Book Review of Shadows: Hoodoo Cleansing and Protection Magic by Miss Aida

🔮🔮🔮🔮/5!

Magical tips and techniques for keeping negative people and harmful forces at bay so you can take control of your destiny and live your best life.

Does your house feel a little wonky? Is someone giving you the evil eye? Are you just having a run of bad luck or have you been cursed? Miss Aida answers all these questions and more.

In Hoodoo Cleansing and Protection Magic, Miss Aida offers sound, practical advice for all sorts of dicey situations, large and small. The book is filled with rituals, spells, and Miss Aida’s own personal magical formulas for removing negative energies, breaking malevolent spells, and banishing harmful people so that you can take control and live your best life.

A seasoned magical practitioner from an eclectic background, Miss Aida shares her own psychic and spiritual experiences in order to help you cleanse and protect your space, aura, and loved ones. Within these pages, you will learn how to:

Avoid and protect yourself from negative entities
Understand unpleasant, negative, and predatory people and take action against them
Break a cycle of bad luck
Distinguish reputable ghost hunters from frauds and amateurs
Recognize bewitched or possessed objects and remove their effects – Goodreads.com

I loved this book! Miss Aida’s knowledge and wisdom comes through in spades. It felt like taking a masterclass is hoodoo cleansing! It took me twice as long to read as I anticipated because it is just so extensive! If you’re looking to learn about authentic and traditional hoodoo from a legitimate (and non-white) practitioner, I can’t recommend this enough. Miss Aida comes from a cuban background and has Santeros and Paleros in her immediate family, as well as being catholic. The personal stories featuring these figures and traditions really brought the book to life. Here’s why I gave it 🔮🔮🔮🔮/5!

🔮 – I don’t think I realized quite how much information would be packed into this little book! Despite liking it a lot and reading it pretty straight, it took me very long to get through it. This book really has everything you could need to know about protection magic in the hoodoo tradition from taking care of your aura, how to know if you’ve been cursed, how to protect your home, and a bunch of methods for cleansing like baths and washes and incense. It’s really clear Miss Aida knows what she’s doing.

🔮 – This is something you can also feel in her voice or tone. This book is oozing wisdom and experience. Miss Aida’s voice is confident, no nonsense, and makes it clear she has the knowledge to back it up. It felt like taking a master class in hoodoo. She also made me laugh! When sharing other names for curses like hex and jinx she said “the younger generation calls this “throwing shade” and I laughed super loud.

🔮 – It’s real traditional hoodoo, but open to people of all faiths. Miss Aida practices hoodoo and Santeria the religion of he saints, and is a devout catholic. This really is classical hoodoo full of prayers, god, and the psalms. What’s great about this is that she actually includes the prayers and psalms in this book for those who are not Christian or catholic. She shares this traditional method and how it work for her, but mentions other religious paths that she admires several times in the book. She offers the traditional Christian prayers and psalms, but reminds you that if this doesn’t align with your values, to find something that does.

🔮 – My favourite parts of the book come when she shares personal stories, some of which center around her family, and some around magic clients she’s had over the years. These stories make a lot of the lessons learned in the book come to life. Everything in this book is useable and useful in your regular daily life and could easily be worked into a regular practice, like spiritually cleansing your home using common cleaning ingredients like ammonia and Pine Sol. Hoodoo is all about working with what you can get ahold of, and that really comes through in the book as she shares ways it’s influenced her over her whole life.

The reason I took off a crystal ball is, as usual, just a personal thing. Miss Aida is a nurse and actually serviced in the air force as a combat medic. This is awesome and her knowledge of connecting physical and spiritual health is really cool. But when she talks about the types of people or situations you may need to protect yourself from, she categorizes people as like, having narcissistic personality disorder or anti-social personality disorder. She talks about narcissists and sociopaths. I’m not crazy comfortable pathologizing badness or evil in that way. She does differentiate between socio and psycho path in a way that actually made sense though! Sociopathic behaviour is learned, while psychopathy is something you are born with, it’s the way your brain was made. So she concentrates on dealing with sociopaths, but I know now that personality disorders are almost ALWAYS born out of trauma. I don’t love using someone’s mental health as a justification for cursing. BUT If I was a medical professional I would no doubt think this way, it totally makes sense. In other places her knowledge as a nurse was really helpful and supportive, but in this instance I just felt uncomfortable.

All in all, this is a solid 4 out of 5 like I said. It’s such an interesting book full of a lot of information. SO MUCH INFORMATION! I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn protection magic for themselves, or if you just want to know more about traditional hoodoo from a legitimate source! Miss Aida is rad as hell. I’m reading Cursing and Crossing right now, the other book of hers mentioned in my first Baneful Bitchcraft episode, and I’m learning so much! I’ll definitely be collecting more of Miss Aida’s books in the future!