger days, the tie used on a flannel cloth drawstring bag, as well as on a "flaming comet" style of wrapped flannel cloth square, was, almost every time, a miller's knot. There are both historical and practical reasons for this and i can explain them to my students.Again, speaking from personal history, i can say that in my life prior to the development of the internet, leather mojo bags with leather or nylon-braid drawstrings were sometimes tied with a reef knot or left snugged up tight, due to the lesser flexibility of the leather. But even those may be tied with a miller's knot if the leather is thin and flexible enough to be manipulated in that way.Once prepared or "fixed," the mojo is "dressed" or "fed" with a liquid of some kind.
The most common liquids used to feed a hand are alcohol, such as whiskey; a perfume, such as Hoyt's Cologne or Florida Water; bodily fluids, such as spit or urine (or sexual fluids for a love-drawing hand); or with a specially-prepared condition oil. The bag is not generally soaked through, but simply dabbed with the liquid, although some old-time poker players i knew during in my youth, during the 1960s, used to say that to get a gambling hand to really work for you, you had to have your lover pee all over it out in the alley between rounds of play. Such a lucky mojo would only be used for the one night, after which it would be discarded.Why is the mojo fed to keep it working? Because it is alive with spirit.
One major difference between typical European-style magical talismans and a lucky mojo bag is that it is almost universally claimed and believed by practitioners of conjure that the mojo is alive, is inhabited by a spirit, and/or contains a fragment of the spirit of the owner. Few, if any, European magicians say that sort of thing about their religious or astrological talismans. Yes, astrological talismans are embued with, or reflective of, the energy of a planet or a fixed star, or a moment of transient vibration between two or more such planets or stars -- but they are not alive, kept fed, and cossetted the way a mojo is -- and for good reason.A secondary difference between mojos and European talismans is that mojo hands are customarily fed with scented liquids that are themselves derived from various magical herbal ingredients -- herbal conjure oils, magical herbal-floral colognes, and even liquors such as whiskey ("water of life") in which herbs have been soaked. This is nature magic, the use of this earth's spiritual interweb of magically active beings, in which persons, animals, plants, and minerals are bound together in social patterns on an invisible plane.
