Bloody Spell Over The Network

In the folk magic of virtually every culture there are spells that make use ofall of our bodily effluvia and detritus, including theamniotic sac (caul) of a baby, spit, semen, tears, urine,feces, head hair, pubic hair, and nail clippings. However, due to taboos surrounding menstrual blood, semen, and urine in some urban cultures, the use of these particular body fluids in spell-casting can be problematic for those unfamiliar with the larger history of folk magic. In light of the universality of bodily effluvia and detritus astools of magic, the singling out of menstrual blood, urine, and semen is most rationally approached on the basis of their intended effect(generally spells of sex and love) than on the basis of theirorigin (human bodies).The frankest discussions of the uses of these substances inmagic will be found in ethnological treatises on folk-magic;the "ceremonial high magicians" of the late Victorian era(including Aleister Crowley and his cohorts) were tooprudish to deal with this matter as anything other than anantinomian and rule-breaking rite. They found itexhilarating in proportion to the degree to which theyjudged it to be daring, provocative, and naughty -- and their 20th and 21st century followers have continued in the same vein, especially as the possibility of blood-born and sexually-transmitted diseases has made working with these substances seem dangerous. Infolk-magic, on the other hand, menstrual blood, semen, and urine are straightforward tools ofspell-casting and the knowledge of how to deploy them is routinely passed from one family member to another.MENSTRUAL BLOODIn the African-Americanhoodoo tradition, as well as in Sicilian folk-magic,menstrual blood served to a man in his coffee or tea is asovereign recipe for capturing his sexual attention. No ritual, prayer, or invocation is necessary; yousimply add some menstrual blood tothe man's coffee or tea. The idea is to get your scent into thebeloved's sphere of consciousness. This is nothing more orless than pheromone-magic, and as such it partakes ofbiology as much as it does of occultism. My Sicilian grandmother believed in its efficacy completely.I have done this often, with uniformly good results. I havedirectly fed gobbets of menstruum to my lover, from myfingers, as one might feed a pet. This was done to bind him,but to avoid the sneakiness of slipping it into his drinks-- i want him to KNOW how much i want him to be mine, and toknow that i am working the spell on him right out in theopen. (As the old slogan for the Steak-and-Shake drive-inchain reads: "In sight -- it must be right!")VAGINAL FLUIDSWomen who are not menstruating due to pregnancy or breast-feeding, who have had surgery that terminated their cycles, or who are past the change obviously do not have menstrual fluid to use in sex-spells. Their best alternative is to use vaginal fluids gathered after masturbation during the full moon. In hoodoo and Sicilian folk-magic,vaginal fluids make a good substitute for menstrual blood in coffee or tea love spells.I have used menstrual blood or vaginal fluids with equal success when anointingidols (statues of deities), amulets, and curios -- forinstance, when dressing lodestones in spells for sexual attraction and bonding.URINEIn European -- especially Italian -- folk magic, as well asin hoodoo,urine is used in women's coffee and tea lovespells, as a quick substitute for menstrual blood,when the intention is to tie or bind a lover. This is particularly common among girls to young or women too old to have menstrual periods, and among pregnant women and those who for any other reason don;t menstruate. Men also canput urine in a drink to tie a woman, although this is notmentioned so commonly. In hoodoo, and in polite Southern speech generally,urine is often called "chamber lye" or "water." No matter what you call it, one of the oldest root work traditions is for a male gambler to have afemale lover urinate on his mojo bag or lucky hand while heis at play. If the gambler and his partner can retire to analley to perform the act while the game is in progress, somuch the better. This is called "feeding the mojo," and theuse of the word "feed" is, of course an indicative link toAfrican magico-religious thought, from whence this customderives. (Lodestonesare also "fed" in hoodoo-- with magneticsand.) Women players rarely ask a man to urinate ontheir mojo hands, so, for whatever reason, it is femaleurine that is considered lucky in this case.Chamber lye can be a vulnerable spot in a man or woman's periphery. An enemy who gets your "water" can cause grave damage to you by stopping it up in a bottle with red pepper and Graveyard Dirt. The result will be urinary tract problems, ranging from cystitis and nephritis to prostatitis and kidney stones. The only way to take off such a condition is to find the bottle and destroy it, letting the urine run out into a fire. Conversely, chamber lye has its strengths -- a man can use his own urination to cure a case of impotence that was put on him through magic. Peeing on a knife blade and letting the pee run on the ground is one of many methods for accomplishing this. Another is to urinate into a red ants nest. Women who have had their natures hoodooed can pee into a running river as they call on the river to take off the jinx. I should also add a quick comment on the term "chamber lye" for readers who are not native English speakers:Chamber: A chamber means a room, so in the old days a bedroom was called a bed chamber. With no indoor plumbing, you wentoutdoors to pee in an outhouse, but the first pee of themorning, before dressing or washing up, most folks didn'twant to go out, so they peed in a covered container called achamber pot, which was carried out later.Lye: This is an old Anglo Saxon word meaning any strongalkaline liquid. Most of the time nowadays you'll hear theword lye in reference to making soap at home, where one goodsource of lye is potash -- literally pot ashes. You makepotash or pot ash lye by concentrating water that has runthrough the ashes collected from the fire under your cookingpots. Since there is no one chemical formula for lye; incommon parlance it can be any really strong alkalinesolution. So a polite word for urine used to be "chamberlye" -- an alkaline solution obtained in the bed chamber.So... "chamber pot" plus "pot ash lye" equals "chamber potlye" -- which is shortened to "chamber lye"!SEMENMen can make use of their sexual fluids in love spells. Josh Geller (dclxvi@best.com) gave this simple formula for an orgasmic spell utilizing semen:Masturbate to orgasmand preserve the resultant fluids. You should be concentrating on your desired result at the point of orgasm. Take some of the resultant fluidsand insinuate a bit of them into the food or drink of your prospective victim.For every man who uses his semen to attract a woman, however, there are probably a hundred women who capture a man's semen to rule and control him or to keep him faithful. The most popular way to do this in hoodoo is by making a knot-spell on the man and keeping it tied up in a nation sack. For this purpose, the semen can be fresh or gathered from a discarded condom -- or even stored in the freezer until needed. Most of the rootworkers who have told me about how to capture semen have noted that it is important that the woman not have an orgasm when capturing semen, because then she might get "mixed up in the spell,"and fall victim to her own conjurations. "Hold yourself aloof," was how one woman put it to me. "Don't let yourself get mixed into it when you collect his stuff." FROM FOLK MAGIC TO SEXUALIZED SPIRITUALITYKarezza is a sexual-metaphysical system in which heightened states of spirituality are believed to occur if both partners become highly aroused but hold back from having orgasms. However, even in the most ascetic forms of karezza, intercourseduring menstruation -- not involving blood per se, but takingadvantage of the woman's typically increased level ofdesire at that point in her cycle -- is perceived as a "rite" in the mystical sense. Onekarezza writer, John William Lloyd, who advocated abstinencefrom orgasm, declared that during "the woman's time of greatdesire" (e.g. at the outset of her period) she should beallowed to have all the orgasms she wants and that the manshould go along with her and come too. So Lloyd recognizedthe menstrual period as qualitatively different from therest of the woman's cycle, in terms of the performance of aspiritual sex act. WHY DOES IT WORK?The use of urine or menstrual blood in witchcraft, stregha,hoodoo, and other forms of folk-magic is a codification andamplification of the natural biological process by which a femaleattracts a male. Note that in token of this, urine/menstrual blood magicis almost always a subset of love or lust magic. Some people think of urine as a "territory marker," equating its magical deployment to the way that male dogs and other carnivores use it to drive off male rivals, and so they don't appreciate the fact thata lot of the urine magic encountered in folklore involves WOMEN'S urine,not men's. However, the basis for the utilization of urine in women's sex-attracting spells makes ready sense to anyone who has ever raised goats -- because smelling and even tasting the urine of a doe goat is the prime way that a buck goathas for determining the female's readiness for mating. This is true of many other mammals as well. Are humans more like dogs (males using their urine to drive off rivals) or like goats (males tasting female urine to assess readiness to mate)? Well, here's a clue: in humans, there is a notable difference between the sexes in regard to thebody parts they sniff to get a whiff of attractant pheromones. Just asfemale humans are attracted to male underarm scents (rich inandrostenone) so are male humans attracted to female vaginalscents, a complex compound of uterine menstruum, vaginal secretions,and lingering urine odors known collectively as "copulins." Thecomposition of these copulins changes throughout the woman's monthlycycle, but they are basically attractants for males, not territorymarkers. They may function as territory markers to other females, ofcourse.AVOIDING MAGICAL "CAPTURE" BY MENSTRUAL BLOOD OR URINEBecause men are thought to be so susceptible to the magical deployment of women's menstrual blood, vaginal fluids, and urine, in some cultures they are taught to avoid eating anything served to them by an unmarried woman which might contain these bodily fluids. It is common for a man to refuse or only warily accept dark-coloured beverages like coffee or tea or foods with brown or red sauces such as barbeque, lasagna, or spaghetti from a woman. Some folks believe that the power of menstrual blood is inherent -- that is, it will work just the same whether it is deliberately added to foods or beverages as a magical act or ingested accidentally. For those who feel this way, any contact with menstrual blood may result in bewitchment. Nona C. Wright tells how this advice was passed along in her husband's family: My late husband, who was African American, used to tell mehis grandmother warned him never to indulge in oralsex with a woman during her period because it would make himbound to her for life. I always took it as his quirky sensethat one could use menstrual blood in love spells. But inhindsight this seemed to be a very powerful thing to him ashe swore he would never do it. To him it had to do withgiving up his free choice to be with someone and somehowbeing under their power or control.Clear mention of avoidance of capture by menstrual blood orurine can be heard in the old song"Dry Southern Blues" recorded by Blind Lemon Jefferson in March 1926, where Lemon sings: I can't drink coffee and the woman won't make no tea I can't drink coffee and the woman won't make no tea I believe to my soul sweet mama gonna hoodoo me TAKING OFF A MENSTRUAL BLOOD OR URINE CONJURATIONWhat can a man do if he suspects or knows that an unscrupulous woman is putting menstrual blood on him? What can a woman do if she suspects or knows that another woman is using that stuff on her man or on a male relative? Well, you can't stop her if she's already done it, but to take the mess offyou have a couple of choices:1) A doctor can perform a purification on the man -- such as washing him in a bath ofrue herb tea, smoking him with Uncrossing Incense, and then dressing him with Van Van Oiland/or2) If the man has been rendered impotent by the enemy woman, he can perform a specific spell of his own, such as drawing cross-marks on his penis for nine days or pissing into a red ants' nest to restore his manhood. and/or3) The man or a root doctor working on his behalf can get back at the enemy woman and reverse the spell by capturing some ofher menstrual blood and laying a trick for her, such as stopping her blood up in a bottle with 9 pins, 9needles, and 9 rusty nails, then hiding the bottle in a hollow tree where shewill never find it. That'll serve her very well. She'll get "femaletrouble" and will have to leave that man alone. MUST MAGICAL BODY FLUIDS BE USED FRESH?I am often asked this question, especially by women who want to work with their period blood during particularmagical phases of the moon orwho have collected semen or urine from a lover and found that it dried up before they were able to work with it. The answer is simple: Traditional old spells that originated long before artificial refrigeration was developed simply call for drying the fluid on a piece of cloth or a string. Soaking the cloth or string in liquid will re-activate the fluid. I have known women who have frozen their menstrual blood in ice cube trays in the freezer for future use. I find that dried tampons work fine, though, if you swish them through coffee like a tea bag. Bed aware that liquid body fluids are highly degradable personal concerns, unlike hair or fingernails. Urine, semen, menses, and sweat, must NOT be used in a honey jar as loose liquids; they must be dried on a piece of paper or cloth. Use good common sense when handling liquid bodily concerns or you will make a stinking mess of things.CLOSE TO BODY FLUIDS: BATH WATER AND DRINKING WATERBath water or left-over drinking water, soda, coffee, or tea from a person has special uses,as does the water they washed dishes or clothing in,if they scrubbed the dishes or clothes by hand. The idea is that this must be water that they physically contacted. One traditional method of preparing these "personal waters" is to use in love spells of control is to wash yourown face and body parts with the liquid,collect it, and use it to feed back to the person you are working on. Inother words, you mingle their "personal water" with your body fluids and then get the target to drink it. This work is aided by the accompaniment by powerful prayers. You can also use a person's bath or drinking water to water aplant in which you have "planted" a honey-apple spell. You may keep the plant in your home and let the person set near it, or your could give theetablished plant to the person as a present. Finally, you can use a person's to make a "boiled prayer." You write a prayer for love or a petition for domination with a water-soluble ink on paper and then boil itin their bath or drinking water until the volume of the water is reduced to 1/3 of what you started with and the written words have all washed into the remaining water. You may then feed the "condensed" water back to the person to control them. This practice is the subject of a 1930 song by the Memphis Jug Band called "Papa's Got Your Bath Water On." SUBSTITUTES FOR BODY FLUIDS: THE MAGICAL LINKI am often asked what a person can use for this type ofrootwork if bodily fluids cannot be gotten. In descendingorder of strength, according to hoodoo folk magic, here isa list of substitute magical links:Genital fluids: menstrual blood, semen, vaginal fluidOther biological concerns: urine, feces, sweat, blood, spit Hair: pubic, head, armpit, beard Person's unwashed clothing: underwear, socks, handkerchief Person's foot track lifted from the dirt"Shed" body items: nail clippings, baby teeth Person's bath water, wash water, drinking water Person's handwriting on paper Something Person owned or wore Something Person touched, e.g. butt from smoked cigarette Photo of Person Drawing or silhouette of Person Person's business card Person's full name written on paper 9 timesThese items can be used for good or for evil; all that isindicated here is the relative strength of the tokens thatrepresent the person. In practice, the weaker of these items may be combinedto increase their power. For example; you may get theperson's business card and then write their name on the back9 times, or you may get their handwriting on paper, writetheir name on the back 9 times, and fold the paper around ahair you stole from their comb or brush while you were using thebathroom in their house.NAIL CLIPPINGSThose who say that nail clippings are used for domination are right, up to certain point.First, let's talk about dominating someone with YOUR stuff. Notice whatkind of domination that usually is? Not to get your boss to bend over, notto win in court, not to get lucky gambling numbers and make others lose.... nope, getting someone to ingest your stuff, your personal concerns,that's used for domination or winning in L-O-V-E. And nails are a personalconcern. They can be used like hair, foot skin scrapings, sweat, sexualfluids, et al. Basically, you put something of YOURS in THEIR drink.As stated above, to put nails into a drink, you'd want the nail filings(dust), not big ol' hunky shards or clippings. Why the toenails? To getthem under your feet, so you can walk all over them. And you could usefingernail filings, too, to hold them. For love, mind you, for love.Second, the other way to use nail clippings is to harvest them from yourlover. In other words, YOU capture THEIR stuff. Here you do want theshards, and the old routine i learned was to get one from each finger ofboth hands and one from each toe of both feet. That's twenty littleclippings. It'll take some time.If you suspect your lover is hoodooing you, and your lover says, "Hey,honey, i've got the clippers out, just lemme trim your toe nails, sweetie. "-- BEWARE.If your lover says, "Doodle-bug, i'd like to let you put your hand downthere, but your nails' too long, just let me get my li'l clippers and trimyou up and then we can do it." -- WATCH OUT.Thus endeth the lesson on nail clippings.The following documentation on the use of body fluids in hoodoo spell-casting comes from"Hoodoo - Conjuration - Witchcraft - Rootwork," a 5-volume, 4766-pagecollection of folkloric material gathered by Harry MiddletonHyatt, primarily between 1935 and 1939. For a furtherdocumented series spells using salt in the German-American and African-American folk-magic traditions, see the page on Protection Spells.IMPORTANT: If this is the firsttime you have encountered Hyatt material at this web site, pleasetake a moment to open and read the supplementary page called "Hoodoo - Conjuration -Witchcraft - Rootwork" by Harry Middleton Hyatt.MAN'S SEMEN IN PILLOW CAUSES IMPOTENCE TIES HIS NATURE10262. Ah heard dey said yo' could take yo' discharge an' put it in arag an' put it where no air kin git to it, an' put it in yore pillah,an' he cain't do nuthin off nowheres else, an' he'll have tuh stay home.[Fayetteville, N. Car., (1443), 2614:7.]HAIR -- PUBIC AND MENSTRUAL BLOOD3207. Well the other is, you can take hair