Dead cats and chicken blood? Poppets stuck with pins? Hexes, baby killing, and all that other sick stuff people imaginatively associate with Satanic orgies? It’s all in a day’s work in New Orleans.
Anyone who has visited the Crescent City recalls dozens of tourist shops selling voodoo dolls straight from China, and all manner of strange roots and herbs and bizarre candles and salts and sprays. You may have picked up some lotion or potion or gris-gris bag as a souvenir, or you may have found the weird ritual objects eerie and frightening. Either way, most of us dismiss voodoo and have no idea that it’s a complex and fascinating religion. We’re still afraid of black people.
And we’re SUPPOSED to be afraid of voodoo. Not because it’s devil worship, but because it’s the only defense the African slaves had when they were herded like cattle onto ships and unloaded in the Caribbean and American South. Vodoun, or Dahomey, is a powerful religion practiced to this day in West Africa and beyond, and more macabre strains of the ancient faith steeped into the new world, in forms called Santeria, Voodoo, or Obeah. Here, practitioners used curses and hexes as scare tactics to protect what little they could of their heritage, to express anger at their slavery, to protest rape and child abduction and slavery. Like any religion, voodoo could be mean and vindictive and retaliatory. Old Testament-style animal sacrifices feel repugnant to some of us, and the ’superstitious’ ceremonies from Africa feel bizarre. Indeed, some of the more unusual traditional beliefs are damaging- we may have read in the newspaper how harmful primitive beliefs are: a virgin should cure AIDS, or an outsider has cast a malicious spell and caused diseases or hunger. Is this how ancient cultures make peace with modern problems? Is this so much different from early Euramericans thinking women should be drowned to protect farms from blight?
For the most part, the faith in the new world was also peaceful. Though there is one God in vodoun, there are many loa, or ancestral spirits, usually regional. These spirits provide intercession with God, and the frenzied dances and rites that terrify the unimaginative, lily-livered puritans provided hope of the homeland in times of extreme despair. The drum, long reviled by the God squad, represented the heartbeat, the pulse of life.
The curses and hexes and zombie making and any Satanic-sounding tidbits were manufactured to keep the master out of the slave girls’ beds. It’s interesting to note that the ubiquitous voodoo doll is not of voodoo origin at all; despite its popularity in souvenir sales, the poppet’s place was in white European witchcraft. And though the sale of spells and fortunes has given vodoun’s legitimacy a bad name, making it into parlour entertainment at best and greedy deception at worst, it was only because slaves and their descendants had no means to earn money that began to sell mojos to white people.
Built up of thousands of unusual rituals and ceremonies, making colourful use of trinkets and candles and ‘patron saints’ of a geographic region or a theme in life, vodoun was surprisingly similar to Catholicism. The old ways merged seamlessly with the new prayers and saints. It’s difficult for contemporary theologians, so removed from religions that preceded ours, to reconcile the pagan roots of Christianity. Those roots are black and white, and evident in every Christian custom and ritual, especially the holidays.
Because slaves who practiced their born religions faced death or torture, they often professed complete conversion to Catholicism and simply practiced their rituals privately at appropriate intervals, or cloaked with the Church’s rites. Many were legitimately Christian, seeing no discrepancy between their traditional customs and the new ones. They viewed the faith of their African ancestry as a doorway to the Christian mysteries. They loved Biblical stories and parables, complementing their vast oral histoire of myths, legends, and parables.
New Orleans’s most famous and powerful voodoo priestess, Marie LaVeau was a devout Christian. She was lauded in obituaries as a saint for her lifelong and tireless devotion to the sick and the poor. The known facts about her life are difficult to extricate from the legends and lore of her devotees and enemies. Thousands visit her gravesite today and leave small trinkets in exchange for spiritual favours or good luck. Many saw Marie continue her ritual work long after her death, but this uncanny occurrence was easy to explain: Marie passed her gifts to her daughter Marie, who markedly resembled her mother.
Marie 1 was born in 1801- this date was up in the air, and many accounts say 1784- but Ina Fandrich, a religious history scholar at the Louisiana State University finally found Marie’s missing birth record in 2001. Her birth was not unusual for the time- she was the bastard child of a plantation owner, Charles LaVeau who knocked up his Haitian-descent slave girl. Marie was an unusually beautiful girl with Haitian and native blood from her mother and white from her father, and though little is known about her childhood, she was a free woman of colour, or ‘half-breed.’ Plucky and resourceful, she learned to cut and style hair and began working for herself as a teenager. She was a good listener in addition to a good hairdresser, and a sensible businesswoman. She allegedly wore her own hair beautifully, a constant advertisement of her services.
It is not known from whom she learned the art of voodoo, but it must have been her mom or other relatives, as Haitians at the time (and now) were faithful to their traditional rituals. Smart and insightful and compassionate, Marie was sympathetic to the stories of her hair clients, and as more and more began asking her advice on love, fidelity, money, and other affairs, she saw an opportunity to exchange her gifts instead of giving them away for free. She began selling custom-made spells and charms and advice to her white clients, though she always worked her mojo free of charge for blacks and the poor. Sometimes all that was asked of her was prayer, and from an early age, she devoted much time to visiting prisoners, just like Christ commanded in the book of Matthew. She would provide prayer, solace, advice and companionship free of charge, and she did this into old age.
Though skeptics discredit her intuition, saying she used spies and her own conversational genius to dig information up about each client, only to later astonish them with her clairvoyance, this type of thinking shows a complete lack of understanding of real magic. For the heart of magic is empathy, despite the fact that shoddy psychics and performers have convoluted its essence. Spiritual healing is about more than guessing how many kids or lovers a person will have. It’s about helping people gain confidence and trust in themselves, find spiritual comfort, and seek the truth they need about a situation. To most practitioners of symbolic arts, it’s more about harnessing the power of the spirit to overcome obstacles, to ritualize your needs, and find comfort. If Marie was a good listener and used this skill wisely in her spell work or fortunes, this only attests to her intelligence, not to her fraudulence. She did not claim to be what she was not- she merely sold what was asked of her to those who could afford it, and gave it lovingly to those who could not.
Of course, Marie is infamous, as voodoo is in general, for lascivious sex dances in the city and surrounding bayous. Though ‘negro gatherings’ were illegal, she charmed the police by letting their wives attend. Though so-called orgiastic rites were blamed on the heathen souls of Africa, many voodooists saw nudity or sexuality as sacred gifts. In contrast, the South’s mixing of blood to form the mulatto, quadroon, and octoroon caste systems of old New Orleans happened largely because of rape. A slave, after all, is a man’s property, but the babies that resulted from his lust were not his concern.
Many sympathetic and supportive whites joined in the voodoo rituals: perhaps as many as thirty percent of practitioners in that day were white. Many women were in disagreement with their husbands’ use of black women as chattel, unfaithful to their wives, yet denigrating the black women who they sought out for lust. Forming an alliance through voodoo bonded the women in strange faith.
Whatever unusual cavortings really took place under the moon is impossible to know. Regardless of the festive gatherings, Marie’s one-on-one work was booming, and she was seldom wrong about the outcomes of court proceedings, dalliances, parental heritages, and other standard questions of a priestess. Skeptics say she could hoodoo any court case not by the herbs she mixed in a jar, but by the information she knew about a judge and could bribe him with. Again, a real priestess knows the herbs are symbolic and it is the mind, not the mumbo jumbo that works the spirit. Powerful potions are inert unless blessed and believed, because all ‘primitive’ magic is sympathetic magic. This is not just true in voodoo, but even in plain old wholesome Baptist faith. Is taking a shower the same as the ritual of baptism? No, yet they are the same act. Intent always changes an action into a rite.
Marie continued her successful hair salon, spell sales, and ministry to prisoners and the poor. She encouraged all of her clients to attend mass and take ownership for their misdeeds. There are rumours that she also entertained white men at orgies and that she killed babies, but holy women are often accused of such things, especially if they are sexually active. It is possible she was a midwife or directed midwife abortion services to black girls who had been raped into pregnancy by rich white men, like her mother. There is little evidence to show this rumour to be true. Yet, this role was an unfortunate necessity for some skilled voodooiennes at a particularly tragic time in history.
Some of Marie’s shadier reputation was linked to voodoo Doctor John, who told others he gladly sold whatever he could to the gullible, and acknowledged his work as ‘humbuggery.’ I would argue there are many faithless today who puppet their religion, and many who make a living deceiving others in some way, and still more who make a living selling useless crap. Who could judge a man with no earning options for work as a snake oil salesman? Perhaps the roots of advertising today are in voodoo?
Marie did marry early on, a fellow named Paris, before she was twenty, but just as quickly she was either abandoned or widowed. She went on to a long-term common-law relationship with another, Christophe Glapion, with whom she reportedly had fifteen children. Other reports say six. She definitely had a daughter named Marie the second, who carried on her work with gris-gris, juju, candles and charms. Whether this Marie was gifted also, or just able to carry on in the name of her legendary mother is not certain.
Marie was a brilliant businesswoman, and some of the rumours about white men and orgies may be explained by other rumours- that she ran a brothel, selling mixed girls to rich men of any colour. (In the strange society of the day, a woman whose features were full yet ‘passed’ as white fetched incredibly high prices as a wife or whore, and was considered the most beautiful. To have just ‘a drop’ of black blood was the height of exoticism. From mulatto on down to octoroon- one-eighth black- these exotic mixes were desirable. Anne Rice popularized this history in her book The Feast of All Saints.) She may well have run a brothel. Brothels were not rare in New Orleans, and they have not been rare anywhere in the world, at any time in history. While a brother may be depraved, there was often a kind of safety and solidarity instead- rather than the man taking what he wanted for free, and leaving the girl sick, sad, broken, injured, raped, or pregnant, a brothel could ensure that willing women, or women with few choices, could have a better experience of man’s lust, by being paid and cared for and protected, with access to medical care. Whether Marie was in charge of such an establishment cannot be known for sure, but in many ways, Marie stood for all women of this complicated era- sister, soother, mother, saint, priestess, whore.
Of course I do not underestimate the dark side, but it is not a satin ribbon on a chicken foot, or a picture of the devil that can scare me: it is the darkness in the human heart. Voodoo was a form of faith that was twisted by captivity, torture and rape into something darker than its origin. Our perceptions are completely skewed by racism, and evasive of the hideous crimes in our own faith’s heritage. The accusations of baby killing, devil-fucking, and orgiastic rituals of which voodoo is accused or interpreted are reminiscent of another witch-hunt back in Europe, where women were tortured with iron claws, their breasts torn and their bodies raped by steel because terrified white men accused them of ‘cavorting with the devil’ or of “monstrous desires.” If a wise woman mixed up a few herbs into tea to ease a neighbour’s childbearing pains, she was burned at the stake for succubus humping.
I will not put into softer terms the kind of degradation and ridiculous sex obsession of these men in power. If my words sound sick, it is because they reflect the sickness of their philosophers, and I will not cover up those crimes. The same spiritual terror they had of women’s sexuality in the middle ages also fuels the racism from which we inherited our perceptions of voodoo, and of Marie, and of black people, and their customs at the time. It’s difficult to remove that sick lens and see the narrative clearly. Even the educated among us will quickly mock as strange a scene from a New Guinea initiation ceremony or some unusual body tattooing in Africa. And yet the absolute creativity of rape and torture and devil-obsession or superstition that is a legacy of the European heritages is somehow irrelevant.
Indeed, the accounts we have left of the voodooienne are ironically convoluted by superstitious bias- and racist and sexist bias, making the sparse facts difficult to interpret clearly. And most of them are written a century later, including Robert Tallant’s 1956 novel, the Voodoo Queen. It’s quite a riveting read, but starts out on that left foot: “Marie LaVeau was the last great American witch.” By the second paragraph, whispers of her consort with Satan in the form of snakes and goats already make their appearance.
Jewell Parker Rhodes, a professor of American literature, has devoted most of her writing career to Marie LaVeau. Voodoo Dreams and the sequels that follow the 1993 novel are works of fiction, but Rhodes scholarship and historical and racial sensitivity provide both a fascinating and a sensitive treatment. Remarkably, the works aren’t too sentimental as my work here might be- Rhodes acknowledges that Marie was only human after all, driven to both good and bad as we all can be.
Marie died in her cottage on St. Ann Street in 1881, at the age of 80, though her death certificate stated 98 years! She was beloved and not reviled by the Church, who gave her last Catholic rites without hesitation.
The Daily Picayune reportedly lavished her with affection in the obituary: All in all Marie LaVeau was a wonderful woman. Doing good for the sake of doing good alone, she obtained no reward, oft times meeting with prejudice and loathing. She was nevertheless contented and did not lag I her work. She always had the cause of the people at heart and was with them in everything.”
Lorette C. Luzajic is the girl at www.thegirlcanwrite.net. Writer, artist, editor- her various art creations are everywhere. You may also enjoy her feature food stories and spice column at Gremolata.com. Visit her site for biography, client testimonials, links, or to hire her for your next writing project. Please order her amazing poetry collection, The Astronaut’s Wife.
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