The Hoodoo Tarot Workbook

“With deep learnedness, wicked wit, gimlet eye for human frailties, and a vast, generous love for history and for the world, Tayannah has written a splendid manual for the deeply cosmopolitan, utterly American form of magic that is Hoodoo.” * MOLLY CRABAPPLE, author of Drawing Blood * “I continue to be a great admirer of Tayannah Lee McQuillar’s scholarly and practical work The Hoodoo Tarot. This follow-up work, The Hoodoo Tarot Workbook, continues to engage the complicated history of Africans in North America and Indigenous communities of the American Southeast. McQuillar finds fruitful data in the interstices and intersections that gave rise to Black American culture, a term that she uses to avoid ascribing all things found in early and contemporary ‘African American’ culture to Africa. While not diminishing Africa, McQuillar’s work calls us to consider the significant Indigenous influences on Black American lifeways that show themselves in Hoodoo/Rootwork/ Conjure traditions and practices. The Hoodoo Tarot Workbook challenges readers to take a deeper look at the philosophy, flora, and fauna of the Hoodoo tradition, offering practical suggestions about preparations for rituals as well as directions that readers may choose to engage. This book is a great companion to The Hoodoo Tarot, but it is also of great value as a text in itself. Scholars, practitioners, enthusiastic learners, or those who embody all these will love this new text.” * Stephen C. Finley, Ph.D., associate professor, Department of Religious Studies and African American * “Tayannah takes a step ahead on oracle reading with this book. Much more than only providing counsel or fortune advice, the exercises and meditations from The Hoodoo Tarot Workbook are powerful tools for self-knowledge and self-growth, no matter which faith the reader practices. She also brings light to the mysteries of leaves and charm magic as well as important lessons on how to create magic in daily life guided by the tarot cards and their wisdom messages. The historical chapters are a must-read, especially because they reveal and reinforce the non-Christian aspects of Hoodoo and its founder practitioners. The illustrated plant dictionary and descriptions of their magic uses are a highlight for all magic lovers, Rootworkers or not. Along with the guide to the plants, the Elder cards’ rituals are very interesting and show how Hoodoo and Black America folk magic relates with other diasporic traditions such as Brazilian Umbanda and Jurema.” * Diego de Oxóssi, author of Traditional Brazilian Black Magic and Afro Brazilian Numerology *