When you look at the Instagram account of Bri Luna, who gave herself the playfully tongue-in-cheek moniker “the Hoodwitch,” nobody would fault you for assuming the stunningly curated imagery was realized by a professional artist or creative director. As Luna’s nickname implies, her Instagram is a shrine to all things witchy and supernatural: You see serpents, storms, planets, skulls, and fire, all rendered in a way that’s haunting and seductive. Yet the well-conceived, intoxicating feed — easily a best-in-class account an instructor could use as an example of how to do social media right — is all her.
“I’ve always loved cinematography,” says Luna, who grew up in Los Angeles. “I wanted to go to school for that, and I never did. I love color. I love symbolism — seeing the visual and creating a story or a scene or a memory, you know what I mean?”
The talent, in other words, was always there, so it’s no surprise her first career was in makeup and special effects for TV and film, followed by a stint as an aesthetician. Yet those paths were merely pit stops that would open another door to her current, highest-profile profession: a full-time witch. “You know how when you get massages or facials, you tend to open up?” she explains of her journey to becoming a conjure woman. “I had this connection with a lot of my clients, and I was starting to read tarot for them, which I’d already been doing since I was, like, a teenager, but mostly for friends. Okay. So, having these clients and doing that for them, that really opened up something else.”
Like her other passions and talents, Luna’s supernatural skill came organically. As she lays out in her new book, Blood Sex Magic: Everyday Magic for the Modern Mystic, which arrives on Halloween, she inherited her connection to and affinity with the otherworldly from both of her grandmothers — one Black and one Mexican, both practitioners of everyday magic that Luna in turn hopes readers can connect with too. Blood Sex Magic, Luna’s first book, merges her knack for visual storytelling — it’s packed with the same type of alluring, sexy, and slightly dangerous-feeling images as her IG — with personal stories, spells, and rituals meant to make readers awaken the witch within themselves. That, she believes, requires first shedding the misconceptions a lot of us have about magic and witches in the first place.
“The witchy world was predominantly white, very Eurocentric,” she says of her early days in what one might call the occult industry. But, Luna says, as she really leaned into the practices of her grandmothers and their ancestors, it became clearer to her that magic was literally already in her DNA. “I always just thought of my grandmother as being spiritual. I never really saw [their practices] as witchcraft because in Black culture, [that language] is considered demonic. But everyone’s granny, especially if you’re from the South, knows why you can’t let people you don’t know touch your [pregnant] belly, or like my grandmother would always tell me, ‘Don’t throw your hair in the trash can; don’t sit your purse on the floor.’ We have family that is from New Orleans, Texas, North Carolina. And they’re very much rooted in magic, hoodoo, conjure tradition.”
Indeed, Blood Sex Magic arrives at a point in culture when the mystic arts are not only becoming more accepted and mainstream but are also arguably more popular than traditional religious practices. Particularly among younger generations, adherence to formal religion and churchgoing continues to decline, according to studies, while, by contrast, one only need open their eyes or phone to see how astrology, use of crystals, belief in manifesting, and other New Age practices are more popular than ever. And for young Black people specifically, there’s a growing interest in and acceptance of hoodoo (not to be confused with voodoo), a distinctly African American tradition that enslaved people took part in that was rooted in African spirituality but adapted to their lives in the South. For Luna, magic and witchcraft are fundamentally about communing with ancestral spirits — thanking them, asking for guidance, summoning the power they handed us.
“The prayers of my grandmother are still protecting me,” she says. “I can sit at my altar, talk to my grandmother, and leave her offerings. She has flowers, coffee, candles. I tell her, ‘Thank you for opening the roads for me. Thank you for paving this path for me, and keeping me protected, and shielding me every single day on my journey. I’m doing this work to elevate your spirit and all of our honorable ancestors.’”
Much of what’s in Blood Sex Magic is reliable and practical. There is, for example, a spell for self-love (involving a candle, mirror, perfume, oil, and repeating an affirmation), as well as common-sense advice reframed from the view of harnessing your own power — a central witchcraft idea. “Every No,” one page reads, “is a spell cast to protect you from unnecessary bulls–t.” While other spells and rituals in Blood Sex Magic are a bit more advanced (there’s one for binding a lover using your underwear that’s best discovered on your own), all of them come from a place of owning your own power, intuition, and divine feminine energy. Indeed, another major theme running through the book explores how powerful women have always been persecuted, shunned, condemned, and deemed evil for carving their own path; after all, those enduring myths of witches being burned at the stake (even if the truth might’ve been altered over time) always seemed to make women the villains.
Luna hopes that all readers, and particularly people of color, will feel empowered by Blood Sex Magic. “Be always shamelessly and unapologetically yourself, practice connecting to your spirit, and just stand in your power,” she says. “That really is my biggest hope. Freedom and unapologetic empowerment.”
Blood Sex Magic: Everyday Magic for the Modern Mystic arrives on October 31.
Malcolm Venable is a Senior Staff Writer at Shondaland. Follow him on Twitter @malcolmvenable.
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