Goofer Dust

Goofer dust is a powder from hoodoo, the African American folk magic of the southern United States, made chiefly to do harm; its roots lie in traditional Kongo religion. The word goofer is traced to the Kikongo kufwa, 'to die', and older practitioners used it as a verb and a noun as well as before 'dust': to goofer someone was to put a spell on them, and as late as the 1930s goofering was, in some regions, simply another word for hoodooing. Euphemisms grew up around it, so that 'poisoning' or 'hurting' a person meant working on them with goofer rather than with any real poison. The name can cover any powder used in a spell, harmful ones above all, but more narrowly means a mixture of natural ingredients meant to bring trouble, illness or death to an enemy, and some of the interviews Harry M. Hyatt collected treat it as another name for graveyard dirt. Recipes differ, but graveyard dirt and snakeskin are the usual base, joined at times by ash, powdered sulphur, salt, powdered bone, dried manure, herbs, spices and the fine iron dust from round a blacksmith's anvil; the snakeskin reflects the West African Vodun reverence for snakes. Its victims were said to suffer swollen legs or blindness. More rarely it has served in coercive love spells and in gambling spells, and also for protection, as an enslaved conjurer named Dinky used it in the 1820s and 1830s.