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When Ryan Coogler's Sinners became one of the biggest films of 2025, millions of viewers met Annie — a quiet, capable woman in 1932 Mississippi who wears a mojo bag and knows exactly what to do when something unnatural comes to the door. Searches for “Hoodoo” spiked overnight, and most of what people found was either a sales pitch or a horror-movie caricature.
The tradition deserves better than both. Hoodoo is a real body of African American folk practice — also called conjure, rootwork, or simply “the work” — that took shape over centuries in the American South, survived slavery and migration, and is still practiced today. Here is the folklore as folklorists actually record it.
What Hoodoo Actually Is — and What It Isn't
The most common mistake: treating Hoodoo and Vodou as one thing. They are relatives, not twins.
- Vodou (in Haiti) and Voodoo (in Louisiana) are religions: they have a structured pantheon of spirits called lwa, initiated clergy, and community ceremonies.
- Hoodoo is not a religion. It is a folk practice — a toolkit of herbs, roots, prayers, oils, dirts, and personal objects used for protection, love, luck, justice, and healing. Most historical practitioners were churchgoing Protestants who read the Psalms alongside their rootwork.
Hoodoo emerged among enslaved Africans in the Southern United States, who carried Kongo, Yoruba, Fon, and Ewe spiritual knowledge across the Atlantic. Cut off from their institutions and priesthoods, they preserved what could travel in memory: plant medicine, reverence for ancestors, the conviction that the physical and spirit worlds touch. Over generations this blended with Indigenous American plant knowledge and European folk belief into something distinctly American.
One more thing it isn't: devil worship. That framing was applied from the outside. Within the tradition, the work is overwhelmingly protective and practical — help for people who had no courts, no doctors, and no police willing to protect them.
The Mojo Bag: A Prayer You Can Carry
The mojo bag — also called a hand, a toby, or a gris-gris — is Hoodoo's most recognizable object, and the one Sinners portrays most carefully. It is a small cloth bag, traditionally red flannel, holding an odd number of items chosen for one purpose: roots like High John the Conqueror for personal power, lodestone for drawing luck or money, herbs, coins, sometimes a written petition.
Three details matter more than the ingredient list:
- A mojo is “fed” — refreshed with whiskey, oil, or perfume — because it is treated as a living helper, not a lucky charm.
- It is kept hidden, worn against the skin where no one can see it.
- Letting someone else touch your mojo is believed to kill its power — which is why blues singers sing about their mojo but never show it.
The Crossroads and Robert Johnson
The crossroads is one of the oldest ideas in Hoodoo: where two roads meet is a threshold between worlds, and a person who goes there at midnight, on several nights running, can meet a spirit who will tune their instrument and teach a skill — guitar, cards, anything requiring uncanny mastery. In Kongo cosmology, from which this belief descends, the crossroads is the meeting point of the living and the dead, and its keeper is a teacher who tests nerve, not a buyer of souls.
American popular culture welded this belief to one man. Robert Johnson, the Mississippi Delta bluesman who died in 1938 at twenty-seven, was said to have gone to the crossroads and sold his soul to the devil for his talent. The legend is wonderful and mostly wrong in its details. The story circulated earlier about Tommy Johnson, an unrelated bluesman, and the “devil” is a Christian relabeling of the crossroads spirit of African tradition — a teacher at the threshold, not Satan. Johnson's own “Cross Road Blues” never mentions a deal. The bargain grew in the retelling, decades after his death, into the founding myth of rock and roll — and, in 2025, the historical backbone of Sinners.
Goofer Dust and Graveyard Work
Not all of the tradition is protective, and honest folklore should say so. Goofer dust — the name likely descends from a Kikongo word associated with death — is a harming powder built around graveyard dirt, used in foot-track magic: laid where a target will walk, so the harm enters through the feet.
Context keeps this from being a horror trope: folklorists who collected these accounts understood goofer dust as a weapon of last resort for people the law refused to protect. And graveyard dirt itself is not sinister by default — in Hoodoo it is bought respectfully from an ancestor's grave, paid for with coins or whiskey, and used in protective work as often as harmful work.
Why the Folklore Endures
Hoodoo persisted because it worked as culture: it carried ancestral memory through the worst circumstances American history produced, and it gave ordinary people agency. Its fingerprints are everywhere — in blues lyrics about mojo hands, in Southern gardens bordered with protective plants, and now in one of the most successful horror films ever made. The tradition is a living one, and its practitioners have long asked that it be portrayed as inheritance rather than costume. Sinners came closer than most, which is exactly why so many viewers walked out of the theater wanting to know what was real. Much of it was.
Learn More
To go deeper than a film or a blog post allows:
- Mojo Workin': The Old African American Hoodoo System — Katrina Hazzard-Donald's academic history
- Hoodoo, Voodoo, and Conjure: A Handbook — Jeffrey E. Anderson's folklore reference
- Robert Johnson and the Crossroads Legend — the blues history behind the myth
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Frequently Asked Questions
Is Hoodoo the same as Voodoo?
No. Vodou and Louisiana Voodoo are organized religions with a pantheon of spirits and clergy. Hoodoo is a folk practice — rootwork and conjure — historically carried out alongside Protestant Christian faith. They share African ancestry but are distinct.
Did Robert Johnson really sell his soul at the crossroads?
There is no evidence he claimed to. The story was earlier told about bluesman Tommy Johnson, and the crossroads spirit of Hoodoo tradition is a teacher figure, not the Christian devil. The legend grew decades after Johnson's death in 1938.
What is inside a mojo bag?
Traditionally an odd number of items in red flannel — roots such as High John the Conqueror, lodestone, herbs, coins — assembled for one purpose like protection or luck, kept hidden, and periodically “fed” with whiskey or oil.
Is Hoodoo still practiced today?
Yes. Rootwork survived the Great Migration into cities across the United States, and contemporary practitioners — many descended from the tradition's original communities — continue it today, alongside renewed public interest sparked by Sinners.
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