Working with Graveyard Dirt

To bring the presence and the character of a particular dead person into a work - for protection, for justice, for harm, or for family and ancestor work

Graveyard dirt is the strongest and most restricted material in hoodoo, and the collections treat it with more caution than anything else. Hyatt's fourth volume carries the great body of it, grouped with death and burial, and Hurston describes the etiquette of the cemetery as she was taught it; the dirt of a grave is understood to carry the dead person's presence, so that which grave it comes from decides what the dirt can do. The material is also the base of goofer dust, which is why the two entries have to be read together.

Dirt is taken from a grave for a purpose that matches the dead person - a soldier's grave for courage and protection, a child's for innocence, a murderer's or a sinner's for harm, an ancestor's for family work - and it is taken only after asking the dead for leave and leaving payment: coins, water, rum, tobacco, flowers, or a promise. The tradition's rules are specific and are the heart of the practice: leave is asked before anything is taken, the dirt is taken from the foot of the grave rather than the head, only what is needed is taken, no grave is approached that the worker has no business with, and the grave is left as it was found. The dirt is then carried in a packet, worked into a hand, or laid as a trick.

The ethics are the practice. Dirt taken without asking and without payment is, in the tradition's own terms, theft from the dead and the beginning of a debt that the worker will pay; the corpus states the rule because it is what practitioners say, and it does not supply the words or the amounts. Beyond the tradition's rules there are the living community's: a cemetery belongs to a congregation, to a family and to a municipality, taking soil from a grave is a crime in most jurisdictions, and the descendants of the person buried there have not consented to anything. The dead are not a resource, and a worker who treats a cemetery as a supply yard is not practising hoodoo as the tradition understands it.