11/24/2024
Hoodoo Bottle Trees captures Evil Spirits:
The Bakongo people, whose homeland is near the mouth of the Congo River, brought the tradition of bottle trees to the United States during the slave trade in the 17th century. According to tradition, legend has it that a malevolent spirit can be captured in the bottles during the night, and in the morning, the sunlight would destroy the spirit. African Americans use the tradition to protect their land or personal area by placing bottles on trees outside their homes, etc. Bottles are believed to capture spirits. A bottle can be used to capture a spirit and house it, or in the case of the bottle tree, negative spirits are caught in the bottle and destroyed in the morning by the sunlight, seeing as it's believed negative spirits like the dark.
Bottle trees are considered to be spirit catchers.
They can be made with living or nonliving trees. The bottles are either placed on the branches of the tree or hung with a string from the tree.
One could then if they choose to take further action, cork the bottles and dispose of them in a river to eliminate the evil spirits. In some cases, materials such as nails, foil (aka silver paper), stones, reflective objects, graveyard dirt, or bones are placed in the bottles. These things placed in the bottle are meant to attract wandering evil spirits so that the spirits can be destroyed the next day. Think of the bottle like a trap for evil spirits. The bottle tree works the same way as a bug catcher.
The mouths of the bottles are sometimes greased, or a substance is placed on the mouth of the bottle to also attract or draw in the spirit.
These trees were placed outside the home or near the home. They are also placed in gardens or fields to scare away thieves too. This is because thieves believed that if they entered the property where a bottle tree was, they would be cursed.
Disclaimer: The image used is a Metaverse generated Ai image. My post is tagged Ai info because I used their image generator to show what a bottle tree looks like if the bottles are hanging from a tree. I however, wrote the post. No, Ai tools was used to write this post.