African Spiritual Geographies in Hoodoo: Mapping Sacred Landscapes

• In Event: Ecological resistance spirituality and community

Description for Program

This paper explores the intricate relationship between African spiritual traditions and geographic spaces through the lens of Hoodoo, emphasizing how African peoples in North America (re)created sacred geographies that bridge the material and spiritual realms. Drawing on African cosmology, this study highlights Hoodoo’s spirited landscapes as sites of agency, resistance, and collaboration with the supernatural.

The analysis foregrounds “crossroads thinking,” a conceptual framework rooted in Kongolese spirituality that positions liminal spaces—both physical and metaphorical—as critical sites of spiritual communion. From ritual deposits in dirt floors to sacred groves and waterways, African peoples preserved and transformed their spiritual practices, adapting to North American landscapes while maintaining connections to ancestral cosmologies. This work also examines the evolving roles of urban spaces, such as candle shops, which have become modern loci for Hoodoo practice, education, and community.

Key to this exploration is the understanding of space as a collaborative act between humans and the spiritual world. Spirits and divinities are not static but move through itinerant geographies, inhabiting objects like charms, altars, and consecrated pots. These spirited objects, along with stationary sites such as cemeteries and sacred natural spaces, create a dynamic sacredscape where the material and immaterial intersect.

Building on scholarship in Black Studies and spiritual geography, this paper situates Hoodoo as a vital epistemology for understanding African diasporic relationships to land, space, and spirit. It argues that Hoodoo practitioners chart a “live map” of sacred geographies, continually shaped by ancestral agency and human interaction. By centering African spiritual geographies, this study offers a framework for reimagining the intersections of spirituality, geography, and Black cultural resilience.

Author

• Justice Isaacs, Santa Monica College