Printed seals from the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses moved through Hoodoo for a century: what they are, how workers carried them, and the respect they require.
Walk through any old spiritual supply catalog and you will find pages of seals: circular emblems dense with script and symbols, printed on parchment and sold by the sheet. Seals are one of the more mysterious corners of Hoodoo, so here is the plain history and the plain caution.
Where the seals come from
Most seals in the tradition trace to European grimoires, above all the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, a text that crossed into Black American spiritual life in the nineteenth century and never left. The book claimed to hold the hidden workings Moses used, and that claim landed differently with us, because Moses holds a singular place in Black faith: the prophet who faced down an empire and led an enslaved people out. Zora Neale Hurston wrote that our folks held Moses as the greatest conjure man who ever lived. The seals rode into the practice on that reverence, and the spiritual supply trade printed them by the thousands.
How workers used them
Seals were carried. Folded into a wallet for money matters, pinned inside a coat for protection, tucked into a mojo hand among the roots, or set beneath a candle to sharpen its assignment. The seal named the work in ink the way a fixed candle names it in wax. If mojo hands are new territory, What Is a Mojo Bag covers that form, and What Is Conjure holds the wider frame.
The respect they require
Here is the caution, given straight. Every seal is specific. Each one names a particular working, and the tradition is firm that you do not carry what you do not understand. A seal is not wall art and not an aesthetic, and grabbing one off the internet because it looked powerful is exactly the kind of shortcut the old workers warned about. If seals call to you, study before you carry, and learn from people inside the tradition.
Seals in this house
Some of our work includes seals where the assignment calls for them, chosen and placed the way I was taught. Which seals, in which work, stays in-house with the rest of the formulations. What I will teach openly is the history and the respect, because that is the part that keeps people from playing with what should not be played with. The faith history underneath all of this, the praying grounds and the hidden church, lives in The Invisible Institution.
The deeper seal teachings go out on the email list, at the bottom of this page.