celebrating october 26 full moon, the crossroads moon (open practice)
and october 31 man of the crossroads day (closed practice)
as part of the living Black archive we are reclaiming our relationship to the energies of the moon, and so each month we will reveal the next living Black archive moon and we start here with crossroads moon. and each is connected with a major arcana card that you can add as a reward to the oracle deck we released earlier this month.
read all the way to the end to learn how to receive the interdependence arcana card as a reward!
the sun is setting.
you arrive at the crossroads,
a threshold place of possibility
and discernment.
it’s time to make a decision.
every direction ahead of you
changes your relationship
with other people,
the land,
those who came before you,
and those who will live out their future
according to your choice.
Fannie Lou Hamer teaches that freedom needs
material conditions undergirding it:
land, food, housing
shared resources
the ability to organize
the ability to determine more
of our own lives.
Freedom Farm Cooperative brought
this question to the crossroads:
how can we transform the knowledge,
labor, and land that have been used
to extract from Black people
and turn it all toward sustaining Black life?
neither the question nor the answer
is located in the individual.
Freedom Farm grew food, shared tools,
raised livestock, created housing, and
organized resources so that freedom
could be lived together.
this is interdependence.
learning to make choices with an awareness
of the relationships that hold us
and the lives our choices affect.
on october 31st, the final day of Hoodoo Heritage Month,
we meet at the crossroads.
you arrive only knowing where you’ve been.
but you don’t know everything yet about where you are going.
*this is a closed practice for practitioners of hoodoo / Black people who share this cultural heritage
the crossroads has been oversimplified into a metaphor for having a choice to make.
it’s a liminal place and a portal where paths, worlds, relationships, and possibilities meet.
across African and Black diasporic
spiritual traditions, the crossroads
carries different names, figures,
practices, and meanings.
in Yorùbá religion and Ifá,
Èṣù is associated with crossroads,
communication, exchange, consequence,
and movement between realms.
in Kongo cosmology, the Dikenga
is a circle crossed by the Kalunga line,
the water that divides the world of the living
from the world of the ancestors.
it traces the path of the sun and the soul
through conception, birth, fullness, and death,
and around again.
in Haitian Vodou, Papa Legba opens the gate
and makes communication with the spirits possible.
hoodoo carries its own crossroads traditions,
including the Man at the Crossroads.
these traditions are related through long histories,
and they are not interchangeable.
colonial Christianity taught generations
of people to fear African spiritual figures
whose power did not fit neatly
inside Christian categories.
and the crossroads became dangerous.
spirits became devils.
the Man of the Crossroads became a more sinister kind of trickster
but trickster is different from the evil many of us were taught
he can unsettle certainty,
reveal consequence, redirect power,
and make another route visible.
he can offer gifts on our behalf to remove barriers.
at the crossroads, offerings and relationships hold sway.
you never arrive in isolation asking some invisible force
to make your decisions for you.
you arrive carrying relationships
with land, spirit, ancestors,
community, and the living world.
in the teachings we have received,
divination doesn’t require surrendering your agency.
you make your own decisions with the blessings of your ancestors and guides
and you heed their warnings.
but their guidance does not relieve us of responsibility.
in Ifá, orí means both the physical head
and the spiritual dimension of one's personhood and destiny.
to move in alignment with your orí
does not mean that your path belongs only to you.
you arrive through other people and you bring your ancestors with you.
your choices enter into relationships already in motion.
this is why we call october’s moon the crossroads moon.
as the leaves fall and the season moves towards darkness,
we practice orientation between interdependence, agency, and responsibility.
we reflect on where we are, what brought us here, what we bring with us
and how relationships will be changed by the direction we choose
this month, we have been celebrating Hoodoo Heritage Month
through the living Black archive
we practice this heritage because knowledge survives
in more places than books:
in bodies and plants
stories and songs
ritual, food, land
all that our people learned to do
when survival required another way
we made a way
tonight, practice the crossroads
bring a decision you are already making.
stay with it and ask
what do i need to know?
what obstacles should i prepare for?
what relationships does this choice invite me to tend?
then listen to your own knowing.
to the land around you and to the histories that made this moment possible.
listen to the people your decision will touch.
if ancestor relationship is part of your practice, listen there too.
we honor the man at the crossroads
we move toward the unfamiliarity of the future
we do this without abandoning relationship.
we choose with our own power
and we re-member that we aren’t traveling alone.
asé Man of the Crossroads Day.
asé Hoodoo Heritage Month.
asé Crossroads Moon.
receive the interdependence card
to receive the interdependence card spend meaningful time learning from Fannie Lou Hamer and the Black freedom-farming traditions she helped build. reading this post is a great start! we also recommend: Until Everybody’s Free: Fannie Lou Hamer Immersion.
tell us what you learned. share publicly and tag SUSU, or use our form to send a reflection, photo, screenshot, or other trace of your learning. once you submit your practice, we’ll send instructions for receiving interdependence, major arcana 4. learn more on the card’s page in the botanica (and the price is reduced to $0 when you complete the activity associated with the card.
please consider selecting “show my support by making this a recurring donation.”