Hoodoo

Hoodoo (pronounced who-do)

(1) A set of spiritual practices and traditions created and concealed from slave-owners by enslaved Africans in North America, based on traditional African beliefs.  Practiced predominantly in the south-east US, its identifiable features include folk magic, rituals of protection, herbal medicine, charming of objects, and ancestor veneration.

(2) In casual use, bad luck, or a person or thing that brings bad luck, not necessarily associated with the supernatural; to jinx, to bring bad luck or misfortune.

(3) In geology, a pillar of rock, created by various forces of erosion (also known as spires of rock, fairy chimneys, earth pyramids (and in particular formations) tent rocks).

1870: A creation of US English meaning "one who practices voodoo", apparently a variant of Voodoo.  The meaning "something that causes or brings bad luck" seems to have emerged in the 1880s and it was being used as a verb by 1886.  Interestingly, in 2002, it was documented also as a distinctly non-religious American folk magic.  Until the late twentieth century, hoodoo was spelled with & without an initial capital letter in a most inconsistent matter, both forms sometimes appearing in the one document.  The modern practice (which seems compelling) is to capitalize in when the word is used in the context of the spiritual practice or the cultural identification but to use all-lowercase when referring to the geological formations or used as casual slang (perhaps surprisingly, there’s been little apparent interest in proscribing hoodoo in this sense on the grounds of cultural appropriation).  Hoodoo is a noun & verb, hoodooed & hoodooing are verbs and hoodooism is a noun; the noun plural is hoodoos.

The first known instance of Hoodoo in English was in 1870 but the origins are wholly speculative, etymologists concluding it was probably an alteration of voodoo, a word drawn from the Ewe and Fon languages of Ghana and Benin which reference a divinity although the Akan odu (medicine) may be related and there’s also the possibility of a link to the Hausa hu'du'ba (resentment and retribution).  Less likely, but not impossible is that it’s from the variant Hudu (spirit work) in the Ewe language spoken in Ghana and Togo.  The link with Voodoo however is most convincing because Hoodoo was as early as the late nineteenth century identified as an African dialect with practices similar to the mysteries of Obi (Obeah) in the Caribbean.

Pre-production de Havilland Comet (DH 106) with the original, square windows, England, 1949.

The term hoodoo is often attached to objects thought jinxed.  When the de Havilland Comet (DH 106; the first commercial jet airliner), within a year of its first flight in 1949, began to suffer a number of catastrophic in-flight accidents, newspapers wrote of the “Comet hoodoo”, something encouraged because, in the pre “black-box” era, analysis of aviation incidents was a less exact science than now and for some time the crashes appeared inexplicable.  It was only when extensive testing revealed the reason for the structural failures could be traced to stresses in the airframe induced aspects of the design that the hoodoo was understood to be the operation of physics.  Other manufacturers noted the findings and changed their designs.  It’s because of the lessons learned from the Comet hoodoo that the apertures of airliner windows have rounded edges, the traditional four-cornered openings creating four weak spots prone to failure under stress.

Pre-dreadnought battleship, USS Texas ("Old Hoodoo"), 1898.  Note the sailors' washing hanging from the railings, a long naval tradition.   

Sailors are said to be notoriously superstitious and probably didn’t need much persuasion to call the USS Texas “Old Hoodoo”.  The US Navy’s first (pre-dreadnought) battleship, she was commissioned in response to the naval arms race which developed in the Americas in the late nineteenth century although despite the tensions, the construction was undertaken as what would soon seem a leisurely pace; ordered in 1886, it wasn't until 1889 the keel was laid down and when finally commissioned in 1895, although not yet obsolescent, she was hardly in the forefront of naval architecture.  The ships accident-prone reputation was well deserved and had stated early with incidents of grounding, flooding (drowning three of the crew) and a collision with the dock.  However, she rose to the occasion and provide sterling service during the Spanish–American War (1898) but ironically, the reputation gained was such that the Navy decided to use the now storied name for a new dreadnought and the USS Texas (BB-35), commissioned in 1914, was later declared a national historic landmark and is the last surviving World War I era dreadnought.  As sailors know, it’s bad luck to change the name of a ship and, now named the USS San Marcos, so it proved, towed as a hulk to shallow waters in Chesapeake Bay where, resting on the bottom, she became an increasingly battered target ship and the navy used her for gunnery practice until the late 1940s.  Increasing water traffic however mean the remains had become a navigational hazard and most of the remains were removed as scrap in 1959.

Hoodoos short (left), tall (centre) and clustered (right), Arizona, south-west US.

In geology, a hoodoo (also known as spires of rock, fairy chimneys, earth pyramids (and in particular formations) tent rocks) is a tall, typically thin, spire of rock formed by the processes of erosion (wind, rain, floods) and are forms usually of a relatively soft rock (such as sandstone) topped by harder stone which better resists the forces of nature.  Mostly, they exist within sedimentary rock and volcanic rock formations.  Hoodoos can be only a few feet high or exceed the level of multi-storey buildings and the shape they assume is wholly dictated by the composition of the rocks from which they’re formed, the erosional patterns differing according to the hardness of the material.  The introduction of the word hoodoo to geology seems to have happened in the late nineteenth century at the time when it had entered the vernacular to describe both the rituals of certain folk magic and the sense of doom or bad luck.  As the more remote regions of the western US were explored, the rocky structures were noted to be of not dissimilar spiritual significance to First Nations peoples and in some cases literally to be the petrified remains of those punished by the gods for their transgressions.

In the natural environment, temperature can also create structures with a hoodoo-like appearances.  Trees in Finland (left), a frozen fountain in Shevchenko Garden, Kharkiv, Ukraine (centre) and frozen Geyser in Letchworth State Park, New York with volcano-like flow maintained at the top (right).