The Gambler's Hand

Gambling luck is one of the oldest and most commercialised specialisms in hoodoo: a hand made for a card player or a dice player, carried to the table, and fed before play. Hyatt's first volume groups mojo hands by ingredient and includes the gambling and 'business luck' material, and the supply houses have sold gambling hands, lucky oil and 'fast luck' for over a century; the practice sits at the exact point where the tradition, the professional gambler's own folklore and the mail-order business meet.

The hand is built like any other, with roots and a personal concern and a petition naming the kind of luck wanted, and it is carried on the body at the table - in a pocket, a sock, a hatband - and touched or fed before play. The tradition has strong rules about keeping it hidden from other players and about what may be done at a table, and it is commonly paired with a cologne or an oil used for luck, and with a psalm said before sitting down. The blues and the memoir literature both record the travelling gambler's kit.

Gambling luck is the branch of the tradition most thoroughly turned into a product, and the commerce around it has done the tradition's reputation the most damage: 'guaranteed' luck work sold by mail is a confidence trick, and the people who actually made this material were working gamblers and their families. The tradition's own ethic about it is narrower than the market's - a hand to steady a player's luck is not the same as work to make another player lose, and the second is treated as unjustified. Gambling is also, for many of the communities that made this practice, a way of losing money rather than making it.