practicesSewing in

The gris-gris came out of the Muslim Mande communities of far West Africa: a small cloth pouch, inscribed with verses from an ancestor and holding a ritual number of small objects, worn on the person. The Atlantic slave trade carried it to the Americas, where it became a significant practice in Haitian Vodou and in the Louisiana tradition the cited account calls "Louisiana Voodoo", and where the earliest legal mentions of that Louisiana tradition are New Orleans court cases of 1773, in which enslaved people were convicted of using gris-gris against those who held them. A 1982 survey in Senegal found gris-gris among the three methods of contraception best known to women there, alongside abstinence and roots and herbs.

The Kongo-derived mojo bag took the same shape in the United States and then went into bedding. African American quilt makers sewed mojo hands into quilts for protection — a practice the sources trace to Central African peoples such as the Bakongo, who adapted nkisi practice into the 'Pineapple quilt', and which spread from Mississippi and Alabama to Connecticut.

Japan sewed the charm into a belt and then sewed things into the belt. A senninbari was stitched a thousand times, usually one stitch per woman; some were lined with a woman's hair, or several women's, a form of added protection the sources trace to folk belief on Okinawa, and coins were sewn in as well. Some senninbari were never worn at all: they were folded and placed inside helmet liners, pockets or packs.

The Islamic world put the writing on the garment itself. Talismanic shirts — tılsımlı gömlek in Turkish, pirâhan telesmat in Persian — are found across the Muslim world in Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal and West African types, the earliest surviving examples made in or near the fifteenth century, inscribed with Quranic verses, names of God and of prophets, and numbers. Most seem intended as a shield in battle. Hürrem Sultan gave one to Suleiman the Magnificent and told him its inscriptions would protect him from bullets.

Inference — sewing solves a problem the cord cannot. A pendant announces itself and can be taken off you; a stitched charm passes a search, survives a change of owner's rules, and travels in a garment that has an innocent reason to exist. The practice is heaviest exactly where carrying a charm openly was dangerous.

A pouch is cut, filled and stitched shut; a belt is embroidered and its lining closed over coins or hair; a quilt takes the charm between its layers; a shirt is written on before it is made up. In hoodoo practice the filled bag is then fixed and fed — smoked over incense or candles, breathed on, prayed over, and dressed with a liquid — which is a separate step this atlas files under feeding the charm.

Gris-gris are worn across Senegalese society, by, in the words of the cited account, everyone from wrestlers to soldiers to housewives. Conjure shops sell made-up mojo bags and the materials to make them; Dr Jim Jordan, a conjure doctor in North Carolina, ran a Hoodoo store and a paid practice through the Jim Crow era and became a multi-millionaire doing it. Senninbari stopped being made at scale with the end of the Second World War and are now a collectors' category, catalogued and sold.