The Raven Chronicles -- Part 3 of 5
There is something I kept in two separate rooms for most of my life.
In one room... the church. The Bible. The hymns I still hear in my sleep. The Holy Ghost moving through a congregation on a Sunday morning in a way that made the air feel different, heavier, charged with something real. My grandparent's faith like a wall you could lean against. My family woven into the fabric of that tradition so completely that leaving it behind was never really an option, not fully, not in the places where it mattered.
In the other room... everything else. The knowing that came before words. The way I could feel the energy of a space before I walked fully into it. The pull toward certain plants and roots and oils that nobody had to teach me because it felt less like learning and more like remembering. The understanding that there were layers to this world that Sunday school had not covered and were not going to.
For years those two rooms did not communicate. The door between them stayed closed. Not because I decided to close it, because the world around me had decided for me.
Nobody said out loud: your rootwork and your faith cannot coexist. They did not have to say it. It lived in the silence. In the careful way certain things were not discussed. In the slight shift in the room when the conversation got too close to the edge.
And so, I kept them separate. Kept the altar hidden. Kept the knowing quiet. Kept the two halves of my spiritual self from ever fully meeting.
Until I could not anymore.
WHAT THE CHURCH GAVE ME AND WHAT IT COULD NOT
I want to be precise here because I am not interested in tearing down what raised me.
The church gave me real things. It gave me a framework for understanding that this world is not all there is. It gave me the experience of genuine spiritual power moving through a room. I have felt the Holy Spirit in a way I cannot explain and do not need to. It gave me community, at least for a season. It gave me my grandparents' example of what it looks like to devote your life to something larger than yourself.
Those gifts are not small. I carry them.
But the church could not give me everything.
It could not give me language for the knowing I carried before I ever sat in a pew. It could not account for the women in my family line who moved through the world with a particular kind of power that had nothing to do with a denomination. It could not hold the full complexity of what I am spiritually without asking me to compress certain parts of it into something more acceptable.
And here is the thing about spiritual compression... it does not actually make the thing smaller. It just makes it harder to disguise. The root knowledge does not disappear because you stop talking about it. It waits. Patient and persistent, the way roots are.
It waited for me.
Have you ever felt spiritually split? Like you were carrying two truths that nobody around you had room for at the same time? I want to hear about it in the comments. This conversation matters.
THE WOMEN WHO CARRIED BOTH
I did not arrive at this reconciliation alone.
There were women before me who carried both. Who prayed on Sunday and worked their roots on Monday and did not see the contradiction because they were living too close to the truth to be confused by the theology.
These were not women who had abandoned their faith. These were women whose faith was large enough to hold more than one kind of knowing. Who understood at a cellular level that the God they worshipped had made the plants and the roots and the oils and the ancestral wisdom just as much as the scriptures. That the two streams came from the same source even if the institutions had decided otherwise.
My grandmother was a pastor. She was also a woman who knew things. Who could read a situation before it developed. Who had a particular relationship with prayer that looked, to anyone paying close enough attention, a lot like petition work. A lot like communication with something old and present and responsive.
She never called it that. But I watched her. And I understood.
That is how this knowledge passes. Not in classrooms. Not in books. In the watching. In the being near someone who carries it and absorbing what they do not say as much as what they do.
I am the next woman in that line. And I refuse to carry it quietly.
THE MOMENT THE DOOR OPENED
I cannot point to a single moment when the two rooms finally connected. It was more like a slow pressure that eventually became undeniable.
Part of it was nursing. When you spend years at bedsides, when you have held the hands of people in their darkest and most traumatic times, when you have witnessed the moment something leaves the body and the room changes in a way that no medical training accounts for, your relationship with the unseen becomes very difficult to compartmentalize. You either dismiss it entirely or you lean into it.
I leaned in.
Part of it was the breaking. The seasons I have written about in Parts 1 and 2 of this series; the rage, the shedding, the men who did not show up, the community that went quiet. When the external structures fall away, you are left with what is actually true about you. And what was actually true about me was that I had always been a rootworker. That was never separate from my faith. It was part of the same root system, reaching down into the same dark and fertile ground.
And part of it was simply exhaustion. The exhaustion of maintaining the separation. Of code-switching spiritually, the same way Black people code-switch professionally. Of being one thing in one room and another thing in another room and coming home to yourself at night completely drained from the performance.
I was tired of performing my spirituality for an audience that had not earned that version of me.
So, I stopped.
I set my altar. In plain view. With the Bible and the oils and the herbs and the candles all in the same space because that is what is true for me. I stopped apologizing for the fullness of what I carry. I stopped making it palatable for people who had no framework for it.
And something settled in me that has not unsettled since.
WHAT HOODOO ACTUALLY IS
I want to take a moment here for the people who found this blog and are not familiar with the tradition I practice. Because one of the things I have committed to with Rich Bitch Conjure is education. Not performance. Not mystification. Actual education rooted in respect for the tradition.
Hoodoo is not a religion. It is a spiritual folk practice with deep roots in African American history and culture, developed by enslaved Africans and their descendants who synthesized their African spiritual inheritance with the plants, roots, and land of the American South, and elements of European folk magic and Indigenous knowledge. It is practical. It is ancestral. It is one of the most distinctly American spiritual traditions that exists.
Hoodoo has always coexisted with Christianity in Black communities. The two were never actually at war. That tension was largely manufactured by institutions that had reasons to keep Black people from accessing their own spiritual power. Many of the most powerful rootworkers in history were also devout Christians. The Bible is itself a conjure text in the hoodoo tradition. Psalms are worked, scriptures are used on petition papers, prayer and root work operate side by side.
This is not a contradiction. This is the tradition.
When I say I am a rootworker by birthright, I mean that this knowledge came to me through my family line, through observation and inheritance, before I ever had formal training in it. I have deepened that knowledge through years of study and practice. But the root of it, if you will forgive the pun, was always there.
And it has always been compatible with my faith. Anyone who told you otherwise was working with incomplete information.
THE PERMISSION YOU ARE LOOKING FOR
I want to speak directly to someone reading this who is in the position I was in for a long time.
You were raised in the church. You love God or you love the tradition or you love the community even when it is complicated. And you also carry something else. Something older. A knowing that the church did not give you and cannot fully account for. Maybe it is an attraction to herbs and plants and oils. Maybe it is an ability to read energy that you have always had and never known what to do with. Maybe it is an ancestral connection that keeps pulling at you no matter how many times you try to put it in the other room.
You are not crazy. You are not in sin. You are not betraying your faith.
You are carrying the fullness of your spiritual inheritance. And you are allowed to claim all of it.
I am not here to tell you what your spiritual practice should look like. That is between you and God and your ancestors and whatever else is in that conversation. What I am here to tell you is that the split does not have to be permanent. The two rooms can have a door. You can open it.
The altar was always here. You just needed permission to see it.
THE RAVEN CHRONICLES: WHAT IS COMING NEXT
Here is the full series schedule leading to my birthday on May 2nd:
Part 1: April 14, She Did Not Turn Them to Stone (live now at richbitchconjure.com)
Part 2: April 19, The Snake Shed (live now at richbitchconjure.com)
Part 3: April 25, The Altar Was Always Here (you are here)
Part 4: April 28, What the Men Left Behind
Part 5: May 2, I'm the Birthday (Birthday Drop)
Part 4 drops April 28th. It is the one about the men. The ones who were supposed to show up. The gifts that came disguised as abandonment. That one required the most sitting with before I could write it.
Subscribe to my email list to receive it directly. You do not want to miss what is coming.
THE RAVEN OIL AND ANCESTRAL REVERENCE
Every product I create at Rich Bitch Conjure is made with this understanding embedded in it.
When I blend Raven Oil, I am not just combining herbs and carrier oils. I am working within a tradition. I am calling on the knowledge that was passed to me through the women in my family who carried it before me. I am setting intention that is spiritually grounded, ancestrally reverent, and practically purposeful.
Raven Oil is the product I return to again and again in this series because it is the product that most completely reflects who I am. Dark and layered and deeply purposeful. Made for the woman who is not afraid of her own depth. Who has made peace with the parts of herself that others found too much.
If you are in a season of spiritual reconciliation...
If you are working through the tension between the faith you were raised in and the knowing you have always carried...
Raven Oil is a grounding presence for that work. It is not a substitute for the inner work. It is a companion to it.
Find it at richbitchconjure.com.
CLOSING CALL TO ACTION
The altar was always here.
It was here before the church told you where to look. It was here while you were performing your spirituality for rooms that could not hold your full truth. It is here now, patient and waiting, exactly where you left it.
If any part of this series is landing for you...
If you are feeling something move in you as we get closer to May 2nd...
I want you to be in the room when the final piece drops.
Subscribe. Come back April 28th for Part 4.
And leave me a comment below: What are the two spiritual truths you have been keeping in separate rooms? What would it mean to finally let them meet?
I read every single one.
- Nurse Raven | Lady Di Founder, Rich Bitch Conjure, LLC