Interesting folklore connections

[elaby]

So, I've been reading Mules and Men by Zora Neale Hurston for my Folklore class, and the second half of the book is about hoodoo (mispronounced, it says, by white people as voodoo). There's this one ritual that they talk about in which you catch a black cat and shove it in a boiling pot of water, then after it's all disintegrated you take the bones out and put them one by one in your mouth until one tastes bitter. This one is supposed to turn you invisible if you hold it in your mouth.

And I was reading this, and then went "Zomg!" because almost the exact same ritual - minus some cursing of the cat while it screams and the bitter taste part - takes place in T.H. White's The Once and Future King, performed by Morgause (er, I think that's her name... Morgan's sister, mother of the Orkneys) because she was bored.

Iiiiiinteresting.

Comments

[hak42.livejournal.com]

I thought hoodoo and voodoo were different?

Yay for Wikipedia!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoodoo

[elaby.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link :) It just says in the book "Hoodoo, or Voodoo, as pronounced by the whites..." And she doesn't mention it spelled with a V again.

[elaby.livejournal.com]

But from what I read in the article, the stuff in the book is much more informal rather than an established religion, like the article says Voodoo is. That's probably where the discrepancy is; both things might have been called "Voodoo" by white people at the time, not knowing the difference.

[caitirin.livejournal.com]

Weeeeeird!!

[miss-next.livejournal.com]

If anyone did that to one of my cats, it'd take more than an invisibility spell to protect them from my wrath!

[elaby.livejournal.com]

Yeah, my first thought when they said they had to catch a cat was "What if it belongs to somebody?"

[merrick42.livejournal.com]

Yet another example of how well western European mysticism and religion blended with its western African and Carribbean Indian counterparts.

[merrick42.livejournal.com]

Also, will have to check through some of my papers to see if I referenced any of Hurston's works. The Dimond Library has a lot of great books on Hoodoo, Voudou, Santeria, and Obeah.

[elaby.livejournal.com]

I bet it does :) Hurston did a lot with not just hoodoo, but folklore in general.