Foot Track Magic

A footprint is a personal concern that a person leaves behind without meaning to, and hoodoo treats it as one: the earth that holds the shape of a foot carries something of the person who made it. Hyatt's fourth volume is the great record of the material, grouping it with shoes, clothing, hair and nails as the body's leavings, and the practice is one of the clearest illustrations of a general principle in conjure - that a person is present in what they shed and in what they touch.

Dirt is taken from the print of a person's foot, from a threshold they cross or a road they walk, and worked or kept; a prepared powder, a packet or a 'trick' may be laid in the track so that the person walks over it, and the track itself may be 'held' or 'nailed' to stop a person moving. The work is used to hold someone in place, to send them away, to protect a house by working the tracks that approach it, or, in its aggressive form, to harm.

A footprint is taken without the person's knowledge and used on them without their consent, which makes this one of the tradition's aggressive forms and one of the ones its own ethic surrounds with conditions. Working a track to protect a house is one thing; working a track to hold or harm a person is the kind of work that has to be justified by a wrong actually done. A person who finds a packet in their path has been attacked, and the tradition's response to that is uncrossing, not counter-attack.