Stephanie Rose Bird - The Healing Power of African-American Spirituality: A Celebration of Ancestor Worship, Herbs and Hoodoo, Ritual and Conjure

Traditional African Spirituality in itself is inherently rebelliousa delicious roux, an okra gumbo for the beautiful black soul. Stephanie Rose Bird's emotionally liberating text champions the syncretism of diasporic healing motifs while enhancing the potency of eclectic African-centered folklore. As you travel the pages of this book you will begin to conjure change in your own life by any herb/bath root or oil at your disposal. You will triumphantly follow the cowrie shells back to the crossroads lined with deities happy to be both nappy and, above all, sun kissed.

Mawiyah Kai EL-Jamah Bomani,
author of the plays Spring Chickens and Crows Feet

The Healing Power of African American Spirituality by the illustrious Stephanie Rose Bird is a timely and much-needed inclusive contribution to humanity's spiritual awakening and evolution. Ms. Bird gives us richly textured, detailed descriptions and powerful histories about numerous, authentic African, African American, and Caribbean spiritual traditions and holistic health cures for the mind, body, and soul. Each Afro-centric culture Bird discusses offers their own uniquely captivating and sparkling messages about how to live one's best, magickal life inspired by the ancient beauty and truth of African spirituality. If you want to deepen and diversify your spiritual practice, you must add this book and Bird's other titles to your collection.

Ifeanyi C. Oshun,
author of Cats, Cauldrons, and Corsets and owner of Imaginate1111.com

Copyright 2010, 2022

by Stephanie Rose Bird

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage
and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Red Wheel/
Weiser, LLC. Reviewers may quote brief passages. Previously published in
2010 as The Big Book of Soul by Hampton Roads Publishing Company,
ISBN: 978-1-57174-599-6

Cover design by Kathryn Sky-Peck

Cover art Paradise,

2011 Tamara Natalie Madden / Bridgeman Images

Interior by Steve Amarillo / Urban Design, LLC

Typeset in Addington CF, Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk BE, and Afolkalips

Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc.

Charlottesville, VA 22906

Distributed by Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC

www.redwheelweiser.com

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ISBN: 978-1-64297-028-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
available upon request.

Printed in the United States of America

IBI

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my ancestors

This book contains advice and information relating to herbs and plants, and is not meant to diagnose, treat, or prescribe. It should be used to supplement, not replace, the advice of your physician or other trained healthcare practitioner. If you know or suspect you have a medical condition, are experiencing physical symptoms, or if you feel unwell, seek your physician's advice before embarking on any medical program or treatment. Readers using the information in this book do so entirely at their own risk, and the author and publisher accept no liability if adverse effects are caused.

Every book is the result of a collaborative effort. In the case of this book, a great deal of creative energy and positive thinking as well as hands-on help was shared by a wide variety of people. I wish to thank Greg Brandenburgh for shepherding this project from its inception. I am grateful to the incredible team of proofreaders, editors, designers, and PR and marketing experts at Hampton Roads Publishing for their help, which has been so essential to the making and publication of this book. Special thanks to my eagleeyed personal editor and assistant, Jannette Giles, for her attention to detail and thoughtful input. I thank my first readermy husband Damianand my children, Colin, Liam, Olivia, and Ian, for their patience, love, and support while I was working on this project. I am grateful also to Ron and Iris Bird, my in-laws, for believing in my talents even when I did not and for being supportive as I wrote these pages. Thanks to my parents and community of elders, including my grandparents, uncles, and aunts, for instilling belief in creativity, an appreciation for nature, and the roll-up-your-sleeves, can-do spirit that is a hallmark of black people.

Ashe!

From a young age, I was interested in all things considered dark and macabre, metaphysical, and what we've come to know as the mind body spirit connection. My work focuses on a particular aspect of healing that wants a place at the table and has much to contribute to the conversation. This work revolves around the intersection of my African ancestry and the African American culture I was raised in, and the age-old though contemporary, magickal and spiritual healing ways that stem from this deep well. My passion for this topic stems from curiosity about African-centered spiritual beliefs. I am called to them, from my center.

I have published seven books, including the COVR awardwinning, Sticks, Stones, Roots and Bones. My books explore anthropology, healing, folklore, mythology, and magickal spirituality. The Healing Power of African American Spirituality brings all of these subjects together and takes a deep dive into them. By its very nature and intent, this is an eclectic book, which makes sense because I am an eclectic pagan. You will not find devotion to a singular path in these pages; the unifying element is the wisdom and guidance of the ancestorsa spiritually alive and evolving force.

I seek to situate African American healing in its rightful place in the lexicon of American and other healing traditions. In films and in some novels, black spiritual practices do seem to fall into that category of interest I first mentionedthe macabrewhen in reality, that is not their holistic nature. Once you delve deeply into the varied continental African healing and spiritual practices, those influenced by sub-Saharan African healers, the people from which many of us descendants of slaves hold ancestry, a new picture develops.

African American spiritual practices, outside Abrahamic religions, have been little understood, but over the years they have become more clearly defined and distinctive. Once, our spiritual practices from the Motherland were outlawed, punishable by state-condoned torture and death. These ways have persisted through the Middle Passage and enslavement period, to freedom; they are alive and within us into the present day. Miraculously, they have not only survived, but continue to grow and evolve. In the pages of this book I delight in the rich array of Africanisms, spiritual practices that are found in our food-ways, song-ways, art-ways, and dance-ways. These unique practices are flourishing today.

As an herbalist and aromatherapist, my practice, and thus my writing, focuses on plants. Here, I explore African diasporic practices and beliefs that have a footing in the world of spirit through an engagement with plant magick and lore. This predilection for the spirituality of plants imbues this book with an eclectic African-centered vision that encompasses disparate belief systems that are connected through a genesis in the wide and diverse areas of both sub-Saharan and continental Africa.