“You don’t wanna mess with Death Powder,” said my voodoo mentor Earl Marlowe, one time. “It’s a secret swamp voodoo recipe – the napalm of hoodoo.”
Earl recommended only using Death Powder in extreme circumstances. When there’s no other way. Death Powder is a distillation of ingredients: Roots collected in the wilds at the dark o’ the moon, gunpowder, brimstone and other stuff – all ritually charged during a possession ceremony in an old, disused and deserted graveyard.
Earl told how Death Powder was once used in a courthouse.
“Killed the judge stone dead. It was no loss. He was a nasty bastard, a white supremest motherfucka. There was some black boys on trial. Good boys wrongly accused. Everyone knew they wasn’t going to get off and were headed for the slammer. So the Death Powder ritual was done and the powder was thrown right in that nasty judge’s face. He was dead by nightfall.”
Death Powder Demon Doll…
Dark Angel has been known to lay a curse of this caliber using Death Powder. But only where it was truly warranted. One situation that incurred her justified wrath was when a family member (whom we won’t name) had taken up with a lowlife individual, an abusive sort.
So Dark Angel set about creating one of her unique demon dolls, which are made from clay mixed with various powders and minerals… but in this case, Death Powder.
Once the manikin doll was made, we created a sigil for it (yes, we were both involved in this one), aimed at the unwanted person. Dark Angel then set about conducting her ritual at the “Dark of the Moon”. She put the doll in a wheelbarrow (the doll was rather large) and wheeled it into into the woods, taking a heavy hammer and a handful of rusty six inch nails with her.
In the middle of the woods was large fallen stone, about ten foot by three foot. Dark Angel calls it her “altar stone”. She carefully placed the cursing doll upon the altar. The night was dark as there was no moon. But she’d gathered some sticks and leaves together and lit a small fire to light the clearing in the woods.
Dark Angel picked up her hammer, called upon her ancestors, and stated the purpose of the rite – to fire an unholy, vengeful curse upon the troll-like lowlife that she wanted out of the family picture. A dark light shone in her eyes and she screamed as she placed one rusty nail after another onto the doll and hammered them in. Then she hurled the remaining nails aside and just laid into the doll with her hammer. She was like a female version of the Norse god Thor laying waste to the Jötunns (giants), sworn enemies of the Aesir (gods).
After a minute, she’d smashed the manikin doll to dust. The curse was laid. (You can read the full story here).
Granny Sumlin…
Dark Angel got her recipe for Death Powder from her Granny Sumlin, a rootworker in Georgia. As it turns out, Granny Sumlin was part of the Swamp Voodoo collective that my Voodoo mentor Earl Marlowe was part of… he spent a long time in the American South many years before I got to know him in London. From what I could gather he’d been fairly competitive with Granny Sumlin. He considered her to be “too old time”, as he put it. I recall him saying the following:
“That Granny Sumlin was a piece of work. Mad as a March Hare in my opinion. She used to go to town every Saturday morning. Macon, Georgia, it was. That was the only time she’d smoke cigarettes and put on bright red lipstick. She thought she was Scarlett O’Hara. She’d go there on the bus. People knew she was a witch and didn’t mess with her. It was all folk magick with her. Whereas I would use components from old tube radios in some of my workings – like they do in radionics. You gotta move with the times. But not Granny Sumlin. She was strict old time. But she knew how to make some mean Death Powder. I seen her take out wrongdoers, that’s for sure. She threatened me with it once. I said, ‘You ain’t got the guts to try that with me, you know I’ll come right back atcha.’”
Dark Angel is the same. She’s pretty disapproving of my methods of magick that also involve modern technology. She thinks it should all be authentic. But I say to her that there was no such thing as authentic. Rootworkers always moved with the times. Back in the 1920s voodoo doctors were experimenting with techniques from India, which they called “Hindoo” magick at the time.
That said, Dark Angels’ Death Powder curse above certainly did the job. While it didn’t take the guy out, it put him on the streets homeless. And as I said sarcastically, “It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy…”