Hoyt's Cologne

Hoyt's German Cologne was an ordinary American cologne of the nineteenth century, made by E. W. Hoyt and Company of Lowell, Massachusetts, and it became the gambling-luck scent of southern hoodoo: Hyatt's informants name it more often than any other cologne, and his transcribers wrote it down so variously that the index has to be read with care. The bottle is a standard archaeological find on nineteenth-century American sites, which is a reminder that the materia of these traditions is mostly ordinary household goods.

It is used to dress a hand, to anoint the hands before cards or dice, to add to a bath or a wash, and to 'feed' a mojo; a gambler might keep a bottle in the kit with the hand. It is one of the scents most closely tied to luck work rather than to cleansing, and it is used in the same way as Florida Water but with a different reputation.

Hoyt's is the purest case in the corpus of a material whose magic is entirely a matter of use: there is nothing occult about the bottle, and its power in the tradition comes from what generations of gamblers did with it. The revival market now sells 'Hoyt's' to people who have never seen a card game, which is neither fraud nor tradition but a third thing that the file records rather than judges.