The Tradition's Account and the Marketing Account

Every tradition in this file has two accounts of itself in circulation, and they do not agree. The tradition's own account is a practice of healing, protection, obligation and community, transmitted inside families and churches under conditions of extreme hostility. The marketing account is the one produced for outsiders: 'voodoo' as pins, curses, zombies and sexual magic; hoodoo as a bag of tricks anyone can buy; Santería as a set of spells with a saint on the label; rootwork repackaged as Wicca with roots in it. The second account was not invented by the traditions, and it has been profitable for people who were not of them.

The two accounts meet in shops. A botánica or a spiritual-supply house sells real materia to the communities that use it and, on the same shelves, products built for tourists and for a New Age market that wants 'exotic' magic; the shopkeeper may serve both and may be an initiate of one tradition and a retailer of another's image. The same is true of publishing: the twentieth-century occult presses printed hoodoo books alongside Wiccan ones, and the twenty-first-century internet flattened all of it into content.

The disagreement is not a matter of taste. The marketing account has real effects: it gets traditions banned, it gets practitioners arrested, it sells initiations to people who are not prepared for them, and it separates a tradition's knowledge from the people who are owed for it. Naming the difference is not gatekeeping for its own sake - it is the minimum a reference work owes to traditions that have been misrepresented for two centuries by people who found them useful.