SPIRITUAL SUPPLIES: Deborah Halstead, the owner and manager of Ebbo Products Inc., sells candles, herbs and other products from the business she has operated for the past 16 years at 1331 Madison Ave. -- PHOTO BY TOM WILEMON

The display windows at Ebbo Products Inc. showcase an exotic mixture of ethnographic art and religious icons.

This is the place for herbs, candles, incense and other products related to spiritual practices and faiths from six continents. Its owner, Deborah Halstead, has sold these products from the store at 1331 Madison Ave. for the past 16 years.

She said the location near the medical district is the perfect place for her business.

“No matter where you go within a radius of a mile, you could probably come across any walk of life,” Halstead said. “Actually, our first customer was a Baptist minister and he still comes in once a week to get his candle.”

All walks

The store sells to Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, Wiccans, Voodooists and others. It gets its name from a Yoruban word. The Yoruba people are from Nigeria.

“Basically, Ebbo means gift or offering to that which is higher than yourself,” Halstead said.

The name was chosen in tribute to a woman who adopted her into the Yoruba tribe as her child.

Halstead was raised Baptist, married Catholic and educated religious eclectic. She has masters’ degrees in urban anthropology and archaeology. A faculty member at the Memphis College of Art, she teaches world mythologies, cultural anthropology and anthropology of art.

Halstead and her employees respect their customers and their beliefs.

“Everybody is in a dark room,” she said. “We’re all looking for a light. Some people feel along the wall. Some people feel along the floor. Some people just walk straight through and they turn the light on. Does it really matter how you get there?

“To me, speaking as an anthropologist, no one has the right to judge other people and their approach to religion or spirituality because that is based on their own cultural beliefs.”

Halstead and a former business partner got the idea to open a spiritual supply store in Memphis while visiting New Orleans. The owner of F&F Botanica showed them a thick stack of orders from Memphis and suggested they open the business.

They started out with a booth at the fairgrounds, then grew into the Madison Avenue location. Halstead bought out her partner 11 years ago.

“I don’t think I’m wrong for saying this, in the city we have the largest collection of herbs, oils, candles and incense,” she said. “We’re noted for that. We sell some of the more unusual things.”

Shelves of jars contain John the Conqueror root, balm of Gilead, angelica root, sandalwood, rose of Jericho, hyssop and lotus root.

But candles are the biggest sellers. Last week, for example, the store received a shipment of 255 cases of candles. The four employees were unpacking boxes everywhere throughout the 1,188 square feet of the store.

“That order usually lasts six to eight weeks,” Halstead said.

There are two basic lines of candles: saints and brands. Some have depictions of St. Dymphna, St. Mary or St. Joseph that can be lit for prayer. Others are brand candles that can be lit for luck with gambling or love.

Help when can

Ebbo is a business, not a spiritual home. However, the employees do have knowledge about the products they sell.

“I don’t claim, and none of us claim, to be experts in any one particular field,” Halstead said. “We always tell people if we have knowledge we’ll be happy to share it with you. A lot of times people will come in and ask, ‘What can you tell me about this?’ or ‘What can you tell me about that?’ I’ll usually respond, and like I said, most of us will say the same thing.”

Her son, Kevin Holowchik, works alongside her in the business, and two other employees have been at the store for more than five years. Halstead doesn’t have to do a lot of marketing.

“We’re word of mouth,” she said. “I’m very selective about how we advertise. We’re just kind of that hole in the wall. Unless you know what you’re looking for, you’re not going to find it. We kind of like it that way. We’re not looking for tourists. I think if we were looking for tourists, we would be on Beale Street.”

This is the type of business where the employees have the opportunity to work with people from different cultures. Ebbo sells products to Indians who worship at the Hindu temple in Eads. In recent years, the store’s sales to Latino customers have been growing. The candles sold have both English and Spanish inscriptions.

“You never know who is going to walk through the door on any given day,” Halstead said. “You get to explore the beauty of life through someone else’s eyes. I consider myself very fortunate and very blessed in that area because not everyone loves their job.”