Roots
Sandy Jenkins was crossing the Maryland woods to visit his free wife when he ran into a teenage boy on the verge of death. Dried blood streaked him from head to foot. He looked of the dirt. But he was not the undead; Sandy recognized his fellow enslaved from the neighboring estate. The boy, it turned out, was at a crossroads. He confessed that he could remain in the woods and starve or return to the farm where he would surely die at the hands of the brutal overseer. Sandy led the boy to another part of the woods. He plucked a root and instructed the boy to return home and that no man, Black or white, could touch him so long as he had the charm.
Whenever I have been at a crossroads, the practice of astrology and magic has pointed the way forward. But for a long time, under the sway of someone's Christianity, I thought divination was inherently evil. My Sunday school teacher said that astrology was the devil's work so I stopped learning the planets. In college, I resumed it. I cast spells on a carpeted floor with a broken heart. The RA confiscated my unlit candles. Fire hazard. I dated an abuser who told me repeatedly that Black people had no culture. I suffered. I prayed. I listened. I had a knack for listening. Friends and colleagues confessed their lives to me. I solved logistical problems at work most of the time with a dose of good luck. My mom died. I quit my job. I sat pregnant for the second time. This time with a partner. This time with my own office where I could divine with a stack of playing cards. I began to study the spheres again. They had never left. They were in years of poems and journaling. I swelled and grew a baby. I grew myself. I reintroduced myself to each of the seven planets but found that they already knew me. Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, and the Moon. We named the baby Luna. I cried to my ancestors in the final push. To my mother. Luna was born. I was new, again. This is the working, the only thing that has given me back to myself over and over and over.
The African diaspora flooded every corner of the earth with old magic. Uprooted and then rooted again. Work in different soil both sings of my heritage and also becomes new material. From Tennessee to Chicago to Texas. This ancient technology has always been a reliable system of rebellion. Conjuration was a tool for the maligned, strong-hearted, bitter-tongued.
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Frederick Douglas was sixteen years old when encountered the rootworker in the woods who changed his fate. Harriet Tubman was fifteen years old when she divined that she would fly over the South and into the land of freedom. Black history comes alive when the tales and lore are infused with the magic that was running through them in the first place. But, we know that most of our tales got written down by white folks, edited by the man, then reprinted sterile and lifeless. As an astro mage, part of the work is to reanimate our stories with this magic. Magic is always radical because it gives us back to ourselves.
I think about Harriet Tubman a lot. I’m in the middle of an in-depth astrological research of the events that shaped her legacy. She was more than a brave woman who stole away hundreds to freedom and safety. She was a diviner and a conjurer. They called her Mama Moses for the prime magician himself. When the road to freedom became muddled or disappeared, she’d fall asleep and awaken with the knowing. Suddenly, the road ahead would become clear and she knew just how to lead her caravan to safety.
Divining is the art of going between what is above and what is below. Fundamentally, it’s a skill of translation. For those enslaved in American chattel slavery, who were denied the freedom to read words, the art became its own literacy. It was retained through the lineage in stories of elders and echoed across the fields. Elegba breathing the wisdom and ritual through the singing of Psalms, root remedies, and secret gatherings in the woods under a full moon.
Dey has meeting’ places in secret and a voodoo kettle and nobody know hat am put in it, maybe snakes and spiders and human blood, no telling’ what. Folks all come in de dark of de moon, old doctor wave he arms and de folks crowd up close. Dem what in de voodoo strips to de waist and commence to dance while de drums beats. Dey dance faster and faster and chant and pray till day falls down in a heap.
— (Texas Slave Narratives Part 3 of 4, page 142)
Sometimes, the body itself becomes a vessel for the art.
The Work
It happened that if you were seeking freedom, you would rally whatever resources you had in order to make it to the promised land alive. For many freedom seekers, this meant relying on the Hoodoo practices not just for luck but for protection, the ability to outsmart and to move in the shadows of a moonless night. In the Yoruba pantheon, Elegba/Eshu — the cunning messenger god — taught African people how to work with herbs roots to heal and protect against danger. When Douglas details his encounter with Sandy, the ancient wisdom is working within him. In his written narrative, Douglas performs skepticism, but scholarship on the work reveals that Douglas may have done this to conform with a white framework that doubted the effects of African magical arts. In any case, Frederick Douglas took the root from Sandy, wore it on his right side, and in a matter of days the talisman showed its power to alter fate.
It was a warrior spirit that was born from Sandy Jenkin’s root. And warriors belong to the planet Mars. Roots and herbs that correspond with Mars are on the whole thorny, prickly, bitter, acerbic, having the quality of being intolerably hot (like spice) and flowering botanicals would be bright red in color. A conjurer working in this mode would harvest the roots and herbs at an auspicious time — if he had time. But if he had the wisdom from Elegba, he’d recognize the scheme of correspondences in the land around him. The root becomes the body for the spirit and the intelligence of Mars to work on this earthly plane.
A psalm is a song. The Book of Psalms in the Old Testament lists over a hundred of these songs which travel from our bodies and breath to the divine. The songs have power. Thus, they invoke. And singing these songs wasn’t solely for the sake of praise but to fill one’s own body with the spirit. There’s an established tradition of using the psalms to invoke spirits, particularly planetary, supported by a system of correspondences can be musical botanical, or drawn.
In the Texas sugar bowl, where I grew up, enslaved conjurers built cabins with the Bakongo Cosmogram scrawled inside. It looks like the Christian cross but it’s not. The horizontal line marks the division between the living and the dead. The vertical line denotes the separation between rising and setting like the sun’s journey through the sky. The northern circle indicates noon, strength. The southern circle is midnight, rest, and power of the other world. The Cosmogram heralds back to Egyptian horoscopes, what we might recognize in an astrological chart.
Frederick Douglas’ counsel with the rootworker Sandy Jenkins changed him forever. When Douglas returned to Covey he was not the same boy. It’s here in his narrative that Douglas proclaims his famous statement that You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man. When Covey went to tie Douglas down and beat him, Douglas was suddenly overcome with the resolution to fight. From whence came the spirit I don’t know, Douglas tells us. It surprised him. It surprised Covey. Douglas fought Covey for a grueling two hours and by the end Covey relented, humiliated. Douglas regained his spirit, manhood, and will to live.
How many times did we find ourselves at crossroads last year? Well, we have been there before. Our own legends have been at the threshold. Between life and death; slavery and liberation. When we look at these stories through the lens of magic, we see that we have always been guided.
Thea Anderson (she/her) is an astrologer and writer. She studies and practices traditional astrology and integrates that into a modern context. She believes that the ancient technology of astrology, divination and ritual are what we need to help us get free today.
Follow Thea on Instagram and Twitter: @theaastrology and check out her website: http://theanichelle.com/