Hot Foot powder incense

Price range: $3.25 through $20.85

A self-lighting powder incense in the hoodoo Hot Foot tradition. It is burned to drive an unwanted person away, making them restless until they leave.

Hot Foot work is meant to make the ground too hot to stand on, so that a troublesome neighbour, tenant or rival simply has to keep moving.

Origin & Traditional Use

Hot Foot is one of the best-known ‘moving’ formulas of Southern conjure. Its classic form is a powder laid in a person’s footprints or path, traditionally built on hot pepper and sulphur. This incense version carries the same purpose in smoke, burned while the target’s name is worked so they become restless and go.

Uses by Tradition

Hoodoo & Rootwork

Moving work: burn over a petition with the person’s name written backwards, then send the ash away from your home.
Footprint work: smoke a little of the dirt from their footprint and throw it into running water.
Unwanted guests: burn in a room after they have left so they do not want to return.

Demonology & Black Magick

Cursing: burned against an enemy’s name to make them unsettled, unlucky in staying put and unable to rest.
Combined with a black candle to drive someone not only away but into trouble on the road.

A Simple Working

Write the person’s name backwards on a slip of brown paper.
Sprinkle it with black pepper and fold it away from you.
Pour a small cone of the powder into a heat-proof bowl and light it.
Hold the paper in the smoke and tell the person plainly to go and not come back.
Burn the paper in the bowl from the cone’s embers or a black candle.
Take the ash far from your home and throw it in running water, then walk away without looking back.

Pairs Well With

Hot Foot powder: to lay in the person’s path.
A black chime candle: for banishing and driving away.
Black pepper: for bite on the petition.
Sulphur: a traditional companion in driving-away work.

Lore & History

Foot-track magick, laying powders where someone walks so they pick them up through the feet, is among the most widely documented practices in African American conjure. Harry Middleton Hyatt’s huge collection of interviews from the 1930s, ‘Hoodoo—Conjuration—Witchcraft—Rootwork’, records many Hot Foot methods.