There’s always magic brewing at Absolem’s House of Voodoo in the East End. The only dedicated Voodoo shop in Houston, it’s stocked full of spiritual oils, candles, herbs, stones, roots, powders, dolls, charms, and many a mojo bag—everything one could possibly need for some Voodoo-centric spell work.

Housed in a two-story home on Polk across the street from a Kroger, the space has a decidedly homey vibe, due in no small part to the fact that owner Absolem Yetzirah, a local “conjure doctor” and Voodoo practitioner, and his family live in a portion of its upper level. On any given day, you’re just as likely to see Yetzirah casually lounging with his wife on the shop’s front porch as you are to see him behind the register.

During a recent visit, however, Yetzirah was all business as he was putting the finishing touches on a spell for a heartsick young client from his perch on the porch. “This is a return-to-me spell,” he says as he tightly screws a lid onto a jar containing a mélange of magical ingredients. “A girl left him, and he wants her back.”

So, what’s in the jar? Well, a whole lot of Voodoo. There are pieces of hair from the client as well as his former lover. There’s a picture of them together, as well as individual portraits. There’s also a handwritten petition from the client saying exactly what he wants to happen, which, in this case, is a reunification. All of that is suspended in the jar in a rose milk bath with a few additional magical accoutrements.

After screwing the jar’s lid on, Yetzirah makes his way to the front room of his shop and shuffles over to a large altar dedicated to legendary New Orleans Voodoo priestess Marie Laveau. A statue of Laveau sits atop the multilevel altar, which takes up most of the shop’s right wall, its other shelves overflowing with relics and offerings—think perfumes, candles, jewelry, and libations. An antique mirror from Laveau’s estate is in the mix (a gift from local metaphysical store Thorn & Moon Apothecary) as well as several taxidermized alligator heads with cigars propped up in their mouths that are meant to represent Papa Gator, a spirit Laveau is said to ride as her main means of transportation in the afterlife. Below the altar, there’s a chest that Yetzirah says contains a portion of the famous Voodoo queen’s grave.

After gingerly placing the jar on the lowest level of the altar, Yetzirah tops it with three candles—one black, one red, and one purple—that are meant to achieve different magical goals. He then douses the candles with drops of an oil designed for reconciliation before finally setting them all ablaze. “When you look at the science of it, heat activates a lot of things,” he says. When the heat from the candles causes the lid of the jar to pop, Yetzirah says he’ll know the spell is nice and ripe.

Since opening his shop in 2016, Yetzirah has developed a steady list of clients who come to him in the hope that his spell work can help solve a variety of personal problems, from broken hearts and the return of a lover to child custody agreements and other legal woes. For Yetzirah, helping people is a family tradition. His grandmother was a curandera—a traditional healer—and his family has always practiced herbalism. “My grandmother healed a lot of people with medicinal herbs and did a lot of spiritual healing for people and blessings,” he says. “That was the tradition she was involved in and that we were raised with.”

On his other side, his grandfather was Sephardic. Yetzirah says he was raised Jewish and identified as Jewish growing up but that his spirituality was always curanderismo. “A lot of people call it brujeria—witchcraft,” he says. “Every culture has that older generation that mixes the religion that dominated in the area due to colonialism with their traditional folk magic, the medicine systems of those places. I think that’s what made me feel comfortable coming into Voodoo because it has the same dynamic.”

Yetzirah’s journey into Voodoo started while he was working as an herbalist at the Magick Cauldron, a metaphysical store in Montrose. When he explained some recurring dreams he was having to a mentor there, she told him it sounded like a Voodoo spirit was trying to contact him, and that he should reach out to a Voodoo priestess she knew in New Orleans. Yetzirah visited the city in 2009 and connected with the priestess, Miriam Chamani, the cofounder of the Voodoo Spiritual Temple in New Orleans. By 2011, she had initiated him into the religion.

“To be initiated into Voodoo means that you have put in the work to show the individual who is going to initiate you that you’re serious about it. The second part of the initiation is to say that you’re there and you’re dedicated and ready to learn,” Yetzirah says. “The next step is that you find a society or a family to adopt you to their way. Every society practices differently. It’s like how every Italian family cooks their spaghetti differently.”

One day, while working at the Magick Cauldron, he was approached by someone from a local radio station about being the host of a new metaphysical radio show, Bayou City Conjure. The show needed a sponsor to get it off the ground. Not being able to find one, Yetzirah decided to start his shop so he could sponsor the show himself. “I was already making all of these oils and stuff like that,” he says. “I originally was selling everything online and didn’t want to have a storefront. I just wanted to be a manufacturer, but it started to grow. We went from having only four oils to over 200.”

Yetzirah’s East End shop is stocked full of these oils today. Half of them are his own personal creations, and the other half are crafted from recipes that have been passed down for hundreds of years. In Voodoo, there are thousands of already existing recipes for them, but each manufacturer puts their own unique twist on them, and each oil is said to have its own unique spiritual properties and can be used in spell work or for religious purposes. “What makes a recipe unique to each creator are the parts involved. If a recipe calls for sandalwood, cedar, and patchouli, the formulator must put the parts in and make it their own. We’ll use those already known recipes that have been passed down but make our own measurements so we come up with a unique scent and blend,” Yetzirah says.

While the oils are a big reason why people come to his shop, Absolem’s also has a steady supply of candles that have been dressed and blessed in house by Yetzirah and his family. When dressing his candles, instead of placing the herbs inside, Yetzirah dips the tops of the glass candle holders into wax before dipping them into herbal mixtures, almost like how a bartender dresses a michelada. It’s a practice he learned from his grandmother. “Our candles are half-Houston, half–New Orleans,” he says. They’re a top seller and can be found on the shelves of several other metaphysical shops around town.

While many come to Absolem’s House of Voodoo to simply stock up on candles, oils, and the like, there are plenty of other people, like the spurned lover responsible for the jar spell, who come for more intimate reasons, reasons that sometimes have more sinister goals than simply the return of a lost lover. Yetzirah says that he’s gotten some pretty wild requests through the years, but that he always cautions clients to think seriously about the consequences of the intended goal of a spell and how they could be affected by it. While Yetzirah says there are some clear boundaries he will never cross, such as harming a child, he will honor most spell requests.

“When you hire someone for spell work in this way, the spell caster is simply the person who knows how to formulate and how to do things,” he says. “What’s going on between the client and the third party has nothing to do with me. I’m just the attorney.”