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I often feel sad when I think about your leaving me while in the middle of writing this book, but then I remember that you left so that you could join me. This book is for you, my grandmommy Dr. Ellestine J. Grant.

INTRODUCTION

THE BEGINNING

When people ask me, “When did you start your spiritual journey?” I feel the multiple paths I’ve walked in my life illuminating. Even as a child, I knew that Spirit existed. Concepts like God, saints, spirituality, ceremony, ritual, and even ancestors were always present in my forms of worship, whether I was in the church or in the Baháʼí temple. I remember praying to God that my grandmother’s car would start up again when it broke down outside the house—and it did. I remember being eight years old and intuitively laying my hands on my best friend’s stomach when she had a bellyache, and her exclaiming, “Wow, that worked!” Whether it was my African naming ceremony as a baby, facilitated by my Aunt Myrtle, or my chats to my pop-pop after he passed, I knew something bigger was there for me. As far as I can tell, my spiritual journey existed before I even had the language to describe it as such. My journey has always lived alongside me.

Allendale and Edmondson Avenue is where I received my introduction to what it means to be a devout worshiper, an intentional prayer, and a ritualized Black human. My experience as a good Black Catholic girl started in a large gray brick building under a gold dome that would sparkle in the sun as if the Holy Spirit herself had pursed her lips to kiss it. St. Bernadine’s Roman Catholic Church, the all-Black congregation perpetually led by a white head priest, was located in the Southwest Baltimore, Maryland, community of Edmondson Village. The big gray brick seemed to tower over the brown row homes and my little brown body as my father and I entered the side door, nearest the corner store, every Sunday morning around 11ish. St. Bernadine’s, my Black Catholic haven, gave everyone the Roman Catholic aesthetic that we came for: beautiful stained-glass windows and lingering scents of frankincense and myrrh welcomed devoted adults and bored children alike. Eventually the white Jesus paintings that graced the walls were repainted to a dark-skinned man with locs, to better mirror the parishioners who filled the church in this all-Black neighborhood. Now, St. Bernadine’s was not the church where I nonconsensually accepted the teachings of the Catholic Church to wash me of the sins that I was apparently born with as an infant—better known as baptized—but it is the church that I attended for over ten years of Christmas concerts and early Mass until I decided that I wanted to be Baptist, and later Buddhist, then Baháʼí, and then a witch. It is where I learned that reciting the same prayers was basically chanting, and that body posture matters when addressing the Spirit (stand, sit, kneel, repeat). St. Bernadine’s Roman Catholic Church was where my “Black church” experience began.

Believe it or not, Baltimore has quite the active Black Catholic community. If you’re unfamiliar with my culturally unique hometown, Baltimore has the fifth largest population of African Americans in the United States. As seen in our crab cracking and our dirt bikes that are hardly ridden in dirt, Black culture is fully infused into what defines Baltimore—even the Roman Catholics. Of course, Baltimore is no New Orleans, Louisiana. We don’t have as many Catholic schools, churches, or overall Catholic cultural imprint as does New Orleans. But we Baltimoreans have quite the expansive history of “firsts” regarding Catholic roots in the United States. In 1789, Pope Pius VI appointed Father John Carroll of Upper Marlboro, Maryland, the first Catholic bishop in the United States and selected Baltimore as the seat of the first diocese, which is basically a church district that is overseen by a bishop. This is like Baltimore being the first “state” in the Catholic world, followed by New Orleans in 1793. Baltimore is also home to the Oblate Sisters of Providence, who are the most successful Roman Catholic sisterhood in the world established by women of African descent. In 1829 these primarily Haitian Caribbean nuns founded a school for Black Catholic girls, which became the foundation of St. Frances Academy, the oldest continuously operating school for Black Catholic children in the United States. St. Frances Academy remains an active Catholic school in Baltimore today. Baltimore could never be left out of the conversation of Catholicism, and this conversation was my reality until I turned eighteen.

I attended Catholic school from kindergarten to twelfth grade. I was very well versed in what it meant to confess my sins to a priest, use prayer beads to set my intentions, and celebrate a bunch of “elevated” dead people, or saints, by leaving them offerings and prayers on “feast days.” Sex outside marriage was sinful, being gay wasn’t discussed, masturbating was selfish, and the behavior of some local priests was questionable at best. I went to Mass during school, received grades in religion classes, and prayed all the time. Faith was a big portion of my childhood identity. Even as a child I lived and breathed every ritual as if my life depended on it, because my soul did. I never considered that there could be more to my existence outside Catholicism until about eighth grade, when it was time for Confirmation. If you’re unfamiliar with Catholic rites, at around fourteen years old, most good Catholic children move forward with the ceremony of Confirmation, which “confirms” your belief in the Catholic teachings and means that you fully accept Jesus as your savior. Catholic children are typically baptized as infants, so confirmation is our somewhat consensual choice into this faith. You go to classes to prepare for Confirmation, may have some additional praying, and even get to choose a new Catholic name for yourself after one of the saints! I believe mine was going to be Beatrice, or maybe it was Maria. But as my friends prepared for their Confirmation, picked out their Confirmation names, and their parents bought new white dresses or black suits for the ceremony, I decided that I didn’t want to go through with this particular rite. Even as a preteen, something inside me decided that I didn’t want to confirm my belief in the Catholic teachings. I did still identify as a Catholic, but I felt that if I was confirming something, then I should be sure, right? I was only fourteen, so I didn’t feel like I could confirm anything besides what I was wearing on our out-of-uniform day at the school dance. Now, as an adult, I understand this as my Ori (higher consciousness) always guiding me to the traditions that felt safest and most comfortable, even if I didn’t realize that yet. This was my first step in rejecting the status quo and the expectations surrounding my spiritual identity. At fourteen years old, I knew that there was more to my spiritual life than what I’d experienced so far.

Now, although I was a Catholic child baptized, churched, and schooled under the tenets of the Roman Catholic Church, I was blessed to have spiritual interactions with family and friends that consisted of a cocktail of Christianity. My paternal grandmother, with whom I spent much of my childhood in Edmondson Village, was born and raised Pentecostal—Holiness, to be exact. She later converted to African Methodist Episcopal (AME). Then there was my mother’s side of the family, which was originally Baptist. My best friend, Alex, was also Baptist, and her church eventually became my church home. She lived right up the street from me in Southwest Baltimore, and as an only child I often favored her and her sister’s company more than just my own. My father and my granddaddy, who gave me my Alabaman and Caribbean ancestry, were devout Catholics. My father directed the choir at St. Bernadine’s and often played the bongos, too, while my mom was a quieter Catholic who eventually left the Church while I was in middle school. My mom remarried my “bonus” dad, whom I have never known as religious but was definitely spiritual in many senses, which I credit to his Louisianian and Chattanoogan roots. My maternal grandmother converted to Lutheran, and I’m not sure I ever saw her husband, my pop-pop, step foot in a church for anything beyond the major events such as baptisms or funerals. One of the paternal family churches is AME, while the other paternal side is Pentecostal from South Carolina, which I used to visit every summer growing up. So, if you can’t tell, I’ve been churched all the way around. I’ve sat in every kind of Christian denomination setting you can imagine. And although I no longer identify with any of these labels, there’s a strange way that Spirit moved in these spaces that prepared me to be the bad bitch witch Hoodoo Orisha juju lady that I am today. It’s funny how Spirit moves.

The thing about Catholicism is that, once you leave, you see how ritualized, ceremonial, and “witchy” it really is (don’t tell them I said that). I didn’t learn about candle magic from a Wiccan lady or a New Age spiritualist on YouTube; I learned it, at least initially, from the Catholic Church. The concept of honoring deities and reaching out to “the dead” to intercede on my behalf was something I learned from Catholicism. To this day, Saint Anthony, the patron saint of lost items, was (and still is) one of the first spirits that I call on to help me find my wallet or missing cowrie earrings. I often wonder how and why he still blesses my non-Christian ass. The ideas of the supreme “Mother”—in other words, concepts of divine femininity and healing through the maternal—that I’ve come to understand within African diasporic spiritual systems were shown to me first through the exaltation of Jesus’s mother, Mary, to whom we prayed on a spiritual necklace of sorts that the Catholics call a rosary.

You see, Catholics taught me about ritual. Holiness folks taught me how to shout and to “see” beyond my physical eyes. Pentecostals taught me how to dress and move before the Spirit. Baptists taught me how to pull out a spirit through a song and a hand clap. The Lutherans taught me reverence and to be still, but Catholics taught me how to hide in plain sight. Catholics taught me how to feed the spirits. Catholics informed me of the beginnings of how to be a witch.

I must note, however, that Catholicism has quite the messy and traumatic past and present. In many ways this religion in particular has been an embarrassment to Christians and non-Christians all over the world. Catholicism’s relationship to plagiarism, rape, human trafficking, colonialism, and the theft of ancient African religion is still an undercurrent of its horrible history and active present. I think this amalgamation of spiritual trauma has informed much of my own spiritual, physical, and emotional trauma. I was a child immersed in the confusing world of what it meant to be a little Black Catholic girl—who also thinks she likes girls—in an extremely historic location for Catholic history. The abuse I witnessed as a child quite literally touched my family, teachers, and classmates, as people that I loved and knew were survivors of Catholic guilt, shame, and sexual trauma at the hands of pedophilic priests. Catholicism, with its layered functions, is a big part of why it’s hard for me to trust my own elders, spiritual community, and sometimes even my own ancestors. It is part of how I know that religious spaces, regardless of denomination, can be breeding grounds for violence. However, this same violence that I witnessed taught me how to be a good spiritual practitioner. It taught me the value of protecting oneself spiritually and physically. And perhaps that protection is not always from some large unexplainable force like a devil, but from those who purport to be the angels in your own spiritual communities. It showed me that what we deem evil can thrive when it is backed by communities, political powers, and intentional prayers. It was my first true understanding of spiritual warfare, and the amount of control religious leaders hold throughout the entire world. Catholicism taught me that not every ritual is good, not every word is sacred, and not every spiritual house will be your home.

I was not only raised Catholic, but I attended Catholic school from kindergarten all the way to twelfth grade. In that process you can only imagine the level of harmful rhetoric I learned at the hands of well-meaning Catholic teachers. Of course there were the cool nuns who knew that you were having sex, drinking, and all the other teenage tales, but specifically in my Catholic middle school I internalized a lot of guilt surrounding pleasure, specifically masturbation. One day in class, this elderly-ass white couple came in and talked to us about the body and why it was sinful to have sex before marriage. This happened around eighth grade, so by that point I knew that sex was something to “wait for,” although I’m not sure I actually planned on that. But during their presentation someone asked, “What about masturbation?” and the response was, “Well that’s just absolutely selfish, and God doesn’t like that, either.” For some reason, this particular comment still resounds in my head at the most inconvenient times. The thought that self-pleasure is also something that is evil and selfish and could land you a first-class ticket to hell replays in my mind to this day. The imprint of that moment lasted for quite some time as I navigated my own sexuality and sought to discover what my body craved for and enjoyed. I’ve done a lot of sexuality and sensuality unlearning with my ancestors, because I never had space for that within my other belief systems. Remember, I was born with the right to experience joy and so were you, and that knowledge changed my relationship to my body and my identity.

Seeing and venerating ancestors has done a number not just on my sensual self, but on my self-confidence. I have a tattoo on my shoulder that I got many years ago while I was Christian to support me in having more confidence. The tattoo is trusty Proverbs 31:30 (LOL), and it reads, “Beauty is Vain.” Although I understand why I felt that I needed that tattoo at that time in my life, I wish I had simply read that Bible verse every morning instead of tattooing it on my clavicle, because these days I do not share those sentiments at all. Beauty is not vain, and I know that because I have beautiful ancestors. And we don’t have to be what we are told is beautiful to embody it. The way that my ancestors love, nurture, and care for me is beautiful. There was a point when I didn’t like my dark skin, big forehead, or big eyes, but now that I root those traits in those of an ancestor of mine, I can see my own beauty. How dare I call myself ugly! My grandma ain’t ugly. And whenever I see images of the faces of my ancestors in my mind, I know that my ancestors ain’t ugly, either. The reverence that I carry for my departed loved ones has to extend to myself, because I am literally a reflection of them. If I wouldn’t say it to a great-grandmother, I don’t need to be saying it to me. Beauty is not vain—and if it is, what’s wrong with vanity?

If you’ve come to this book today, welcome. Maybe you’ve come because you, like me, were indoctrinated under a system that didn’t work for you, but you always knew there was more to the story than what you were being told. Perhaps you’re deep into an African or African Diasporic Tradition but seeking to ground yourself in what brought you to that tradition. Perhaps you’re curious about what Hoodoo is or are still trying to understand who the Orisha are and what place they may have in your life. Maybe you don’t know, but you felt the tug to go deeper and to look no further than into your own spirit to connect with something divine. Regardless of what unique reasoning you have, may this be a balm on your journey.

The beginning chapters of this book cover definitions: who the ancestors are, why they are important, and other historical examples regarding the importance of ancestral veneration and the process of returning to Africana spiritual systems as Black people. This aspect of spirituality is vast, and developing some kind of grounding in it is important before we move on to the next section. In the latter parts of the book, we’ll discuss the mechanics or the “how to” of engaging in these traditions. We’ll cover concepts such as altar building, spirit communication, spiritual gifts, and rituals. I realize that everyone is always excited to jump into the rituals first, but please take time to process the historical and cultural information this book includes, too. It’ll make your juju pop even more! On top of that, I’ll provide questions, exercises, and journal prompts so that you can take note of what you’re experiencing as you absorb this text, to work that third eye and get into habits of better ritual for yourself. I’ll also be sharing personal stories about my spiritual journey, along with the ancestral tea that my spirits have been sharing with me throughout the past few years.

Whatever your reason for picking up this book, you’ve felt something calling you home to yourself and to your people … and all I can say is that if you’ve taken that first step, then you’ve already done the hardest part: listening. I encourage you to keep listening throughout this book, take notes on what comes up for you, and stay open to the transformative powers of our ancestral voices. I’m excited for you!