Open Roads incense sticks

How to Use It

Hoodoo & Rootwork

• Clearing the way: burn a stick at the front door on a Monday morning, with the door open, saying where you want the road to lead.
• Before applications: pass your résumé, contract or application through the smoke before sending it.
• Paired with a key: smoke an old key and carry it in your pocket as a sign that the way is open.

Santería & Lucumí

• Elegua’s work: opening roads belongs to Elegua, so devotees often light this incense at his shrine behind the door with a little candy or rum and ask him to open the path.
• Crossroads: burn a stick at a crossroads and leave three coins as payment for passage.

A Simple Working

• On a Monday morning, set an orange chime candle in a holder by your front door.
• Write the road you want opened in a single sentence on a slip of paper.
• Light the candle and one stick of Open Roads incense.
• Open the door wide and pass the paper through the smoke, reading it aloud.
• Fold the paper around an old key.
• Let the candle burn out, then carry the key and paper until the road opens.

Pairs Well With

• Abre camino herb: the Cuban road-opener plant, for baths and floor washes.
• Road Opener oil: to dress candles and doorframes.
• Orange chime candle: for new opportunities and movement.
• Skeleton key: a carried sign of the open door.

What You Receive

Open Roads stick incense, a box of 6 packs with 20 sticks in each (120 sticks).

Origin & Lore

Open Roads (Abre Camino) is a modern formula incense drawn from a practice shared by hoodoo and Latin American botánica traditions: clearing blockages before asking for anything else. Road opening is worked at the start of a job search, a move, a business or a new relationship, or whenever plans keep stalling for no clear reason.

In Cuba there is a wild shrub whose very name is a spell: abre camino, the road opener. Its leaves, like this incense, are used when every door seems locked and every path blocked.

Abre camino is the Cuban name for a shrubby plant in the aster family (Koanophyllon villosum, formerly Eupatorium villosum). Lydia Cabrera’s El Monte (1954), the classic record of Afro-Cuban plant lore, lists it among the herbs used to clear a person’s path. Its name gave the road-opening formulas of the botánica their Spanish label.