Spiritual Bath

To remove a condition - a crossed state, a run of bad luck, illness, a lingering influence - or to draw one in, depending on the herbs and the direction of the work

The bath is the most common single prescription in African American conjure: where the reading shows a condition on a person, the bath is how it is taken off. Hyatt's informants describe it constantly and so does every later worker; the Cuban omiero and the Mexican-American herbal bath are close relatives, and the three are best understood as one Atlantic family of practice rather than as borrowings from each other.

The bather steeps herbs, roots or minerals in water, sometimes with a cologne or a condition oil added, and pours the preparation over the body from the neck down, or sponges with it while praying. It is done standing in a tub or over a basin, often at a set hour and for a set number of days, and there is a widespread rule that the water is not rinsed off but allowed to dry on the skin, and that the used water is carried out and disposed of away from the door rather than poured down the household drain. A worker may bathe a client rather than prescribe a bath, which is a different and more intimate service.

A bath is prescribed, not shopped for: in the tradition a reader names the condition and the course, and a person who assembles baths from a catalogue without a reading is understood to be guessing at their own case. Bathing another person is intimate work with rules about who may be bathed by whom, and the herbal knowledge involved is a family and community inheritance rather than a public formulary.