Brown paper bag spell

Sacred Saturday: Brown-Paper Petition Work

Drawing In • Releasing

Written petitions and name papers have a documented place in African American Hoodoo. Zora Neale Hurston recorded written petitions in Hoodoo in America in 1931, and Harry Middleton Hyatt’s collected oral accounts include examples in which papers were written and folded with intentional direction. These historical records document variations in practice rather than one universal formula every rootworker followed.

For this Sacred Saturday, I’m sharing my personal practice. Discernment is part of the work. Learn why you are doing something, choose ingredients that agree with your intention, pray over your work, and allow your own spiritual practice to guide you.

For this working, start with a clean piece cut from an unprinted brown paper bag, your pen or pencil, herbs chosen for the intention, and your Money Drawing oil when you are doing drawing or abundance work.

The working:

1. Write your intention. Decide clearly what you are calling toward yourself or what you are releasing. Write your petition by hand and keep your words direct and purposeful.

2. Add your herbs. Choose herbs whose spiritual purpose agrees with the work. Place them onto the petition before folding. You don’t need a mountain of herbs—a little goes a long way.

3. Add your oil. For money-drawing work, anoint the herbs/petition lightly with your Money Drawing oil. The oil is there to support the intention, not soak the paper.

4. Pray over your work. Hold your petition, speak your prayer and put your intention behind what you have written and added.

5. Now fold. In my practice, I fold toward myself when I am calling, drawing or welcoming something to me. When the work is meant to remove, release or repel, I fold away from myself. The “toward” direction also appears in Hyatt-collected Hoodoo material, but methods varied among practitioners and communities.

6. Follow through. Spiritual work doesn’t mean sitting still waiting for something to happen. If you’re drawing money, look for the opportunity, send the application, make the call, work the business, pay attention to the door that opens. If you’re releasing something, stop feeding what you’ve asked to leave.

For disposal, I keep drawing work somewhere private and spiritually meaningful while I am actively working it. When I’m doing releasing work, I remove it from my home once the work is closed. Dispose of herbs and paper responsibly, and don’t leave oils, paper or other ritual materials on someone else’s property or in nature where they don’t belong.

Documented history: Hoodoo developed within African American communities in the United States, drawing from African spiritual traditions under the conditions of enslavement and later African American life. The National Park Service documents Hoodoo/conjure/rootwork as an African American spiritual tradition and also records archaeological evidence of concealed spiritual objects and bundles associated with enslaved African Americans.

Personal practice: My choice of herbs, Money Drawing oil, prayer, folding direction and the way I carry the work forward are the practice I am sharing with you—not a claim that every Hoodoo practitioner works exactly the same way.

Sources: Zora Neale Hurston, Hoodoo in America (1931); Harry Middleton Hyatt, Hoodoo—Conjuration—Witchcraft—Rootwork; National Park Service, “Hoodoo in St. Louis: An African American Religious Tradition.”