Vestapol, you asked,"Do we want to preserve the folkway and therefore celebrate...tolerate or ignore...the individual moralities of all practitioners? Or do we want to professionalize Hoodoo and have a Code of Ethics to which all practitioners subscribe?"
I dunno. I'm not doing either of those things and i do not feel any need to engage in bivalent thinking of the kind you propose, nor do i feel moved toward any kind of either/or decision-making in this situation.
1. Rather than "celebrate, tolerate, or ignore the individual moralities of all practitioners" in the tradition in which i work, I am teaching everything that was taught to me, regardless of anyone's moral system. Furthermore, in discussing a morality system in hoodoo, i always make it clear that there is no monolithic "African American system of morality," although most African Americans are Christians.
2. I keep my morality to myself unless asked, but i respond freely when questions are broached to me about my personal beliefs. For instance, i am very clear in explaining that i tend to abide by the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule. I also have made it clear that i have performed death spells according to the principles known in hoodoo as ""justified work," that is, by presenting my case against a wrong-doer before God and asking Him and Him alone to decide the outcome, according to His own standards of Mercy and Justice.
3. I am very clear and outspoken about the fact that i personally won't perform certain types of activities that used to be commonplace (and in some cases still are commonplace) in the folk-magic and folk-religions of Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Specifically, the acts i personally will not perform include (a) trafficking in endangered plant or animal species; (b) torturing animals to death for the purposes of sympathetic magic; and (c) killing animals to acquire their "power" or "life force" either for my own use or to offer this "power" or "life force" to a deity or an ancestor. I even go farther than not performing such acts myself -- i speak freely about why i won't, and i encourage others to examine their own hearts in respect to the performance of such acts.
For me -- and, again, i am speaking only for myself here -- embarking upon this path and plan of teaching my students was the result of decisions i made 15 - 20 years ago, and i have been writing about hoodoo under those terms since 1995; it's nothing new.
As for a professional organization -- like i said before, we've had professional organizations in the hoodoo Spiritualist community since the 1920s. The Crystal Silence League, a magically-oriented Spiritualist prayer chain to which i also belong, was founded in 1919.
One organization of hoodoo practitioners of which i am currently a member -- the Association of Independent Readers and Rootworkers -- first got off the ground in 2007 (6 years ago) and went online with a web site of 100 pages in 2009 (4 years ago). The other organization to which i belong, Hoodoo Psychics, was originated in 2011 (2 years ago). Both of these are relatively new, but they require members to abide by codes of ethics and codes of conduct that are similar to other groups of older vintage.
In fact, in developing the Code of Ethics and Code of Conduct for AIRR, our team researched similar ethical codes that had been published by Spiritualist mediums, hypnotherapists, astrologers, numerologists, and other practitioners of divination and magic during the 1940s, and we incorporated several of these older ideas into our own final Code of Ethics and Code of Conduct. You can read it online:
AIRR Code of Ethics and Code of Conduct
http://www.readersandrootworkers.org/wi ... _of_Ethics
We also publish a seed-document for potential clients, describing questions they can ask their readers and rootworkers:
Questions to Ask Your Reader, Rootworker, or Conjure Doctor
http://www.readersandrootworkers.org/wi ... ure_Doctor
We offer ideas for sample contracts to be drawn up between clients and rootworkers for cases in which significant fees may be involved:
Contract
http://www.readersandrootworkers.org/wiki/Contract
And, finally, we offer free Ombudsman services to mediate complaints between clients and rootworkers (as well as between members of the organization):
Ombudsman Terms of Service
http://www.readersandrootworkers.org/wi ... of_Service
I hope this is of interest to you -- and to others.
reading about the professional Association (AIRR), it's pretty clear professionalism is the goal. So ethics is on the table and, even if it's a stretch, it will be good to see how we help the spiritual folkways incorporate some formalities of professionalism and religion. It doesn't have to be either-or.
What if somebody does something horrible to you and you'd like justice, but the reason said person treated you that way was because another party had cursed you to have trouble, misunderstandings, and bad things happen to you? So,... if you did work to reverse, would both people get hit? For example: if "Person A" put a curse on you last year to be treated badly by people you encounter, and that was the reason WHY "Person B" just yelled at you and threw you out of their place while falsely accusing you of something in front of lots of people ... which person, "A" or "B" would be hit by a reversal spell?
