Well.....I wasn't entire sure so I ask my mentor and this is what she said
Hello Sedna,
Goofer Dust is a very old African-American hoodoo curio used to trouble, harm, or kill an enemy. In particular, it can cause the victim's legs to swell up and medical doctors will not be able to effect a cure.
Recipes for making it vary, but it is almost always a mixture of simple natural ingredients, usually including Graveyard Dirt, powdered sulphur (which can give it a yellowish colour) and salt.
Subsidiary ingredients may include
powdered snake heads or snake skin "sheds"
red pepper
black pepper
powdered bones
powdered insects or snails
and greyish
powdery-surfaced herbs such as mullein and sage.
In the past, some formulas for Goofer Dust included anvil dust, the fine black iron detritus found around a blacksmith's anvil. A modern substitute for this now-uncommon ingredient would be magnetic sand, which is also black in colour.
A continuum of shared and overlapping ingredients links Graveyard Dirt to Goofer Dust, and thence to Hot Foot Powder and Crossing Powder -- but of all of them, only Goofer Dust is said to contain both Graveyard Dirt and snake skin.
Goofer Dust spells -- like similar tricks involving Graveyard Dirt, Hot Foot Powder, and Crossing Powder -- are quite African in character, deriving from African foot-track magic, a form of sorcery in which one hurts or poisons a victim through the feet Undoing the jinx may involve ritual bathing, floor washing, or sweeping to remove the Goofer Dust. Sprinkling salt in the corners of the house is also an antidote.
Although in Memphis a locally popular method to use Goofer Dust is to put it an unwanted lover's mattress to "hurt" him, the most common way to employ it, as described in both the catalogue and the song lyric above, is to sprinkle it around the enemy's home where it will be stepped on and rise up through the foot to poison the legs. Alternatively, it can be placed in the victim's sock or shoe when he or she is not looking.
If this is not possible, it can be mixed it with the enemy's footprint dirt and the resultant mixture corked up in a bottle to stop the victim in his tracks or bring on an unnatural illness, buried in a graveyard to kill him, or thrown into a crossroads to drive him out of town. While it is theoretically possible to sprinkle goofer dust into food that will be eaten by the victm, this is actually not a common way to deploy it because the ingredients -- which may include dirt, sulphur, and red pepper -- would be noticable to the palate.
Occasionally Goofer Dust is placed inside a protective mojo bag or wound inside a jack ball as part of a coercive love spell, but these are fairly uncommon usages. Most of the time the intent is more sinister, and the application is external.
When a victim is goofered, a number of things can happen. The victim may start having bad luck, lose his or her job, suffer from sexual impotence or mental confusion, or develop a chronic disease such as tuberculosis, diabetes, angina, gout, or high blood pressure.
Of all of these problems, the relationship between goofering and diabetes is the clearest and most direct: the symptoms of poisoning through the feet are identical with those of diabetic edema and diabetic neuropathy.
One of the first signs of leg-centered or classic goofering is a sharp pain in the feet or legs. This is followed by swelling and an inability to walk. A really severe case of poisoning will leave the victim crawling around on all fours and howling like a dog. Medical doctors may provide palliative relief, but they can't really help a person who has been goofered. Unless the victim is cured by a root doctor, death may result.
As Robert Farris Thomson indicates in his works on Congo folk-magic, the word goofer comes from the Kikongo word kufwa which means to die.
Among older hoodoo practitioners, this derivation is very clear, because there "goofer" is not only an adjective modifying dust but also a verb (He goofered that man) and a noun (She put a goofer on him) . As late as the 1930s, goofering was a regional synonym for hoodooing, and in North Carolina at least, the meaning of the term was broadened beyond spells of damage, illness, and death to include love spells cast with dominating intent.
Meanwhile, in New Orleans, the specificity of Goofer Dust's connection to graveyard dirt was lost and the term became a general name for any sachet powder used to cast a harmful spell.
A euphemistic word for goofering is poisoning which in this context does not refer to a physical poison but to a physical agent that, through magical means, brings about an unnatural illness or the death of the victim. Even more euphemistic is the special use of the verb hurt which in my youth was often defined as to poison with the tacit understanding that to poison really meant to goofer The more general verbs fix (meaning to prepare a spell) and trick (meaning to cast a spell) are also applied to goofering.
