Time
As Reed famously says in his novel, time isn't a river: it's a pendulum. What he means by this is that linear, chronological conceptions of time, especially in the rendering of history and fiction, are not effective or accurate in conveying what things are really like. There are dialogues between eras, a return to and a return of the past in the present.
Neo-HooDoo
Christianity—represented as, more or less, Atonism—is aggressive, affiliated with colonizers, racists, and oppressors throughout history. It has a singular worldview and is intent on establishing hierarchies. By contrast, Jonathan Lewis states, "Neo-HooDoo is...a liberating poetics": there are multiple gods and spirits, and its practice eschews domination, hegemony, and empiricism.
Racial Issues
The novel makes the case that racism against Black people began not with the slave trade, but even before that. The novelist writes of Africa as a victim of European aggression, and in the novel's depiction of 1920s America, that hasn't really changed. The novel also features the oppression of Afro-centric religions at the hands of monotheists.
The Danger of a Single Idea
One of the reasons Hinckle likes Woodrow Wilson Jefferson for his Black perspective is that he has a singular, totalizing focus guiding him—in his case, it's Marxism (similarly, in Hamid's case it's Black Nationalism—and any single, monolithic worldview or ideology is a danger. Instead, Reed eschews hierarchy, hegemony, and monotheism/monoculture. He is suspicious of "truth" and "unity," preferring to remain open to multiplicity and heterogeneity. As W. Lawrence Hogue writes, Reed's "Voodoo is defined as a very undogmatic system, adaptable to new ideas, new truths, new forms and methods. It is an infinite system."
The Detective Novel
Mumbo Jumbo is ostensibly a detective novel, and many of the elements of the genre are present here, but Reed undermines this by suggesting that a process of detection does not have to utilize ratiocination, be fully rational or objective, or have a teleological conclusion. There is not really one "truth" to uncover, the end does not offer the closure one would expect, and the detectives do not behave as the genre would dictate they ought to.
Limits of Rationality
Reed suggests that the West's focus on rationality is limiting at the very least and even dangerous. In PaPa LaBas and Black Herman's quest to find Jes Grew, they rely on "knockings" (dreams, intuition), the occult, a Haitian revolutionary and his obeah man, chance phrases and guesses, and more—all of which reject empiricism. The men do succeed in most of what they want to accomplish, but not through an adherence to Western ratiocination.
The Textual and the Visual
Reed tells his story not just through words but also through images, populating his novel with photographs and drawings. This suggests an outside narrator who is compiling the document that is Mumbo Jumbo (a metanarrative paralleled by Jes Grew). It also, as Keren Omry writes, "requires of readers an entirely new way of reading. To gain the full effect of the technique, readers must resist the temptation to ignore these pictures or reduce them to a loose verbal translation." Both forms of "reading" are necessary.
