How Alexis P. Morgan became a village witch

Alexis P. Morgan, my neighborhood village witch, joined me to talk about how she kept being called to learn magic and sorcery. We talk about the differences between hoodoo and voodoo, her Tarot card collection, and her primary community service - The Juno Jar. The winter Juno Jar is available starting on November 1, 2021, on a sliding scale.

Happy Birthday Alexis!

Thank you to Dave Coustan for editing this week's episode.

Follow @findingfavspod on Instagram and Twitter. Rate and review on Apple Podcasts

Show Notes

• The Sorcerer's Secrets: Strategies in Practical Magick by Jason Miller
  
• Mojo Workin': The Old African American Hoodoo System by Katrina Hazzard-Donald
• Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica by Zora Neale Hurston
• Hera's Compassion  painted by Christy Tortland

Alexis  0:00  
Hello, my name is Alexis P. Morgan, and my favorite thing is magic.

Announcer  0:06  
Welcome to the Finding Favorites podcast, where we explore your favorite things without using an algorithm. Here's your host, Leah Jones.

Leah Jones  0:18  
Hello, and welcome to Finding Favorites. I'm your host, Leah Jones. And it is Sunday, October 31st. It's Halloween! And boy, does Chicago have perfect weather for Halloween. This weekend has been a super fun weekend; my twin sister came up, and we're helping my nephew move into his very first Chicago apartment. And then we did a fire pit and told spooky stories and drank hot cider and ate Halloween candy. And now, I'm just watching the sky get brighter, and looking forward to a really another nice fall day.

Leah Jones  1:01  
This week, I got my chemo port, which is a device that sits right under my skin to help with IVs and chemo infusion for the next year. 12 weeks of chemo, but they keep it in for a while for other treatments and other possibilities. So, that is a weird, very weird sensation. But it's healing, and I'm getting more mobility back every day. 

Leah Jones  1:29  
This week, on Finding Favorites, we have Alexis Morgan. Alexis is my neighborhood sorceress. She works in magic -- it also happens to be her birthday. Happy birthday, Alexis. I didn't necessarily plan that when we recorded this episode, but it's kind of fun. So, I hope you're having a *wonderful* birthday and that this year is outstanding.

Leah Jones  1:54  
We talk a lot about how she got called into doing magic and the differences between Hoodoo and Voodoo initiation rites. We also talk about Juno Jar, which is a service that she offers, that starts -- sign-ups go up tomorrow, for this wealth-building service --listen to her describe it. There'll be a link in the show notes to her website with all the information. And I hope that you have a wonderful Halloween and I definitely want to see pictures of your cute -- all the costumes. I want to see all the costumes. You can follow me on social media @chicagoleah on Twitter and TikTok, @chileah on Instagram. Finding Favorites you can find @findingfavspod on Twitter and Instagram. Wear your mask, wash your hands, and keep enjoying your favorite things.

Leah Jones  3:11  
Hello, and welcome to Finding Favorites. The podcast where we get recommendations from people without using an algorithm. Tonight, I am here with Alexis P. Morgan. Alexis is my neighborhood sorceress. She is a creative; they do collage, works in radical luxury, just one of the most fascinating people that I am connected with in the hellhole, blazing dumpster fire that is Facebook. And we were introduced indirectly by one of the most dumpster fire-y people on the internet that I've ever sat in a conference room with. Alexis, how are you doing this evening?

Alexis  4:05  
I'm fantastic. I still think about that like incident a lot. Am I allowed to name names?

Leah Jones  4:12  
You are allowed to name names, yes.

Alexis  4:17  
As I was saying earlier, like Gary is -- meeting you was the only good thing that came out of ripping Gary Vaynerchuk a new asshole. [laughter]

Leah Jones  4:32  
Alexis had had a -- online interaction --  ripping a new asshole of Gary Vaynerchuk, and then kind of put out a call saying, "Does anybody know," you kind of said to the people you are connected with, "Does anyone know anything about this guy?" And a mutual of ours, Sydney, tagged me in. And I was like, "What do you need to know? I've been in a conference room with him before, I have opinions, what would be helpful to know?" You all had planned a dinner to meet in-person/to talk in-person. And then he either no-showed or canceled last minute and you had bought a really great dress for it. 

Alexis  5:21  
I did! That dress was spectacular and wildly inappropriate for --- [laughter] -- I was about to show up with cat pasties with a -- [laughter] -- it would have been, it just would have been not cute, not cute at all. What actually ended up happening was is, he sent his little minion to cancel on me, because the heat died down for a little bit. And I said to my assistant at the time, "Just wait, if it kicks back up, he'll be back." And lo and behold, it kicked back up again, because Jason Falls shared my article on Twitter. So, it started going all over the place. So, of course, the team had to hop back on that fire. 

Alexis  6:10  
So I sat on it, and I watched Gary's socials for a few days, just to see what he was posting. And I ended up responding to the email about rescheduling with, "No, thank you, you have disrespected my time and treated me as if my time is not as valuable as yours, kick rocks, and be blessed." He read the email like 12 times because I had a tracker. So, that's what happened. 

Alexis  6:45  
I was looking for information because we were gonna talk face-to-face, because I called his bluff, cause he pulled up on my Medium post, and was just like, "If we could break bread in person, you would see that I'm not a bad guy." And it's like, "That's literally not the point of this critique, but okay, sir. All right, I'll call your bluff." And then oh, look, he disappeared. But it's fine, because that wasn't supposed to be my path anyways, which is why we're here. Because I do magic for a living, which is not the original plan.

Leah Jones  7:24  
Right, you have been trying -- I don't know, was that like, four or five years ago?

Alexis  7:31  
Yeah, that was 2018. 

Leah Jones  7:36  
And you have basically been trying *not* to do magic the whole time we've known each other. And your guides and your ancestors keep, they just keep putting detours, perhaps? You're like, "I've got a plan!" and they're like, "Uhhh, okay?"  How has -- because tonight, you're in this beautiful white top, and you were doing divinations before we came online. We were just running down what the planets have been up to, because it was Mercury Retrograde, and Saturn Retrograde and Jupiter and tonight's a full moon, and so we've just been getting **all** of it lately. So, maybe we're just getting right into it. So today, you were doing divinations. In my understanding, you're kind of always doing magic, but today was active versus maybe passive magic?

Alexis  8:44  
It depends on how you define active and passive. So, active in the sense that I was dealing with clients. Every day, just about, I have a routine of things that I do and maintenance work that I have to do. I tell people all the time, that being a professional witch is not at all glamorous, because 90 percent of my workload is just cleaning up offerings, praying quietly like in my closet, which is not ... [laughter] what necessarily comes to mind when you say professional witch or Brouhaha or Priestess or whatever, and time for somebody. 

Alexis  9:25  
But just about every day, I have some key practices that I do -- both for myself, but also on behalf of my community, cause I have a magical community that I run called Lucifer's Well, which is really a great name to turn away all the "love and light" -sy kind of folks who are going to be judgy and sketchy. Also, for the handful of retainer clients that I do have, which they're all super great, and unique cases unto themselves. I didn't want retainer clients, but of course, as we've established, my ancestors kind of make me do things. 

Alexis  10:08  
It's interesting because I have been -- my first experience like with magical stuff, formal experience  -- was actually when I was a pre-teen, which is pretty common in like occult paces. If you were to send around a survey, all the first-time magic stories are somewhere between the age of 12 and 16. And involve either a crush, a bully, or a weird shop that a child shouldn't have been in by themselves?

Leah Jones  10:39  
Or a dusty book in the back of the library and a librarian who lets you have free reign?

Alexis  10:46  
It's usually some combination of those things. And in my particular case, I was crawling around the adult section of library and I got hit in the face with an unshelved, improperly shelved, copy of a Edain McCoy's "If You Want to be a Witch," which now I would recommend for various reasons. But 13-year-old me was just like, "Ooh, what is this? Witch?" Because we were coming off the Harry Potter craze, before J.K. Rowling went full-body, TERF-y, awful? It was a formative experience, but that quickly puttered out because my family was not very kind or supportive about it. 

Alexis  11:37  
And then, I want to say, seven years later, I was 21, one of my adopted -- my first set of adoptive parents, that's a whole story -- passed away and I had this overwhelming urge to get a new tarot deck. And the ball went rolling down the hill and at the time, I didn't intend for this to be a vocation. A hobby, but then it just kind of kept going.

Leah Jones  12:14  
One tarot deck led to many tarot decks.

Alexis  12:18  
Yeah, one tarot deck led to reading cards and studying the cards, like 14 hours a week, like a part-time job; led to developing a collection; led to buying my first book on actual magic, which was "The Sorcerer's Secrets" by Jason Miller, which is a pretty solid book. That, I *do* recommend. 

Leah Jones  12:42  
Okay, I will link to that one. 

Alexis  12:45  
Although, I have side-eye for basically all of my cis, white, men colleagues, because -- oh, boy, just a lot of mess on that front in magical spaces. Then it just kind of took on a life of its own. I thought it was going to be an attorney. [laughter]

Leah Jones  13:07  
Okay ... that is ... only knowing you in this grown-up chapter, I would say an attorney is not what I would have pinned on you. Shocking, I know.

Alexis  13:23  
Would you have pinned on me?

Leah Jones  13:28  
Well, honestly, any of the things that you've tried to do -- it wouldn't surprise me if you were someone who made all their money from writing or from voiceover or from collage and art. None of that would have surprised me. Also, I would say, advocate for artists. I think there's some things about law that also make sense for you, but the American lawyer system doesn't make sense, you know?

Alexis  14:07  
In hindsight, now that I've known people who have gone through law school, and I have dated several lawyers, and had those conversations, I now look at that and go, "Child, what?" [laughter] Because I would have been absolutely fucking miserable if that plan had worked out. 

Leah Jones  14:30  
It's often one of the only -- there's not a lot of careers presented. Unless you -- I don't know *how* people find careers that aren't doctor, lawyer, teacher, nurse. That's what we see on TV. Those are  -- I don't know.

Alexis  14:57  
Yeah. But speaking to finding careers like that, I think that's a very purposeful sort of architecture of how our school system works. As I keep telling people, had anybody told me when I was even 16 or 18, "You're going to be a full-time witch, you're going to run a digital community dedicated to political magic and talking about politics and magic, and a writer and an artist, and this, that, and the other thing ..." I just would have probably sat there and dumbfounded silence and been like, "What drugs are you on? Can I have some?"

Alexis  15:41  
I say this to my community all the time -- I don't really understand how people pick up spiritual stuff as a hobby. Because from the various cultures that make up my background, some of which I am more familiar with, and others -- I am descended from Black folks who were enslaved. So, we don't have a lot of those records.  You don't get to *choose* to do this kind of work, it's chosen for you. So, my experience is kind of going around and around in a circle, developing this massive library and a foot locker full of tarot decks and me going, "No, this is just a thing that I do. This is a phase, I'll get through it, it'll be fine."

Leah Jones  16:35  
So, Alexis just did what many of my guests do, which is look slightly off-camera at a large collection. It's happened, no matter what I interview people about, it's always just off-screen, and they're looking at this large collection. So, you're looking at your tarot cards and library.

Alexis  17:00  
My library is actually out, I have all of my books that won't freak guests out, up front. And then, I have ones that are a little sketchy behind. I live in a studio, so I have it partitioned off. Behind both of my partitions, where you can't necessarily see the titles too much? I was actually looking at my bones set -- I was telling Leah earlier -- that I had pulled my bones set out, which I'm showing her now. 

Alexis  17:37  
Because I was talking to a client about bone readings, and bone reading as a form of divination. That is, as the name implies, you throw bones down, and then you interpret them. But you also throw -- bone sets can have like little bits and bobs, they can have little pendants, or a piece of jewelry, or shell, or a stick, pebble, whatever. And each of these different pieces in Hoodoo, which is one of the traditions that I practice out of. Hoodoo is a form of Black USCM folk magic. 

Alexis  18:20  
It's the folk magic of Black people in the United States. But it's also an ancestor veneration tradition, it's a religion in that sense. So, from that point of view, when you read with the bones, you're reading with your ancestors, you're consulting your ancestors for guidance and insight. And each of the pieces that are in a kit have their own sort of special gifts and medicine and messages, of course. But they're alive, so if one of them disappears, the thought is that, "Oh, well, it didn't want to talk to you anymore. It did its work, it's done." 

Alexis  18:59  
And sometimes they'll come back, and sometimes you'll find something that you really want to add to your bone collection. But you have to ask the spirit of the object first, if it consents to be added to your collection. Oh, boy. Now I'm getting into the special interest, hyperfixation space. But, I find it really interesting, and part of what makes magic one of my favorite things to talk about. 

Alexis  19:31  
Both, from a practitioner point of view, but also just a curious person and a historical point of view, is that magic, and different forms of magic, and people's relationships with either the supRAnatural or the supERnatural, can tell us a lot about what people value and what people find important, and what different kinds of experiences they were having. What sort of the the context of their lives was like, especially with divination.

Leah Jones  20:07  
Can you do a quick -- cause you just very *carefully* said "Their relationship to the supRAnatural and the supERnatural." What's the flip there?

Alexis  20:21  
The way that I was using it was, for me, the supRAnatural is about experiences that we can explain, that we feel are firmly within sort of natural experience, and that are the natural extension of the world that's going on right around us. However, it is an antiquated form of supERnatural. And the supernatural says that things are existing beyond like the laws of nature and physics. 

Alexis  20:52  
So, the reason why I said it that way, was because obviously, different people have different points of view on what's going on. But, a lot of my colleagues and peers -- a surprising number unless you do magic, and then it's not surprising -- are actually mathematicians and scientists with graduate degrees. One of my favorite teachers -- and this is not to put Sarah on a pedestal, she's just really dope -- is Sarah Mastros of Mastros and Zealot, she lives in Pittsburgh. She's a Greek and Jewish witch, who is just incredible. I believe she has her PhD in mathematics. I know she's definitely taught high school kids calculus, which is a feat. 

Alexis  21:36  
And she's deeply mathematical, and we've had conversations about how magic is fundamentally magical. There's a lot of historical, philosophical context, around that sort of notion, especially within both the Islamic and Jewish traditions, very specifically. About sort of magic existing as a function of math. Because God is a part of nature --well, nature is part of God -- or God is nature and one and the same depending on the philosopher you're reading.

Leah Jones  22:24  
My undergrad was in chemistry. And we had a professor who gave a lecture that was -- he was like, "The carbon molecule is proof of God." The most deeply religious, and out about their religion department on our campus, was our chemistry department. Our chemistry department was our most religious department, and then it went from there. I don't even think I saw the lecture, because in college, I would have been like, "Ugh. You're so wrong." But now, I agree with them totally.

Alexis  23:00  
You know, I went through a phase where I was very --  I just didn't give a shit about spiritual stuff, or the existence/the nature of God. But you know, I didn't really have an interest in that, and I went to a phase where I felt very disconnected from the world around me. Now, as an adult who is doing this work, I agree with my colleague, when she says, a lot of magic, it's just things that we have not yet learned to explain with math or science. 

Alexis  23:48  
And given that I also come from an Indigenous background, with my adoptive mothers as Indigenous, and we are *reasonably* certain that my birth father-- my biological father, rather -- is also an Indigenous man, but that's a whole complicated story we're not gonna get into. A lot of Indigenous wisdom, a lot of Indigenous knowing, has been proven to be scientifically sound, in the last 50 years. And there have been some really exceptional, ecological scientists, professionals, and researchers who have written about how, especially within an Indigenous context, ritual is research. 

Alexis  24:37  
Ritual is the observation of the world around us for the purpose of beneficially interacting with it and existing with it to the best of our abilities, with minimal suffering to ourselves or to the other beings around us. And for me, that informs a lot of how I live my life now, and has given me a lens to look at the world that I feel is far more expansive and skeptical and curious than I may have had if I just stayed in the space where I felt comfortable, which was just being numb to everything. It's been hard, but it's been worth it. And it's been very challenging, because I *know* what people think when they hear professiona witch, or professional psychic. You know, they think of Miss Cleo. Who, I have a party story about ...

Leah Jones  25:43  
You have a party story about?

Alexis  25:46  
Yes, I do have a party story about Miss Cleo.

Leah Jones  25:49  
You actually met Miss Cleo in-person?

Alexis  25:52  
Yes. I met Miss Cleo, when I was 21, at a party where I was reading on the patio for tips. It was the "Heart and live music night" at a little place called Mother Earth Cafe in West Palm Beach, and I didn't recognize her. I swear to God, I didn't recognize her and she came, and she sat down, and she started talking to me and she asked me for a reading, and I did my thing. And she got to the end, she was just like, "You really don't know who I am, do you?" I was just like, "No, should, I?" [laughter]

Alexis  26:32  
I just honestly gave her this look like, "No, ma'am." Then, she put on the accent, and, apparently all the color must have left my face, because Patty, the woman who owned the cafe -- who's outside smoking a clove cigarette, was behind her -- started laughing. I melted underneath the table.

Leah Jones  26:56  
Oh, my gosh. 

Alexis  26:58  
Because I realized who it was.

Leah Jones  27:00  
Were you doing a tarot reading for her?

Alexis  27:03  
Yes, I was. And she told me that I was very talented at what I did, and that I should be careful with my skills, and with my talents. We had an interesting conversation about the whole Psychic Friends Network situation. Also, her own spiritual life and practice outside of that; she was actually there reading poetry. She's also very talented poet, I should add. And it was a really surreal fucking night. Yeah, I have to think this is weird as hell.

Leah Jones  27:39  
Yeah, that's so weird. I mean, no, of course you didn't recognize her outside of the context of a *commercial.*

Alexis  27:47  
Right? And also, I was very little when the Psychic Friends Network situation went down. I think I was maybe, I don't know, that was the '90s, so I was sub-10 years old.

Leah Jones  28:00  
I think you might have only even known her as an SNL sketch or as an internet meme and not even known her commercials.

Alexis  28:10  
It was such a weird, cultural zeitgeist moment for me, personally. It was interesting, because I was actually there that night with a guy friend that I knew from school, who is very Christian. So the contrast -- those two things happening at once, was quite interesting. But, even at that stage of my life, I didn't really know what I was doing with the path that I was walking down. And a lot of my traditions, so in terms of specific traditions that I work out of -- I am a lay practitioner of Haitian Voodoo. Although, it's pretty likely I'm probably going to end up either Mirage Loa, which is a marriage to a Loa -- which I'm happy to elaborate on what that means -- or initiated some time, maybe in the next five to six years? It's going to be a minute, for various reasons. Not just me not being ready. 

Alexis  29:21  
Because there's no such thing as divorce in Voodoo, and once you cross that threshold, it's life, baby! So, there's that. I'm also rootworker, so I practice Hoodoo, in terms of formal traditions. And, I have a hodgepodge of sorceress stuff that I draw on/work out of. And, I'm Jewish, which is also a weird situation. One of the things that we've connected over, and me trying to figure out how I'm going to explain myself to a rabbi.

Alexis  30:04  
So, that's also been a really complicated part of my journey, too. Because I was raised in a secular Jewish household with secular Jewish values, around my Jewish extended family. But my parents -- which was kind of a bizarre choice, because they were two old, gay, white ladies in the deep south in the 90s -- why would you choose the Catholic Church over trucking us to a synagogue? But then I realized, probably because the only synagogue in town at that point was Orthodox, which explained their thinking there. [laughter]

Alexis  30:30  
Because the Catholics will take anybody. [laughter] So we were quasi-ly, barely raised, doing CCD classes that I never gave a crap about, right? But, we casually celebrated Hanukkah, we did Shabbat dinners at my grandmother's condo periodically. You know, the cultural sort of experiences. And I had a lot of Jewish friends; went to plenty bar- and bat mitzvahs. But I didn't come back around Judaism until I was an adult when that parent passed away. 

Alexis  30:52  
I felt this really intense need to sit Shiva for her. And she was not religious at all, so I have no clue why the hell that happened. Then fast-forward two years later, the Tree of Life synagogue shooting happened, and that did weird things to me. My web leading here is very complicated, but I love it all. I find it really fascinating, as I already said, because it tells us so much about how people exist and how we have things in common. For example, not anywhere within my reach right now, but I'm taking a class on a document called the pirate magic a griped pirate magic Greicy. Oh my god, I can speak. Also known as a PGM, which is a collection of the semiotic magical scrolls that were assembled during the Hellenistic period of ancient Egypt. It's basically all folk magic. It's kind of treated a little bit pinkies-up, a little bit snobby now, cause it's old and shit, but the actual contents of the scrolls and what we have left of these propietary are all folk magic. It's all "How can how could I make Suzy love me?" Well, obviously not Suzy, but pick a name. You know, "This bastard stole my cow."

Leah Jones  33:36  
It's all the same issues that went into veteran the Talmud. This person steals your cow, nd they don't harm the cow, and you get it back. Or they do harm the cow, or they harm your pregnant spouse, or they do this. It's all about complicated solutions to minor grievances. Some major grievances -- I'm not gonna say -- so much of Jewish tradition is about applying Torah to modern situations. It's why I love being Jewish. So much in why I converted was I was like, "Oh, well, here's the scaffolding."

Alexis  34:24  
Judaism provides a scaffolding for decision making. If had to describe why I also love Judaism and where Judaism sort of wraps itself into my life, it is that scaffolding. I've always said that from the outside looking in, I can understand why somebody just picking up a random tractate of the Talmud would be like, "What in the? Put a baby on a mountain?" But, it's the exercise of ethics and logic. It's having these interesting conversations about theoreticals in order to be able to distill really practical, consistent applications of wisdom that also evolved in response to human evolution. It's really interesting because a lot of what what we would culturally term Jewish magic, which is a whole academic fuss unto itself as to what qualifies under that banner, reflects a lot of this tendencies as well. So, I totally get it because I've said often is that one of the things that I deeply appreciate about Judaism is depths full inquiry.

Alexis  35:58  
What makes us tick and how we sort of operate as a unit and as a society, really sophisticated bodies of wisdom are dotted across the planet. A really great parallel example, slightly different, would actually be the the body of wisdom around a divination system called the de lagoon, which is a form of West African divination with shells. So, if you've ever seen what the hell is it, Spike Lee's um, "She's Gotta Have It" on Netflix. There's a scene where one of the characters has his shelves read by his sister, that's divination system.This divination system has been around for thousands of years. 

Alexis  36:52  
And here, I will physically show you the book of Acts, which are parables. I'm not allowed to read the, because I am not an initiated priestess. So, none of that for me, but, it's a whole textbook. And this is just what's in English, and coming out of one house of Santeria. So, they have these really sophisticated, very thoughtful reflections and prescriptions on how to deal with things, and how to deal with one another. I find that really interesting to kind of compare worldviews, not for the sake of determining which one is better, that's absurd. But better understanding of how the different conditions around different people's lives manifests and with magic, specifically, going back to an academic point of view, so I don't bore the hell out of your audience.

Alexis  37:56  
If you look at the difference between what's considered folk magic, and the body of work that's considered "Western occultism," -- which I'm putting in quotes -- a lot of what makes that distinction is that the things that we consider Western occultism were things that were accessible to people of means, usually the clergy, because they either had the wealth to be able to afford to mount these ridiculous ceremonies, and they had the ability to read and write. 

Alexis  38:35  
A lot of the times, the formation of grimoires was by learned members of clergy, usually the Catholic Church, which is a little bit of a scandal depending on where you say that. But there was definitely a difference, you can tell the difference in concerns and worldviews just based on where practice came from, and when and where and how it was recorded, or otherwise passed from person to person. So, I find all of that fascinating, because it gives me insight into how people operate now, and how to better sort of navigate those situations.

Leah Jones  39:20  
I do think it's interesting, because when you pulled out that book about reading shells, you said, "This is what's available in English and is from one house," which I think people who are Jewish who listen know that everybody's -- you ask  "Hey, can I do XYZ?" Everybody's always, "Talk to your rabbi." Talk to *your* rabbi, my rabbi might say something different. There's no answer, go talk to your rabbi. That, to me, is a parallel where you follow a specific within a broader worldview, religion, set of rules. Do you have the traditions of of the rabbi that you get advice from or the lineage? I think that's really interesting. And I also think there's -- so much was preserved through oral tradition that, and I can only draw the parallels I can draw -- which is that in Judaism, the Oral Torah is written down, because eventually enough people got literate. And to really get it down, we wrote it down. 

Leah Jones  40:31  
But there's, we've got a book we call the "Oral Torah", because it was -- people's jobs were to remember different parts of it. So, there is also the point of when does an oral tradition get written down to better share and pass it? And what does the translation -- what is the risk of translation do to it? I think all of that stuff is really interesting when you look at -- I'm just gonna say religion, because that's kind of how I understand it -- of how they get passed between generations, between clergy. What is oral, what is written, what is translated, and your access to the tools of the trade?

Alexis  41:21  
It's interesting, because as I mentioned, my primary tradition, structured tradition, one of them is Haitian Voodoo, and Voodoo is decentralized. There's no central authority, per se, in Haitian Voodoo and any self-anointed official authority. It's just kind of "Cool, whatever, we don't care."  But we do have a lineage system. So, if you are meant to become clergy, you have a godparent or parents, and usually you're given an initiatory name that distinguishes who you are before the Loa, but also who you are in relationship to your godparent into your associate day, which is the society. Different societies have different regular Mon, which is ritual process. 

Alexis  42:26  
However, the those regular mom differences vary slightly, depending on where the tradition is from in Haiti. A lot of times, the division is usually in northern Haiti versus southern Haiti, because there's differences politically and geographically in terms of land and all that kind of stuff. But within Voodoo, teaching is almost exclusively oral. A lot of the prayers and some of the indications that are used during various rituals, and various rites are called "Langaj," which is a Creole word, which just means "the language," because they don't actually remember what those words mean. Because they came out of the interactions, the various enslaved people who were brought to Haiti, and started collaborating with one another to match up their spiritual systems as much as they possibly could. 

Alexis  43:36  
So, there's whole chunks of things that we don't actually quite know what they mean, or what they were. Scientists and researchers have either --because part of the controversy is that sometimes, specifically, ethnographers will present themselves as approaching these things in good faith, and get access to spaces that are sacred and private, and then take those things and put them out in public. Then we get into this really hard discussion about what happens -- specifically speaking to Voodoo -- so what's happening right now in Haiti is, the Catholic Church has generally always looked the other way at folk traditions. As long as you show up to church every Sunday, it's fine. 

Leah Jones  44:36  
"You need a Virgin Mary? You got one -- this one jumped out the back of a wagon, say right wheels." That's the one in Tandiel in Argentina -- "You need one, we got you, we got you." I am speaking so disrespectfully of a church I'm not a member of, but they could not have become a global religion without looking the other way-slash-embracing local traditions. 

Alexis  45:07  
Oh, absolutely. I think a lot of people gloss over that. But I made a joke -- and I'm allowed to make this joke because I was baptized at one point --  the Catholic Church recognizes 10,000+ canonized saints. And I was like, "If that ain't an ancestor cult and a papal friggin?" I don't know what it is, but in the case of Voodoo, the Catholic Church has always kind of looked the other way. They've done this with Santeria and Cuba. 

Alexis  45:46  
If you ask most Voodoo sons in Haiti, what their religion is, they will usually tell you they are Catholic. Or they will very rarely say that they are some flavor of Protestant. However, what has been going on since the first big earthquake circa the early 2000s, early 2010s, is that evangelical organizations from the United States, very specifically, have been going into Haiti and radicalizing the Haitian public. And they're doing it through manipulating aid to Haitian people, by opening schools, by requiring families to convert in order to be able to have their children be eligible to go to these better, safer schools or to receive food, or whatever it is. 

Alexis  46:39  
I just want to preface this here with a little asterisk -- I know it's not all Christians -- but these specific evangelical Christians have been doing this. And in the process of doing this, they've also very, very heavily demonized Voodoo as a tradition, and there's a reason for that. Because Voodoo in Haiti -- Haiti has always had an accepted but uneasy relationship with Voodoo, because it's very Black and very African, and there are lots of political layers there. But Voodoo is central to the Haitian liberation story. 

Alexis  47:25  
The Blasket, man was a very major event, we know it happened. We know that a black man was a real person. We don't actually know what was said or done during that event, we have some idea. But the symbolism of that alone, was enough that it set off riots, even in the United States, amongst slaves who were brought from the islands to New Orleans, which is why they stopped importing enslaved people from the islands and bringing them to New Orleans. 

Alexis  48:01  
But, these evangelicals have been declaring Voodoo spirits to be demons and doing really abusive things. They've been burning down associate days and tearing apart shrines. It's just absolutely brutal persecution of Voodoo practitioners on the island. What has happened, is the numbers are starting to dwindle, because Haiti has a lot on its poor plate . But it started to grow in the diaspora, specifically in the United States. It's brought up a lot of interesting dialogue around cultural appropriation. But also, how do you tend to a faith and to a belief system that is so -- not only intimately tied to land, the place, but also language, and also oral tradition in a way that doesn't dilute it out as this unfortunate kind of cultural disaster is taking place?  I consider what's happening in Haiti, and with Voodoo to be a form of cultural genocide, and if I say that in some rooms people would be like, "Oh, that's really strong language,  are you sure you want to do that?" 

Leah Jones  49:33  
It's sounds exactly like what many of us have only recently become aware of with Indian boarding schools?

Alexis  49:40  
Yeah, Native American children being brutally beaten, if they spoke their own languages. Which is part of one of my projects, as well -- I'm trying to learn Cherokee, which is very hard for a variety of reasons, because the worldview's entirely different when you speak Cherokee. But, it's been really interesting being a guest in this house, because I'm not Haitian; I was not born on Haitian soil. So, my position in the tradition is very different than somebody who isn't even Black and was born in Haiti.

Alexis  50:24  
 Which surprises some Black folks in the United States, when I tell them that there are a number of societies in Haiti that wouldn't accept them, but they would accept a white person who was born in Haiti on Haitian soil. I get a lot of looks. It's because of the place, it's because of the soil. I understand, I think I have a relationship that I do with Voodoo, because it's very much connected to being in a place. All of the LOA are expressions of places in nature, and places in the world around us.

Alexis  51:09  
It's hard to kind of navigate this context, in the 21st century with globalization and have to fight with misinformation, with people who will watch "American Horror Story," and see representations of Papa legba -- that's a whole -- I could go off on a tangent about poor Papa legba being demonized. Which, of all the Loa, you're gonna pick the one who's represented by Saint Lazarus, the fucking came. Like, what? A lot of times people will take the imagery of go on somebody who is the Baron of the cemetery, who's the spirit of the dead. He's a member of the good day nation, which is all the dead folk. And they will put that on Legba. Legba's an old man? You still shouldn't fuck with him, because he's a trickster, but he's a little man with a straw hat and he doesn't bother anybody.

Leah Jones  52:19  
Just sitting on a stump, aving a little smoke, relaxing. Trying not to overheat.

Alexis  52:21  
His altar is right next to door, because that's where he customarily sits --by the door. But watching all these cultural phenomena happening, and then trying to reconcile and discern, what is a tradition growing and adapting and evolving? And what is the tradition being dismantled and destroyed? Because there are a lot of lines that get crossed in that process. And the other tradition that I practice, Hoodoo, has really, really badly experienced sort of cultural desecration in my opinion. Because for a really long time, if you went up to a granny somewhere in the deep south, and asked her if she did Hoodoo, she's look at you sideways and ask you if you walked with the devil. But then, if you tried to sweep her feet, tried to take broom over her feet? She'd probably take the broom and beat you. 

Alexis  53:45  
And if you tried to do laundry on the first of the year, she'd be like, "No, baby, take that out of the laundry, you're gonna watch the luck away." So, lot of these Southern -- and because I know we're on a podcast that people can't see me, but I'm doing air quotes -- "folk practices," Southern superstition, are actually manifestations. And most of the South, not all of the South, but most of the South, of the practices that slaves adapted to -- enslaved people, rather -- adapted to their context, Hoodoo, in terms of its techniques, and its liturgical body, is very much of a response to the conditions of being enslaved. They thought they died, spiritually speaking, when they came here. Because in West Africa, obviously, there are different versions and different nuances, so we don't want to boil cultures down. 

Alexis  54:55  
The most, specifically within a Congo context, we view the afterworld as Colombia, and Colombia is a vast body of water, where the ancestors rest at the bottom, and they have their own existence, in their own society, and their own flow at the bottom of this big body of water. So, imagine if you were enslaved and taken over a vast ocean, packed like sardines in a horrible ship. There's this sort of internal process of probably feeling like you died. And that's very much reflected --

Leah Jones  55:32  
-- that the afterlife is much more vivid than you may be anticipated.

Alexis  55:39  
Also, the spiritual loss of that. When you look at the ethnographies that were done of these practices that constitute the body of what we would call Hoodoo -- Dr. Katrina hazard Donald has a really big book called "Mojo Working," which I really love. It's so well-done on this subject. But when you look at the ethnography, we have the two big ones being the work of Dr. Zora Neale Hurston, who did "Go Tell My Horse," and I can't remember the titles of the other two right now, because it's 9:30 at night, I've had a long day. But "Go Tell My Horse," is the big one. She also did a couple others specifically on The States, but she also did them on the islands, as well as "Hi, it's Hoodoo," which you can't get a copy of the five volumes for less than $30,000 because it's out of print, and a lot of the completed copies are in university libraries. But, I got very lucky, and I got PDF scans, thousands of pages of it. 

Alexis  57:04  
But when you look at those, there is a reflection of the sensibilities that came up in response to slavery. For example, it's called Root working, because a lot of,  they're cosmological reasons, but the practical one, too. It's using a lot of material and plants, because one of the things -- 

Leah Jones  57:32  
--oh, like literal roots.

Alexis  57:34  
Yeah, literal roots that we use to prepare medicine for enslaved people, because they weren't given access to health care, doctors didn't treat them. On an interesting sort of flip sides, that the white people who enslaved these folks, also forced them to treat the slave-owning family. So, we have lots of historical records of slaves preparing medicine for sick children, for sick slave masters, then on the flip side of that, also poisoning them. So, there's this overlapping history there, as well, that tells us a lot about the conditions that they were facing. 

Alexis  58:23  
If you look at sort of the oral tradition, and also some of the written down ethnographic information that we have about the use of these plants, not only do we see in certain areas where Indigenous communities had contact with freed Black folk, how their sort of cultures and traditions interacted with that. But, we also see how a lot of the plants that we find in West Africa, either came with them because they were braided into their hair, or because they found very similar plants that they cross-bred into a new variety here in Turtle Island, seeing the Legacy of these things.

Alexis  59:16  
But what ended up happening was, because Christianity became such a central part of the abolition movement, and also just slave life in general, because they were forced to. Also for a sizable chunk of the people who were brought to The States. A lot of people don't know this -- Christianity was already in Africa at that point. The Kingdom of Congo had already undergone a mass conversion, where Catholicism at one point was the was the state religion of the Congo Empire, which was a whole thing, and then it reverted and then it went back. A whole mess.

Leah Jones  1:00:04  
There was a viral TikTok recently of some white kid, he was probably Mormon, but he was like, "Making this TikTok before I go to Ethiopia," on his missionary trip, and it's just duet after duet of people like, "Oh, you're gonna be surprised when you get there and find out it's a Christian country. You are not bringing Christianity to Ethiopia." He's just getting roasted; he's gonna be roasted the whole two years he's gone, and he's gonna come back to TikTok and find out what happened.

Alexis  1:00:42  
Yeah, because the Ethiopian kingdom predates the Catholic Church by a significant amount. Then even in West Africa, missionaries were dispatched to Angola into well, modern Angola, but to this region. Also because of trade, there was encounters with Christianity. Islam was also already in the region, as well. So, some of the slaves who were brought to The States, some of the people who were enslaved -- I like to say people who are enslaved rather than slaves, because "slave" is dehumanizing -- we're also practicing his thumb, and brought that with him. We can see these crossovers into these traditions, because this was already part of the social cohesion and the language that was going on. 

Alexis  1:01:38  
Then over time, as we sort of moved out of the post-antebellum period into Jim Crow, these practices got absorbed into the broader cultural landscape, as many Black things do, especially in this house, but also generally in the United States, and lost their cohesion as a unit of social bonding, and spiritual bonding, and became folk practices. What ended up happening was, some of the more prominent sort of lineages of this kind of work turned into charismatic Black church traditions. Look at like Kojic, which is a whole basket . I was not raised in the Black church, so I speak of this as an outsider who has looked in and then closed the curtain. The speaking in tongues, the anointing oils, gifts of the Spirit, it's just like, "Huh, you know what those things are? Interesting, interesting, interesting."

Alexis  1:02:53  
Those then turned into these big institutions within the Black community, that weren't necessarily recognized as being Indigenous traditions. And there's a whole conversation there about white supremacy and assimilation, and how that impacted the spiritual landscape. But what you're seeing now is a lot of young, Black women, especially in the United States, going back to these traditions to try to find themselves outside of this very patriarchal, very white supremacist narrative. And it's really fascinating to watch, especially as somebody who unintentionally, got a little bit of a head start on that. I'm not bragging, to be clear. I'm just saying I got a three year  -- I was on the train, about five years before it really started hitting the zeitgeist.

Leah Jones  1:04:16  
So, patriarchy and white supremacy have combined to turn Hoodoo traditions into Black charismatic churches. And now young Black women.

Alexis  1:04:30  
Yes. So, I was talking about the struggle between tradition and what is traditional innovation and what is a traditional deconstruction. We're seeing that with Hoodoo, because a lot of the material and a lot of the publications that have been made available outside of very specific academic disclosures (which are also majority white people), have been written by white people. They've been presented as, "Hoodoo is for everyone." Or "It's a Black tradition, but anybody can practice, yadda yadda." People have turned it into whole businesses and brands. Because the magic works, which I try not to -- when I talk about magic to non-magical audiences, I try not to make statements like that. But, it works enough, that somebody's granny remembered the recipe for fast luck oil for 55 years.

Leah Jones  1:05:35  
Right.

Alexis  1:05:40  
And it's really hard to track what is a modern invention versus what is a traditional one. A really great example that I give with this when I lecture, when I'm allowed to lecture like this, on my special interest is honey jars, right? If you have any sort of passing familiarity with magic at all, at some point, you've probably seen a sweetening jar, or somebody mentioned recipe about "sweetening" somebody because it's usually somebody and it's usually in a love context. Cause some problems don't change at any time in human history.

Leah