the spirit who opens the way, guards the crossroads, and teaches wisdom.

European tales of, by, and about European musicians, dancers, and others who see
k physical dexterity selling themselves to the Devil are legion, frequent, and c
ommonplace
In hoodoo practice, after one completes a "job of work" or magical ritual, the m
ost neutral way to dispose of remnants such as left-over candle wax, incense ash
es, footprint-dirt, or ritual bath water is to carry everything to the crossroad
s, throw it into the intersection, turn and walk home without looking back. (Alt
ernative methods for the disposal of ritual items include throwing them into run
ning water for get away or moving spells, taking them to a graveyard for hard-co
re enemy work, or burying them in one's yard for drawing influences toward one.)
If a job such as a Follow Me Boy Spell is worked to link two people, then the tr
ick may be laid at every crossroads between the home of the practitioner and lov
er's home, that is, each crossroads will be marked with ritual artifacts to ceme
nt the bond and draw the desired one closer. Contrariwise, in at least one form
of Hot Foot or Drive Away Spell, ritual items are thrown into a series of crossr
oads leaving town, to push the hated person out of town and to act as guards aga
inst his or her return. Also, there is a version of the Crossing Spell in which
Graveyard Dirt is buried at a crossroads.
Not all hoodoo rituals take place at an actual crossroads, but when laying trick
s or casting magical spells, many practitioners make use of what can be called a
"portable crossroads" or circle with a cross inside, known as an "X" or "crossmark," generally. The cross-mark may br drawn on the ground or on a personal alt
ar with sachet powders or it may be created quite subtly, with a mere five dots
rather than with two crossing lines. In the latter case, the dots go at the four
points where the crossing lines would touch the circumference of an imagined ci
rcle and at the intersection or center-point of the circle. When drawn this way,
the pattern is not called a cross-mark but a "five-spot." Although folklorists
tend to call the pattern a "quincunx" and some anthropologists use the term "cos
mogram," in actual conversations with real practitioners, you will hear them spo
ken of like this: "You lay down your salt in the four corners and in the center,
like the five-spot on dice" or "Sprinkle your powders in the form of a cross-ma
rk inside a circle" or "They'd lay out powders by the door -- a big old X-mark - to trick you.
The crossroads is the most popular place to perform a specific hoodoo crossroads
ritual to learn a skill -- to play a musical instrument, for instance, or to be
come proficient at throwing dice, dancing, public speaking, or whatever one choo
ses. As this ritual is usually described, you bring the item you wish to master
-- your banjo, guitar, fiddle, deck of cards, or dice -- and wait at the crossro
ads on three or nine specified nights or mornings. On your successive visits you
may witness the mysterious appearances of a series of animals. On your last vis
it, a " big black man" will arrive. If you are not afraid and do not run away, h
e will ask to borrow the item you wish to learn. He will show you the proper way
to use the item by using it himself. When he returns it to you, you will sudden
ly have the gift of greatness.
The man who meets people at the crossroads and teaches them skills is sometimes
called "the devil" He is also called "the rider," the "li'l ole funny boy" or "t
he big black man," black in this case meaning the actual colour, not a brown-ski
nned ("coloured" or Negro) person. Because he shares qualities with and derives
from a number of African crossroads spirits (of whom Legba, Ellegua, Elegbara, E
shu, Nbumba Nzila, and Pomba Gira are some African and African-diaspora names),
it is a common scholarly conceit to equate the crossroads "devil" with Legba, bu
t that is utterly unheard of in the oral folk tradition.

This African-derived crossroads ritual is one of the most widely distributed bel
iefs in African-American folklore and is practiced throughout the South. It is t
he subject of the rest of this essay.
The specific idea that rural blues musicians "made pacts" with "the devil" for e
arthly good fortune is an oft-repeated misunderstanding of the crossroads ritual
. Some Christian blacks of the early 20th century themselves confused the issue
by calling the entity one meets in the ritual "the devil," but i have found no e
vidence that they ever called him "Satan" or "made pacts" with him in the mediev
al European sorcery tradition exemplified by the Faust legend. Furthermore, as w
ill be seen below from several examples, the crossroads deity did not grant good
fortune, wealth, or power, as the European-American Christian devil is believed
to do. He was a teacher of manual dexterity and mental wisdom.
When African-Americans born in the 19th or early 20th century told interviewers
that they or anyone they knew had "sold their soul to the devil at the crossroad
s," they did NOT intend to convey thereby that the person in question was an evi
l, hell-bound anti-Christian. The confusion arises in the eyes of white interpre
ters who don't understand that the crossroads deity is a survival from polytheis
tic African religions and that he has been assigned the only name he can be give
n in a monotheistic religion.
The traditional colours assigned to the African crossroads spirit are red and bl
ack, and the spirit himself is given offerings of alcohol and sacrificed animals
, so it is easy to see why Christian slaves and their masters conflated him with
"the devil" (e.g. Satan, the "Adversary" to the monotheistic god in the Jewish,
Christian, and Islamic religions). However, the crossroads spirit is not Satan.
Nor is he evil, harmful, deceptive, or cruel in the sense that the Judeo-Christ
ian devil is. He is a revered spiritual entity from a polytheistic religious sys
tem. No "black arts" in the medieval European sense are needed to call upon him
or gain his favour. He is a teacher and guide, the opener of the way.
{Re: the "things" that "will come 'fore yo'" in the above entry. Hyatt collected
many, many accounts of the crossroads ritual in which it was said that on each
successive visit to the crossroads (at midnight or dawn, depending on the inform
ant), a different black animal appears and on the last midnight (or sunrise) the
"devil" or "big black man" appears and fulfills the request. Each account gives
a variant list of animals, but most commonly mentioned are a black chicken, a b
lack bull, and a black dog. Other animals named are a snake, a bear, a lion, a c
at, a lamb, a cow, a sheep, and a horse. One informant in Snow Hill, Maryland (e
ntry 355), carefully specifies that all the animals will be male (a drake, not a
duck; a rooster, not a hen; "wouldn't be no females"). In a couple of accounts,
some of the black animals are replaced by black weather conditions -- a smoke,
a rain, a thundering. These stories are simply too long for me to transcribe her
e, but the ritual given above, although it does not name or describe the "things
" that will come before the postulant, is obviously part of the "black animals a
t the crossroads" series.}
Not all hoodoo rituals take place at an actual crossroads, but when laying trick
s or casting magical spells, many practitioners make use of what can be called a
"portable crossroads" or circle with a cross inside, known as an "X" or "crossmark," generally. The cross-mark may br drawn on the ground or on a personal alt
ar with sachet powders or it may be created quite subtly, with a mere five dots
rather than with two crossing lines. In the latter case, the dots go at the four
points where the crossing lines would touch the circumference of an imagined ci
rcle and at the intersection or center-point of the circle. When drawn this way,
the pattern is not called a cross-mark but a "five-spot." Although folklorists
tend to call the pattern a "quincunx" and some anthropologists use the term "cos
mogram," in actual conversations with real practitioners, you will hear them spo
ken of like this: "You lay down your salt in the four corners and in the center,

like the five-spot on dice" or "Sprinkle your powders in the form of a cross-ma
rk inside a circle" or "They'd lay out powders by the door -- a big old X-mark - to trick you.
The crossroads ritual is currently best known in popular American culture throug
h the recent acceptance of a spurious legend that the famous 1930s blues singer
Robert Johnson claimed that he had learned how to play guitar by selling his sou
l to the devil at the crossroads, somewhere in Mississippi. In truth, the blues
singer who publicly made this claim was Robert's rather less-well-known contempo
rary and friend Tommy Johnson, not related to Robert. Tommy Johnson is remembere
d for his classic recording of "Maggie Campbell Blues." LeDell Johnson, Tommy Jo
hnson's brother, spoke with the blues scholar David Evans about Tommy's sudden g
uitar playing skill and Tommy's claims about it. His account of the ritual is ty
pical of others collected throughout the South. Note that LeDell did not say tha
t Tommy Johnson called the crossroads spirit "the devil" and he did not mention
selling his soul.
"If you want to learn how to make songs yourself, you take your guitar and you g
o to where the road crosses that way, where a crossroads is. Get there, be sure
to get there just a little 'fore 12 that night so you know you'll be there. You
have your guitar and be playing a piece there by yourself...A big black man will
walk up there and take your guitar and he'll tune it. And then he'll play a pie
ce and hand it back to you. That's the way I learned to play anything I want."
from "Tommy Johnson" by David Evans (London: Studio Vista, 1971)
In fact, these stories seem to be prescriptions for a way to contact a specific,
helpful spirit -- and the specificity of the crossroads spirit's power is quite
apparent: He is a TEACHER spirit who will accelerate one's mastery of mental, m
anual, and performing arts. The man at the crossroads does not steal your soul o
r condemn you to perdition or make any unholy bargain with you. He takes your of
fering and then he teaches by example and transference of power.
A gibbet is any instrument of public execution (including guillotine, executione
r's block, impalement stake, hanging gallows, or related scaffold), but gibbetin
g refers to the use of a gallows-type structure from which the dead or dying bod
ies of executed criminals were hung on public display to deter other existing or
potential criminals. The structures were therefore often placed next to public
highways (frequently at crossroads) and waterways. In earlier times, up to the l
ate 17th century, live gibbeting also took place, in which the condemned was pla
ced alive in a metal cage and left to die of thirst.
In the holy grove at Upsala men and animals were sacrificed by being hanged upo
n the sacred trees. The human victims dedicated to Odin were regularly put to de
ath by hanging or by a combination of hanging and stabbing, the man being strung
up to a tree or a gallows and then wounded with a spear. Hence Odin was called
the Lord of the Gallows or the God of the Hanged, and he is represented sitting
under a gallows tree. -Sir James George Frazer (1854 1941). The Golden Bough. 19
22.
Havamal, Stanza 137
I know that I hung on a windy tree
nine long nights,
wounded with a spear, dedicated to Odin,
myself to myself,
on that tree of which no man knows
from where its roots run.

In the stanza that follows, Odin describes how he had no food nor drink there, t
hat he peered downward, and that "I took up the runes, screaming I took them, th
en I fell back from there."
The crossroads are literally where different roads meet and where they separate,
where opportunity emerges to change directions. They are unpredictable; you cou
ld take any one of a variety of choices. Magically speaking a crossroads is the
place where multiple forces converge, where anything can happen, where transform
ations may occur. Energy is liberated and expanded at the crossroads. Instead of
hopping over boundaries, you can stand in the center and be inundated by power,
potential and choices.
Once upon a time, crossroads were where people met, where nomads rendezvoused, w
here gallows stood, where the death penalty was enacted and corpses left to hang
, where suicides were buried.
Crossroads are ubiquitous in magic. Many spells demand to be cast at the crossro
ads, others require that the remnants of spells - left over candle stubs, ahses
and the such - be buried at the crossroads where their energy can safely dispers
e.
Specific types of spiritual entities, known as "road-openers" and inevitably bei
ngs of great power preside over crossroads. These beings can be petitioned for k
nowledge, information and for a change in destiny. They control thresholds and r
oads and determine who has free access and who finds roads barred, who will choo
se the right fork in the road and who will wander hopelessly lost forever.
In the Aegean/Mediterranean region crossroads were sacred to Hecate, Triformis,
and Diana. Ovid, an ancient Roman writer, speaks of Hecate as having three faces
with which to guard the crossroads as they branched out. Verro, another ancient
writer, equated Diana with Hecate and stated the images of Diana were stationed
at the crossroads. Other writers of the period called this goddess Artemis-Heka
te, and attributed the mother goddess aspect to her.
The crossroads are likewise associated with the ancestral spirits called Lasa or
Lares. These beings were originally thought to be spirits of the forests and me
adows, the fairy folk, and spirits of Nature. With development these spirits bec
ame associated with the cultivated fields, and eventually the Lara became protec
tors of the family and home, and associated with the hearth.
Also, in the archaic Roman religion small towers were constructed at crossroads,
and an altar was placed before them upon which offerings were laid. Such towers
were associated with Nature spirit worship and demarcation.
Ceremonies of death were largely the concern of women in ancient Greece. Women p
redominate in artistic and literary representations of mourning and the laying o
ut of bodies; laws were passed governing their actions and influences of funeral
s. House sweepings and offerings were made to Hecate at crossroads at the Dark M
oon after a 30-day mourning period.
In the second half of the fifth century, there is in Greek literature a side of
Hecate that is both frightening and new. She is associated with restless spirits
and phantasms that attack by their own volition or under the command of spitefu
l foes with purification ceremonies involving the killing of dogs and with offer
s left at crossroads at every Dark Moon. In situations such as these Hecate is k
nown as Hecate Chthonia.
In many parts of the world, they feel that the crossroads are supernatural place
s....places to work magick and to encounter spirits of all kinds. In later liter
ature, Hecate is associated with crossroads and most particularly three-way inte

rsections. Sacrificial meals are commonly left out at crossroads for Hecate, esp
ecially during the three days about the Dark Moon. These are sometimes called H
ekates deipna (Hecate s banquets.) Offerings are to solicit Her aid in protection
against the other spirits. Many felt that restless spirits walk the earth during
the Dark of the Moon. Neglecting to make offerings to Hecate is therefore dange
rous not because she might attack, but because She is the one who stands between
you and the dangerous spirits. Because of Hecate s association with crossroads, s
he is called Hecate Enodia (in the road.)
Hecate is honored on November 30, the night of Hecate Trivia, the night of the c
rossroads.
Hecate also came to be associated with ghosts, infernal spirits, the dead and so
rcery. Like the totems of Hermes herms placed at borders as a ward against danger im
ages of Hecate (like Artemis and Diana, often referred to as a "liminal" goddess
) were also placed at the gates of cities, and eventually domestic doorways. Ove
r time, the association with keeping out evil spirits could have led to the beli
ef that if offended, Hecate could also allow the evil spirits in. According to o
ne view, this accounts for invocations to Hecate as the supreme governess of the
borders between the normal world and the spirit world, and hence as one with ma
stery over spirits of the dead.
The modern understanding of Hecate has been strongly influenced by syncretic Hel
lenistic interpretations. Many of the attributes she was assigned in this period
appear to have an older basis. For example, in the magical papyri of Ptolemaic
Egypt, she is called the 'she-dog' or 'bitch', and her presence is signified by
the barking of dogs. In late imagery she also has two ghostly dogs as servants b
y her side. The frog, significantly a creature that can cross between two elemen
ts, also is sacred to Hecate
According to Ruickbie (2004, p. 19) the Greeks observed two days sacred to Hecat
e, one on the 13th of August and one on the 30th of November, whilst the Romans
observed the 29th of every month as her sacred day.