#mpungu

Hoodoo is a closed system that IS NOT for non-Black people.

Hoodoo has deities, but Orisha, Lwa, and Mpungu are not part of Hoodoo. Those deities belong SOLELY to their own respective systems.

A tarot reading, intuitive reading, palm reading, “a feeling”, etc. CAN NOT help you determine which Orisha owns your head. Only an initiated priest of that system, using the specific divination tools of that system, can tell you this. The same goes for Lwa, Mpungu, etc. If you want to know, seek out and PAY a reputable BLACK priest.

Plenty of Hoodoos, myself included, use tarot but tarot IS not part of the Hoodoo system.

The Crossroads is not just some place where you go to dump your empty candle or otherwise dispose of completed spirit work. Spirits live there. Would you want someone dumping their trash at your house without even asking? There’s also plenty of other ways to dispose of works.

Just because deities in different systems are SIMILAR (or you perceive them to be) doesn’t mean they are the SAME, and definitely doesn’t mean they can be engaged with in the same way. Yemoja, La Sirene, and Mami Wata are DIFFERENT spirits (Mami Wata is actually a family of spirits, not a single spirit) that have different protocols for how to engage them. And initiation is required.

Hoodoo has initiations.

The Crossroads Man is NOT Esu or Papa Legba. They are different spirits. What they have in common is being the keepers of Crossroads, of course, but they also have their own individual things that they do and different protocols. See item #6.

High John the Conqueror does not work with non-Black people. If you’re non-Black and think you’re working with him, go ahead and cleanse that trickster spirit out ya house baby 🤣

Engolo or NGolo (Kikongo word meaning strength, power) is a performance of ritual combat by various ethnic groups around the Cunene River in southern Angola. The style of fighting involves various kicks, dodges, and leg sweeps, with an emphasis on inverted positions, i.e. with one or more hands on the ground. The first mention of Engolo in literature was made by Albano Neves e Sousa in a set of drawings demonstrating various techniques and their similarities to the Afro-Brazilian art form of Capoeira in the 1960s. Engolo is one of several African martial arts of the African Diaspora in the Americas.

Neves e Sousa described Engolo as part of a rite of passage, Omuhelo, between young boys vying for a bride in the contest, and whose techniques derived from the peculiar way in which Zebras fight amongst themselves. Research carried out by Dr. TJ Desch Obi finds that Engolo itself is not strictly performed for any one ritual, but as an element in various public and private performances.

In his book Fighting for Honor, as well as his article "Combat and Crossing of the Kalunga", Desch Obi draws parallels between the circle space used in the Engolo and the inverted techniques with the Kalunga cosmology, in which the spirit–ancestor world is inverted as a world of opposites: where men walk on their feet, the spirits walk on their hands, where men are black, the spirits are white, where men reach their peak physical abilities in life, the ancestors reach their peak spirituality. He states that men in performing Engolo with its inverted positions connect themselves physically and spiritually with the ancestors, and with specific ancestral warriors of the past.

The Kalunga line is a watery boundary between the world of the living and the dead in religious traditions of the Congo region. The word Kalunga is Kikongo for "threshold between worlds". The Kalunga line is often associated with bodies of water, with the Atlantic Ocean being prominent.They believed the soul after death traveled the path of the sun as it set in the west. The enslaved believed they were being taken to the land of the dead, never to return. Thus the Kalunga line became known as a line under the Atlantic Ocean where the living became the dead and the only way back to life was to recross the line. Some religions today still make reference to the Kalunga Line believing that the soul of an African-American travels back to Africa upon death and re-enters the world of the spiritually living although the body has passed on.

Kalunga was considered like a goddess or more commonly a god ; the guardian of border between the world of living and dead, who was the Atlantic sea. He was welcoming dead in Kalunga, the land of death, under the sea. Kalunga was also one of names of Nzambi a Mpungu, the high creator.