Category Archives: Folk Beliefs

Santeria Love Spell

Nationality: Hispanic (product of Spanish rule in the Americas)
Age: 21
Occupation: student, front desk worker/ website translator
Residence: Los Angeles
Primary Language: Spanish
Language: English

To make someone fall in love with you, you take a drawing of a saint such as St. Gabriel or the holy death, a garment from the person you want to love you, and a picture of them. You write that person’s name vertically on the photograph then pin all three items together with a safety pin to a candle. Then you layer the outside of the candle with honey or some kind of wax and put it inside a glass jar. You burn the candle for seven days. If the candle makes the inside of the glass turn black, it means that person’s heart belongs to someone else, but if it’s clear at the end of 7 days, that means the spell worked and you just have to wait.

 

Trying to make love manifest from magic is interesting. The spell evokes the power of god through a saint, the use of something sweet that can be used to “catch” things, ie: honey, and a garment of the person, which hints at the significance and power in folk magic associated with physical objects used by a specific person. However, once all of the preparation is done, this spell depends on chance on how the candle flame affects the jar, which is similar to love; you can’t force it. It’s up to chance and depends on how the feelings of respective individuals develop.

Ancient Chinese Architecture Folk Belief

Nationality: Chinese
Age: 20
Occupation: Waitress
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/18/2012
Primary Language: English
Language: Mandarin

So basically, in Chinese – in ancient Chinese architecture, the roofs are – each tile is curved – and the roof is built in a jagged way, so that it’s uneven. And the point of that is to keep the demons from sitting on your house, because if your roof is slanted or flat, the demon will be comfortable there.

My informant also told me that many roofs today are still built with curves and slants. Even people who are really impoverished and live in shanty houses, will build their roofs with several pieces of tin or wood to make sure that there is still a slant. My informant said that when her family moved into an apartment complex, her mother believed that the “place was fucked” (as my informant put it) and that misfortune would befall those who lived there because the roofs were all flat. Buddhists believed that curved roofs would ward off evil spirits believed to manifest as straight lines. So the ideas of traditional Chinese architecture have been passed down and people still hold deep beliefs concerning them.

more information can be found here: http://library.thinkquest.org/10098/china1.htm

How Taoism Saved my Grandfather

Nationality: Chinese
Age: 20
Occupation: Waitress
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/18/2012
Primary Language: English
Language: Mandarin

So my dad’s grandfather, my great-grandfather, had three wives and they all lived in the same house – yeah, it was fucking messy. And then my grandfather, my dad’s father, was the favorite son, or so he says. And so they had this huge family – you know, cause it was three people’s families, basically, of like twenty kids. And they had like nannies, cause my dad’s side of the family made a lot of money in the timber industry. And so one day my grandfather got super super ill. It was gastrointestinal. And they didn’t know what to do with it. They tried herbal medicine they tried purging and bleeding. And so my grandfather’s mother, as a last resort went to see a Taoist practitioner. And she was like, “what should I do? My son is so so sick. And he’s about to be married off. Like we want to see him get married and start his own family.” So this Taoist drew a picture of this pentagram and then he told my great- grandmother, take this to this specific field on this day in the evening and burn it under the night sky. So she went out and did that and then apparently magically he was better after that. Cured him of his illness.

This is a family story that was passed down in my informant’s family. It attests to the luck and perseverance of a large family as well as to the power of magic. Life works in mysterious ways, so my informant’s grandfather “magically” being cured reveals his fortune. Also, his healing may be related to him being the favorite son within the context of Chinese culture.

Having the Sight: Being Born with a Veil

Nationality: Caribbean-American
Age: 50
Occupation: Attorney
Residence: Media, Pennsylvania
Performance Date: 4/7/2012
Primary Language: English
Language: basic Patois, Spanish, French, and German

Now this story is about people who are born with Sight: the ability to see things and perceive things. And it’s called being born with a veil or being born with, what you call it…a cowl. A cowl is a piece of skin, a piece of membrane in the birthing process that is sometimes covering the face of the baby. And it’s called a veil. Anyway, your grandmother, my mom, was born with one. My mom was born with a veil. At some points she said she could see different things…but after a while she lost it. Her last recollection of something happening was…she was in her house and she had a dream, it was more like a premonition. It was a dream about smoke and it was – she was dreaming it was at my sister’s house, right. So she woke up out the dream and immediately called my sister, you know. And what happened at that time was that my sister had fallen asleep and she had something on the fire and it was burning. There was smoke in her house, but my mom woke her up and she able to – it wasn’t a fire yet, but it was smoking, you know. So then she was able to turn it off and she said, “thank god,” because if my mom didn’t call her, the house would have really burned down. Actually, it was an apartment they were living in at the time. So that was the last incident she had recounted to me.

This is a folk belief held by my informant and many of my relatives on her side of the family. Honestly, I believe that people can have predictions and premonitions in dreams; I have heard of other people having them and I have had them myself. After telling me about the story of my grandmother having the premonition about smoke, my mother said that abilities like these are often passed down through families. She doesn’t have it and never did, but implied that it might skip generations. She views Sight as a gift, especially since it was able to save her sister by showing what could/would happen in the future instead of showing the tragedy at the time it was happening. She didn’t discuss why she thought my grandmother received and then lost the ability, but perhaps that is simply the nature of what we would call a supernatural gift.

Sana Sana Culito de Rana

Nationality: Latino
Age: 19
Occupation: student, officer worker in a shitty office
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/14/2012
Primary Language: English
Language: some Spanish
Sana sana, culito de rana
Si no sanas hoy,
Sanarás mañana

Translation:

Heal heal, little ass of frog
If it doesn’t heal today
It will heal tomorrow
 

This is a rhyme that parents, usually moms, will say to their kids when they get a little injury. My informant said that it’s like a mom kissing a boo-boo and that you can hear a lot of Latin mothers say this to their kids; he learned it from his. Sometimes there will be variations on it such as:

“sana, sana, culito de rana,
si no se te alivia ahora,
se te aliviará mañana”

Translation:
it heals, heals, little ass of frog,
if it is not alleviated to you now,
is alleviated to you tomorrow

Sometimes parents will change “ass” to “tail” or “bottom” for little boo-boos and keep it as “ass” for boo-boos that hurt a lot.