Condition Oils

A condition oil is an anointing oil named for the condition it is sold to fix - Come to Me, Follow Me Boy, Essence of Bend-Over, Look Me Over, Money Drawing, Fast Luck, Uncrossing, Van Van - and the class is one of the great American commercial inventions of the early twentieth century. The oils descend from older household practice, in which any oil could be dressed with herbs and prayed over, and they were standardised, bottled, labelled and mailed by the spiritual-supply houses that Long documents; the catalogue names are still in use, and so are the labels, with the same engraved hands and the same promises.

The oil is worn on the body, used to dress a candle, added to a bath or a wash, used to feed a hand, or applied to a paper petition; the choice of oil follows the condition, and the same bottle may be used for years. The tradition's own practice is that the oil is a carrier for the work, not the work itself, and that a bottle without prayer and without a case is just scented oil.

The catalogue is an ethical document as much as a commercial one. The names say out loud what the work is for - 'Follow Me Boy', 'Essence of Bend-Over', 'Compelling' - and a tradition that names coercive love and domination as products has to answer for them; the corpus records the names because they are the evidence, and does not soften them into 'attraction'. The commerce also has a real history worth keeping straight: many of these houses were Black-owned businesses serving Black customers in a segregated market, and the later mass market that sells 'hoodoo oils' to outsiders is a different thing.