Red Brick Dust

An old conjure standby, red brick dust is seriously old-school, greatly predating as a curio or preparation all the perfumed powders and oils with nice names.

It's got a variety of uses, turning up in protective workings and in "recipes" to attract paying customers (or just money more generally). Within Haitian vodou, it has been used sometimes, in some houses, to draw the veve of the "hot" Petro mysteres.

In the Creole kitchens of early New Orleans when many meals were cooked in huge cast iron pots over open fireplaces, new pots had to be seasoned in stages before they could be cooked in. Rubbing the inside down with red brick dust was one of the stages, right before it got a good greasing with lard. I don't actually have any idea why, but if you know, please message me!

As with talcum and cascarilla, it's probably originally a New World replacement for minerals traditionally used in magical work that could no longer be had so far from home in the diaspora. Rootwork is always responsive to and intertwined with the actual physical geography of the worker and the culture. Literally, the dirt under your feet matters. Not every spirit of every root and stone and bone lives just everywhere in the world all at once --but they may well have cousins that can take their place in a different locale!

• Small Corked Bottle: Glass vial shape/size may vary depending on my supplier, but the 20 ml vial holds a volume of just over half a fluid ounce (same amount as my 1/2 oz  oil bottles). By weight, it holds just under an ounce of red brick dust.

• Small Bag: 2x3 plastic zipper bag, contains ~ 1 ounce

LEGALESE: For external use only. Keep away from children. All items are sold as curios and/or for educational purposes in the study of folklore and popular religion. I use these items myself, though - I don't sell anything I haven't used myself - and repeat customers have sworn by my line of traditional formulas since I started selling them online in 2002. Nearly everything I carry is hand-made or hand-blended by me, from recipes I have learned or developed over the course of a lifetime spent around this work and 35 years of performing it myself.