Long, Carolyn Morrow. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2001. xxix + 314 pp. $19.00 (US). ISBN: 1-57233-110-0.

[1] Spiritual Merchants takes readers into the marketplace of a predominantly African American popular culture where floor washes bring luck, roots keep evil away, and powders assure a lover's fidelity. Long, a retired Smithsonian preservation specialist and conservator, combines artifact studies, field interviews, and archival research to examine magical charms and the stores and manufacturers selling them. Presenting chapters on African-based religions in the New World, New Orleans Voodoo, hoodoo, and the commodification of "spiritual products" in the twentieth century, Long introduces readers to obscure subjects often neglected by academics and sensationalized in mass media.

[2] In part I ("Historical Antecedents and Traditional Practices"), Long examines the historical and cultural origins of spiritual products. Following an overview of Yoruba, Fon, Kongo, and European religious and folk traditions brought to the New World, she argues that "African American charms are primarily of African origin with considerable influence from European folk Christianity and popular magic" (14-15). In other early chapters, Long compares African-based practices in South American and Caribbean Catholic slave colonies to those in the Anglo-Protestant American South. In an argument first made in classic works like Albert Raboteau's Slave Religion and repeated by Long, new religions like Cuban Santer'a and Haitian Vodou combined African religious practices with Catholicism in Latin American colonies. In North America, slave acculturation and plantation demographics caused charms and "conjure" practices to become distanced from their African religious origins. One exception to this was the former French Catholic city of New Orleans, where a somewhat fragmented form of Vodou existed into the mid-to-late nineteenth century and has recently resurfaced. Long dedicates a chapter to "New Orleans Voodoo," discussing its commercialization in the late 1800s and its early twentieth century transition from religion to a form of magical conjuration known as hoodoo.

[3] In the second part of the book ("Sold as a Curio Only: The Evolution of the Spiritual Products Industry"), Long traces the historical shift from individual hoodoo practitioners who prepared homemade charms with specific ingredients to spiritual merchants who sold mass-produced ones defined more by their names and the art on their labels than by content. Other chapters offer descriptions of hoodoo, Santer'a, and Yerber'a shops, interviews with store owners and spiritual product manufacturers, and the cultural history of one particular charm ingredient: John the Conqueror root. In the book's most engaging chapter, "The Commodification of Traditional Charms," Long persuasively shows how "the trend toward the commodification of traditional charms began around the turn of the twentieth century and accelerated in the 1920s" (99). Early manufacturers of spiritual products were sometimes companies that made toiletries and cleaning supplies. Tapping into an African American occult market, these entrepreneurs turned liquid soaps, bath crystals, and aerosols into charms. In the world of mass-produced spiritual products, the magical properties of certain ingredients and the importance of ritual in making a charm disappeared. Lodestone sprays came without lodestone, black cat bones were made of plastic, and uncrossing powder was scented talc. "By a leap of faith and logic," Long writes, "the users of spiritual products have transferred to these manufactured goods their belief in the properties of traditional charms, rendered magical because they are composed of symbolic ingredients and activated by symbolic rituals. Spiritual products are thus a symbol of a symbol" (103-104).

[4] Spiritual Merchants has many positive features. Although never explicitly stating her thesis, Long presents a persuasive historical argument outlining how hoodoo charms became commercialized - and thus altered - in the twentieth century. Her primary sources, like lay anthropologist Harry Middleton Hyatt's five volume Hoodoo-Conjuration-Witchcraft-Rootwork, letters to South Carolina hoodoo doctor D.W. Watson, and mid-nineteenth century New Orleans newspaper articles on Voodoo, are particularly engaging. She also does a good job identifying regional variations in Southern hoodoo practice, and the chapter on John the Conqueror's metamorphosis from "magical root to manufactured product" provides a focused case study supporting her larger historical argument.

[5] Though it exhibits strengths, Spiritual Merchants needs more explanation and clarification in places. In one early endnote, for example, Long tells readers that she will not discuss New Age merchants trading in European Occultism, but fails to say why. Long's inclusion of Latin American-owned bot·nicas and Mexican yerber'as, her suggestion that the early spiritual merchant and author L.W. DeLaurence got into the business by expanding his European occult book publishing company to sell hoodoo paraphernalia, and her argument that charms are a mixture of African religious traditions and European occult practices make this omission somewhat peculiar. One wonders if Long's decision not to compare the spiritual products and stores of New Age occultists to those of Hispanic and African American practitioners stems from a class and race-based assumption that the white middle class doesn't have "folklore."

[6] Long provides a fascinating entry into the world of spiritual products, but readers with training in religious studies, history, cultural studies, and popular culture theory will find that Spiritual Merchants often describes without analyzing and traces historical change without contextualizing. Questions materialize like the spirits once thought to reside in charms. How did the commodification of African American hoodoo charms in the early twentieth century compare to the commercialization of other artifacts of popular religious, ethnic, and folk cultures during the same period? How did the birth of the spiritual products industry, partly focused on health and well-being, relate to the concurrent professionalization of medicine? And how did the racialized, gendered, and orientalist images on charm labels support or subvert popular beliefs and assumptions in the depression-era United States? While Long doesn't broach these subjects, she has given those who want to do so some useful material.

Sean McCloud
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Charlotte, North Carolina
spmcclou@email.uncc.edu