Mojo Hand

The hand is the signature object of conjure: a small bag of red flannel or leather holding roots, minerals and personal concerns, worn on the body and fed and prayed over. Hyatt's first volume groups hands by their chief ingredient and gives hundreds of them, and Hurston describes both the making and the keeping of one; the Louisiana gris-gris is the same object under a French name, and the bag is the ancestor of the 'mojo bag' sold in every occult shop in the world.

A hand is assembled for a named purpose and a named person, usually with a root at its centre - High John the Conqueror, devil's shoestring, five finger grass, a lodestone - together with something of the person it serves and a written petition. It is tied shut, 'breathed' or 'fed' with oil, cologne or whiskey at intervals, prayed over, and carried against the skin, in a pocket or in the bosom; the tradition is emphatic that it is not to be shown, opened or handled by anyone else, and that a hand which is seen or touched by another loses its work.

A hand is made for one person and is not transferable; the tradition's rule that it must not be seen or touched is an ethical rule about secrecy and ownership as much as a magical one. Hands made for love or for a court case work on a situation involving other people who have not consented, which is where the tradition's own distinction between a justified and an unjustified work applies. Buying a mass-produced 'mojo bag' online is not the practice, and the people who make the real ones are usually not the people who profit from the word.