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Voodoo / Voudou / Santeria In The U.S. Of A.

MrRING

MrRING

Android Futureman
Joined
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Who was Marie Laveau?

I've heard of her for so many years, but I've not really understood - why, of all the voodou practitioners in the world, is Marie Laveau the most well known? Anybody got any theories?

I've found a few interesting sites:

http://www.artsci.lsu.edu/phil/faculty/payne/Projects/LaRel/EDick/MLaveau01.html

http://www.voodooonthebayou.net/marie_laveau.html

and the second gives a few clues as to her fame. This article stresses her charitable work:

Besides being very beautiful Marie also was very wise. She was skillful in the practice of medicine and was acquainted with the valuable healing qualities of indigenous herbs.

She was very successful as a nurse, wonderful stories being told of her exploits at the sick bed. In yellow fever and cholera epidemics she was always called upon to nurse the sick, and always responded promptly. Her skill and knowledge earned her the friendship and approbation, of those sufficiently cultivated, but the ignorant attributed her success to unnatural means and held her in constant dread.

(snip)

Those in trouble had but to come to her and she would make their cause her own after undergoing great sacrifices in order to assist them.

(snip)

Besides being charitable, Marie was also very pious and took delight in strengthening the allegiance of souls to the church. She would sit with the condemned in their last moments and endeavor to turn their last thoughts to Jesus. Whenever a prisoner excited her pity Marie would labor incessantly to obtain his pardon, or at least a commutation of sentence, and she generally succeeded.

but this one is condensending but ties her to voodou:

She was a peculiar character, and one which essentially belongs to an era of Louisiana long since passed away. That remarkable woman died at the advanced age of ninety-eight years, and it is curious that her demise should have happened within a few days of the "eve of good St. John," which is the anniversary of the Voudous, and which has been commemorated by the sect under her regency, for the last forty years, on the twenty-fourth of June of each year. When the next celebration comes, the Voudous will have no queen and on the eve of St. John Marie Lavaux will be voudouing with the ghosts of the past and her charms and incantations, will be of no avail. For she had love charms that brought lovers together and fearful drugs that sundered loving souls. Among her people her incantations, fetiches and charms were supposed to be without fail, and thousands crowded around her to obtain relief, fortune or revenge. How they were satisfied is neither here nor there, but they believed in the dark superstition, and faith covered all the faults and lies that made her a sorceress and a queen. With Marie Lavaux dies the last of these old Creole characters that had almost risen in New Orleans up to the standard illustrations.
 
I'm not sure why they don't make dolls and stick pins in them - or is that kind of thing wehre the problem strts? ;)

Posted on Tue, Feb. 24, 2004


Suit: TV show demeans voodoo

An advocacy group for African religions contends that the Sci Fi Channel series degrades the religion.

By Joseph A. Slobodzian

Inquirer Staff Writer



A Philadelphia-based advocacy group for African religions yesterday sued Universal Studios and producers for cable's Sci Fi Channel, contending that a forthcoming "reality series" demeans and misrepresents the voodoo religion.

The federal lawsuit filed by the National African Religion Congress Inc. against Universal Studios Inc., USA Cable Entertainment, and House of Eleven Productions seeks a court order requiring the producers of Mad Mad House to change their advertising and programming.

"People already have negative feelings about this religion without a program like this exacerbating things," said George Ware, president of the five-year-old congress. The congress claims 4,500 members representing such religions as Akan, the Orisa Tradition of Trinidad and Tobago, Ifa, Santeria-Yoruba, voodoo, Candomble and Lucumi, including 500 in the tristate Philadelphia area.

In promotions in print and on cable, Sci Fi describes Mad Mad House, premiering March 4, as a reality series in which "10 everyday people" move into a house run by "five genuine practitioners of alternative lifestyles."

The "Alts" - a vampire, Wiccan, naturist, voodoo priestess and modern primitive - put their 10 guests through "tolerance testing activities," one promotion says, and then vote weekly to decide who is banished and who ultimately wins a 0,000 prize.

The lawsuit contends that the program's voodoo priestess, Iya Ta'Shia Asanti, is actually a priestess of "Yemoja in the Ifa tradition," a faith of the Yoruba people of Africa.

Asanti does not dress as a voodoo priestess, the lawsuit continues, and a commercial showing participants being placed into a pit and covered with animal parts and entrails does not represent voodoo or Ifa.

A spokesman for producers Arthur Smith and Kent Weed in Los Angeles referred questions to Universal's offices for the Sci Fi Channel in New York. Kat Stein, a senior vice president for communications, said she could not comment on the suit before consulting with the channel's lawyers.

The lawsuit contends that producers reached an agreement with Asanti only after Gro Mambo Angela Novanyon, a recognized Haitian voodoo high priestess in Philadelphia who founded the congress, refused to participate in Mad Mad House.

The lawsuit asks for a federal judge to require the producers of Mad Mad House to properly identify Asanti as an Ifa, not a voodoo, priestess and prohibit them from "airing any episode... that falsely portrays any practice of African-based religions."
Click to expand...

http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/local/8024245.htm
 
I've seen commercials for Mad Mad House - they show the "voodoo" queen forcing her housemates to bathe in animal parts. I'm not a practitioner of African religion, but I'm quite well read on the subject and at no point does a bathtub full of pig entrails enter the picture. It is the equivalent of making a "reality" show about Jews in which they spend the entire episode looking for Christian babies to roast.
 
While I'm not entirely against religions per se, this sounds to me like another case of someone trying to get huge amounts of loot ... er ... compensation by bringing facetious court cases to the medias attention.
 
OK this came up over in Play Dead's thread on her book:
http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=16262

And it basically touches on the fact that while she uses the Caribbean-style zombies in her book there isn't very much evidence at all for that parctice making it to the States which is a bit odd and I felt worthy of a thread itself as vodou did make it over. This article by Joe Nickell:

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2843/is_1_26/ai_80924578/

suggests that at least in New Orleans vodou was rather superficial and used for a front for various other criminal activities. I know Play Dead has done quite a bit of research into various vodou practices in the States so I'd be interested to hear what she has to say about what goes on in other areas of the South.

If Nickell is right then it might be that we are seeing somehing like the Founder Effect in biology/palaeontology where the charactersitics of the small founding group may result in a slightly different group to the larger population it came from.

I'm also interested in what it says on the Wikipedia - that there is a law about zombies in New Orleans:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie

There is one in Haiti (as mentioned in the relevant thread below) but that was new to me.

Anyway the history of vodou in the US is interesting - if this page is to be believed:

http://studentweb.tulane.edu/~ltubbs/nohistory.html

the early (1600s) saw the arrival of vodou from Africa as well as Martinique, Guadeloupe, and St. Domingo (now Haiti) into Lousianna where it was more accepted under French rule. It was only in the late 1700s that the Haitian Revolution forced more pracitioners to resettle in New Orleans where it grew and spread in popularity.

This site:

http://www.neworleansvoodoocrossroads.com/historyandvoodoo.html

gives a slightly different history suggesting that vodou developed in the early 1700s and that vodou practionrs made it to New Orleans in the early 1800s from Haiti via Cuba.

This:

http://www.prairieghosts.com/laveau.html

sort of ties them together as there were a number of revolt in Haiti in the 1700s and early 1800s which forced the French over to New Orleans.

So it would suggest that there have been different waves of Vodou entering different parts of the States under different conditions which might indeed have the kind of Founder Effect I mentioned (it also might mean there are different practices in different areas).

Sooooooo anyone got any thoughts, info, etc?

---------------------
Some relevant threads:

Main Voodoo thread:
http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=185

Haitian zombies (I must go and post over there):
http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=12620

Haiti (starts of on a conspiracy theme and slowly turns into a voodoo one):
http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=13856

Candyman (possibly related to the above - although weird and invovles Hitler):
http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=590&highlight=voodoo

Seeling your soul to the devil at crossroads:
http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=14010

Spooky New Orleans (FT travel guide):
http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=5011


And I might as well drop in a mention of the Southern US Forteans thread:
http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=14313

======================
And I'm trying to use vodou (or vodoun) and not voodoo as people seem to feel it makes an iportant distinction between a very stereotypical representation of the various practices.
 
Vodou in Wisconsin

This also came up in that initial thread prompted by weird-wi supremo giving a talk on the radio about it - unfortunately there isn't yet an archive online:

http://www.chadlewis.com/radio/july_2004.html

I did find this:

Voodoo in Madison? (1987)

What do you make of a headless rooster and two full sets of clothing found in a park? Madison police weren't sure. "It could be some bizarre type of cult activity," said one.

A passer-by in Gidding Park, at 429 Castle Place, reported finding a full box of clothing and a blood-spattered rock along the shoreline. When police arrived, they also found a dead white rooster lacking its head.

The box contained a woman's blue jeans, a blue, red and gray checked shirt, blue shoes and underwear. With those articles was a man's white pants, a blue shirt, white socks, shoes and underwear. Both sets of pants were ripped in several places, and the white pants were stained with the same blood found on the rock.

Police confiscated the clothing, while the street department was given the task of disposing of the rooster. A police spokesperson confirmed isolated reports of voodoo in Madison in the past, but never anything like they had found in the park.

Source: Wisconsin State Journal, September 30, 1987
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http://www.weird-wi.com/weirdstories/voodoo.htm

And this:

Man Admits Killing High Priest Of Voodoo

Man Says Vicitm Wanted Him to Kill Him

POSTED: 10:05 a.m. EST November 1, 2002
UPDATED: 10:07 a.m. EST November 1, 2002



A bizarre case plead out before a federal court in Madison Thursday in the case of a high voodoo priest and the man who killed him because that priest reportedly asked him to.

Prosecutors say it was just an ironic twist of justice that it happened on Halloween.

Gregory A. Friesner, 29, of Minneapolis, is charged with the death July 18, 1997, of Mark Foster (pictured, left), 46, who was found shot to death in northwestern Wisconsin. His body was found by the side of the road, clothed in ceremonial white.

Friesner pleaded guilty Thursday to a federal charge of using and carrying a firearm in what prosecutors called the ritualistic shooting death of the Minneapolis pharmacist five years ago.

Friesner, a self-proclaimed high priest of voodoo, met Foster at a Twin Cities bookstore.

"Mr. Foster saw him one day at a bookstore and kind of focused on him ... brought him into his cult," said defense attorney Greg Dutch (pictured, left).

The cult involved voodoo, high priests and ritual killings, according to the criminal complaint.

"They do spells," Dutch said. "They do chants. They try to elevate themselves into some kind of higher spiritual frame."

"That's correct, Mr. Foster recruited them, and was involved in the conspiracy to have his own murder to occur," said J.B. Van Hollen (pictured, right), U.S. attorney.

After an extensive collaborative effort between local and federal investigators, Friesner pleaded guilty, and finally explain what happened: Foster had Friesner shoot him in the chest with Foster's own .44-caliber carbine rifle.

"Foster was this high priest and had inherited the lineage and the spirits of the people who had gone before him, and that the person who then killed him would inherit the same linage, and same spirits, and things like that," Hollen said.

"He still feels very deeply for Mr. Foster," Dutch said. "He still tries to communicate with him on a daily basis through prayers and spiritual awakenings. He feels that he's still at peace with himself. And that's the tragedy of this whole case is that this guy, Mark Foster -- if he wanted to kill himself, well, kill himself."

Friesner will be sentenced Jan. 9. He could get anywhere from five years to life and a 0,000 fine.

Voodoo Religion

In many places, such as Africa and Haiti, the religion of voodoo is held in high esteem. It's a way believers connect with their ancestors, and seek answers to the mysteries of life.

A journalist from Ghana, who is visiting Madison, told WISC-TV it would be wrong to judge the religion by cases like this one.

"Trust me, every religion will have what we call extremists -- who will use the same good values to pursue their selfish ambitions," said Mary-Ann Acolatse (pictured, left), a TV reporter from West Africa.

She is Christian herself, but says voodoo helped hold her country together long before white people came with their religion.
Click to expand...

http://www.channel4000.com/news/1754045/detail.html

Posted on Tue, Jan. 28, 2003


Man pleads guilty in Wisconsin voodoo slaying

BY CHRIS HAMILTON

NEWS TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER



The man who shot his former religious mentor in a bizarre voodoo-ritual homicide will spend at least 12 years in prison for his role in the killing.

Greg Friesner, 29, pleaded guilty Monday in Douglas County Circuit Court tosecond-degree homicide for the July 1997 death of Mark Foster, a Minneapolis pharmacist and self-anointed voodoo high priest.

Friesner admitted to shooting Foster -- who was clad in ceremonial white -- once in the chest with the victim's own rifle on a rural Douglas County road. Friesner killed Foster, 45, in order to inherit his soul and title in a plan that Foster himself hatched.

Foster was openly suicidal and under investigation for illegally selling prescriptions.

In court Monday, Douglas County District Attorney Dan Blank said that while Foster's death was basically anassisted suicide case, it was still homicide.

The men also were accused of executing a scheme with Foster to claim 0,000 worth of Foster's life insurance policies as payment for the killing.

Friesner, who lived with Foster at the time of the shooting, will serve between 12 and 16 years in prison, according to the plea agreement he made with Blank and federal prosecutors.

Foster's daughter, Angela Foster Whitwam, told Friesner she forgave him. Her father might have taken his own life no matter what, but Friesner ensured that her children lost their grandfather, she said.

Friesner told the court he still believes in Santeria, the type of voodoo Foster, Friesner, his wife and nephew practiced together.

Douglas County Circuit Court Judge Michael Lucci approved the agreement, which says Friesner will spend the first 10 years of his sentence in a federal prison. Friesner also had earlier pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Madison to a count of using a firearm "in relation" to Foster's killing.

A second suspect in the case, Foster's nephew Brent Thompson, earlier pleaded guilty for his role in the death and ensuing coverup, which prolonged the case's resolution.

Thompson drove the men to the rural area near Dairyland and threw the gun into the St. Croix River. He also later lied to investigators.

Thompson will likely be sentenced early next month to only five years in prison because he cooperated with investigators.
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http://www.duluthsuperior.com/mld/duluthsuperior/news/5047193.htm

Which is all a bit modern but still worthy of inclusion.
 
I happened to remember a Yoruba Village in Oyotunji, South Carolina, that at one time had it's own website. a sign hangs at the border of the village that says "You are leaving the United States and entering the Yoruba Kingdom... built by the priests of the Oriska voodoo cult." Couldn't find their website, but did find this:

http://152.1.96.5/jouvert/v3i12/vodou.htm
 
I've got a book about voodoo and hoodoo and the US.
Also remember recently reading that the word "Mojo" as frequently used in blues, soul and rock music (blues mainly) is specifically a voodoo word, for a little bag full of magick things.
 
This seems a handy page about voudou/hoodoo and includes this:

Hoodoo in the Americas

Within Haiti, Voodoo became a uniting force amongst the slaves and peasants but also found its more sinister side: the ‘Petro’ loa. In opposition to the gentle, passive ‘Rada’ loa of Africa, the Petro are the ‘dark spirits’. The people needed a way to cope with the brutality of slavery and the Petro spirits offered a source of aggression and action which found a purpose amongst the uprisings of 1791 onwards culminating in the expulsion of the French from Haiti in 1804.

Many of the French fled from Haiti to Louisiana in the Deep South, USA, taking their servants and slaves with them. Again, Voodoo began to adapt to a new situation, amalgamating with the beliefs of the European slaves and incorporating elements of Native American nature folklore. Today, New Orleans is the cradle of this new form of African-American religion, more commonly known as Hoodoo. Hoodoo has moved away from Voodoo in some important ways and is described by many of its practitioners as folklore magic rather than religion. Unlike the Voodoo of Africa and Haiti, there is no strong hierarchy or initiation ceremonies. The emphasis is placed on personal power, usually for magical rather than medical purposes and as a sign of the times a hoodoo spell or ‘job’ has such descriptive names as “Money stay with Me” or “Love Me Oil”. One of the defining characteristics is the use of a mojo bag or conjure hand - a flannel bag used to carry the roots, herbs and other curious needed for potions or rituals.
Click to expand...

http://www.pilotguides.com/destination_guide/africa/benin_burkina_faso_and_mali/voodoo.php
 
a nice conjure book i've used for reference is hoodoo herb and root magic by catherine yronwode. it used to be you could only get it through her website, but now she sells it on amazon. i only wished she had indexed it according to the spell, not the ingredient. so if you want something for good fortune, you can't look up good fortune. instead, you will find several variations of the spell listed under sassafras, a main ingredient.
 
I think it's up as an e book for free on her site, playdead. Good site all round too! If a bit disorganised and rambly. But they are charming qualities and you never really know what you're going to turn up next.
 
i think that is it, emperor. certainly her website. as faggus said, quite charming. on the surface, it just looks like fun, but she's done an enormous amount of research. of course, i like to have the actual book in my hands! :D
 
I've just stumbled across this page,

Today, there are two virtually unrelated forms of the religion:

- the actual religion, Vodun practiced in Benin, Dominican Republic, Ghana, Haiti, Togo and various centers in the US - largely where Haitian refuges have settled.

-an evil, imaginary religion, which we will call Voodoo. It has been created for Hollywood movies, complete with "voodoo dolls", violence, bizarre rituals, etc. It does not exist in reality, except in the minds of most non-Voduns.
Click to expand...

at Vodun & related religions.
 
Yep this is why I'm now trying to use vodou instead. This two page talk is a superb overview of the issues:

The spelling of voodoo in my title is important. The distinction between v-oo-d-oo and v-o-d-ou is a fundamental but slippery one. The only secure consensus amongst scholars and practitioners of the religion in question seems to be that, however Vodou is spelt, it should not be spelt v-oo-d-oo. On the other hand, amongst people who have heard the word but who have little or no knowledge of the culture from which it derives, the proper spelling of 'whatever it is' is v-oo-d-oo. Obviously there is more at stake here than a simple argument about correct/incorrect spelling. The contestations are ripe for discursive analysis; What is at stake in each of the contested spellings (vodou, vodoun, vodu, vodun, vaudu etc)? What arguments are given in support of each? What are discursive histories of their legitimation/de-legitimation, etc? In this presentation I am specifically addressing the thing spelled v-oo-d-oo; 'whatever it is'. I define voodoo as a set of ubiquitous and enduring, popular cultural motifs evoked by the word for people outside of societies where Vodou is a lived religion.
Click to expand...

http://haitisupport.gn.apc.org/Cussans.html

Also see things like:

Do You Do Voodoo?: The Real Religion Behind Zombies and Voodoo Dolls
Shannon R. Turlington
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1902932021
 
I was reading this paper:

Voeks, R. (1993) African medicine and magic in the Americas. Geographical Review. 83 (1). 66 - 78.

Which has a nifty map (I'll see iif I can extract it from the paper) of the various cultures including the ones we've touched on here like Vodou and Obeah as well as related ones like Santeria but I really wanted to bring up Gullah/Geechee as I know very little about it and it is really the basis for Play Dead's book of the same name.

See for example:
http://www.aawiccans.org/gullah.htm

Blue Roots: African-American Folk Magic of the Gullah People
Roger Pinckney (1998)
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/156718524X/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/156718524X/

Soooooooooo I'm unsure how it relates to the more New Orleans Voodoo - it sounds from the above that it is a 'purer' version as it seems to have come directly from Africa. Can it give us a better idea of the kinds of practices that were brought over with the slaves that also influenced Vodou and many others? Voeks mentions that some African researchers have done interesting work finding relics of African knowledge in the Americas that have been lost on the home continent (he specifically mentions Nigerian priest travelling to Brazil to rediscover lost ceremonies).
 
OK I managed to get the map put and get it to the right file size - lets see if it works.
 
OK that works fine.

One thing I notice is that Voeks uses Hoodoo to refer to the Vodou practiced in New Orleans (which was my understanding of the term) while that summary/extract of Pinckney suggests it is the term for Gullah. Or is it just a rather vague term anyway?
 
great map!!
I've never seen anything like it. so nice to have a visual. thanks, emperor. :)
as far as i understand it, true gullahs usually refer to it as root work and root doctors. the roger pinckney book is fairly detailed and ground in fact. he's written others. he may have written one about dr buzzard, who was a famous south carolina root doctor. dr. buzzard is supposed to be buried in an unmarked grave on st. helena island, SC. i tried to find the grave, but it's another world out there and the dirt roads aren't even marked. it's said that conjurers/root doctors take goofer dust from his grave for their spells.

Ed McTeer, a white root doctor and sheriff, wrote a book called fifty years as a lowcountry witch doctor. he supposedly maintained order by scaring the crap out of people!

i actually didn't know anything about the gullah culture until i started researching the area. it's fascinating.
 
Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston, the famous Harlem Renissance writer, apparently did some work as an ethnogropher in the 1930's. And get this:

Zora and the Study of Hoodoo
“I have landed here in the kingdom of Marie Laveau and expect to wear her crown someday – Conjure Queen as you suggested.” So starts a letter from Zora to famous black poet and writer, Langston Hughes, in 1928. Zora spent months in New Orleans and other parts of Louisiana researching the life and work of Laveau, who had been the most powerful voodoo priestess in the world in the 1800s and self-proclaimed “Pope of Voodoo.” Zora was in fact “crowned” by a grandnephew of Laveau’s after an initiation rite that required her to lie face down and naked, without food or water, for nearly three days. (Zora Neale Hurston, a Life in Letters, collected and edited by Carla Kaplan, 2002)
Click to expand...

http://www.st-lucie.lib.fl.us/zora/marker5.htm

And apparently, according to a book I'm reading called Voodoo Queen: The Spirited Lives of Marie LaVaeu, the grandson who initiated her told her some of Marie's catchisms that were a blend of Catholic cathcisms and voodoo belief, but I'm not sure which of Hurston's books include them.

She does have a book about HAITIAN VOODOO, though.
 
I have a copy of "Tell my Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica" so I'll have a look through it now.

I would probably recommend looking in the book mentioned above:

PB:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385490364/
HB:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385490356/

She also wrote "Hoodoo in America" for the Journal of American Folklore in 1931 so I should be able to dig that out.

[edit: OK I got it:

Hurston, Z.N. (1931) Hoodoo in America. The Journal of American Folklore. 44 (174). 317 - 417.

I should say that it was mentioned in a timeline in the back of Tell My Horse which doesn't mention trips to New Orleans - the book itself was based on her travels and research in the late thirties so may not be too relevant to the 1920s.]
 
I got slightly distracted by other things I found while nosing but it does look like her 1931 paper is pretty definitive on these early practices - I found this:

Jacobs, C. F. (1989) Spirit guides and possession in the New Orleans Black Spiritual Churches. The Journal of American Folklore. 102 (403). 45 - 56; 65 - 7.

Which discusses the issue (page 49):

If Leafy Anderson based Father Johnon the legendary image of Doctor John, she was only doing what some Spiritual people have done in claiming that the churches are tied to such notable voodooists as the Marie Laveaus. Likewise, Hurston (1931:320) found that the city's most influential "hoodoo doctors" explained their powers as inherited through direct kinship to the Laveaus
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The paper is pretty extensive (it is the whole of one issue of the JAF) and she goes into a lot of detail. She certainly takes the claims of the various "grandnephews" (especially their actually relation to the Marie Leveaus - she say it is more of a "spiritual relationship") witha pinch of salt. She details a ritual with a series of 30 petitions dealing with differen matters (pages 328 - 57). They were taught to her by Samuel Thompson, one of the "grandnephews" and she seems to have interviewed a vast number of Lousiana hoodoo doctors who all knew "the Leveau routines".

It seems to be pretty standard voodoo fare but is much more elaborate than the other rituals she gives in her article (but she does give an awful lot from various sources Catholic and Protestant).
 
Emperor said:
It seems to be pretty standard voodoo fare but is much more elaborate than the other rituals she gives in her article (but she does give an awful lot from various sources Catholic and Protestant).
Click to expand...

Well, the book I'm reading is going through how culturally diverse the whole region was, and how each element grew from one another. There was an activist priest who fought against racism and sexism, proformed illegal inter-racial marriages, and held last rites for people the official Church held to be in ill-repute. Apparently, his work, as well as some activist French nuns, helped put a strong semi-official stamp on Marie's form of voodoo, and the 30 Petitions were done in the exact style of Catholic teachings, but with voodoo and indiviual elements of Marie's personality.
 
Mr. R.I.N.G. said:
Well, the book I'm reading is going through how culturally diverse the whole region was, and how each element grew from one another. There was an activist priest who fought against racism and sexism, proformed illegal inter-racial marriages, and held last rites for people the official Church held to be in ill-repute. Apparently, his work, as well as some activist French nuns, helped put a strong semi-official stamp on Marie's form of voodoo, and the 30 Petitions were done in the exact style of Catholic teachings, but with voodoo and indiviual elements of Marie's personality.
Click to expand...

Quite possibly - I might have been raised a Catholic but I've probably not got the background to spot any parallels between the two and the voodoo trappings may be leading me astray. I wouldn't be suprised. What I thought was interesting was what Jacobs had to say about the unique qualities of New Orleans Spritualist churches when compared with those in other areas and the inluences clearly go both ways. It happened all the way through the region.

I was intrigued by the mention of some of the ingredients: "Essence of Do As You Please", "Controlling Powders", "Ruler's Root", etc.
 
Voodoo Queen (s)

Okay, I just finished my book on Marie Laveau, and I wanted to share some of the great insights the book had concerning her extraordinary lives.

1) There were two Marie Laveaus. Many people at the times, particularly Creoles and Free People of Color, had multiple names. The first Marie Laveau lived roughly from 1800 to 1884 or so, and after her first husband disappeared, she was mostly known as the Widow Paris (even though his true fate hasn’t been determined). The second Marie Lavaeu was Marie Eucharist, and she was born in the 1830’s … though her date of death is unknown, and she is generally known as Marie the Second. More about that later.

2) The Widow Paris helped as an influenza nurse throughout the many epidemics that hit New Orleans, as did all in her family. Many of the voodoo rituals were designed to help people in need; there would be food offerings that the hungry and needy could use to get a bite to eat. They also helped runaway slaves & helped blacks & whites negotiate a society bent on keeping them seperate. (The Widow Paris’ second husband was white, and he had to “fake” on paper that he was a Person of Color to keep from being arrested and be able to offer some form of legitimacy to his family. They helped many people in similar circumstances throughout the years, helping them navigate paperwork so they could own land and marry).

3) The nature of Voodou changed from the Widow Paris through Marie the Second. The Widow Paris worshiped at Congo Square, it was more a direct mixing of Catholicism and African religious thought. As Reconstruction and post Reconstruction roared through the gains and power the Free People of Color had, Congo Square became closed off the the Voodous in an effort to stop their assembly, and they had to move further and further out of the city. Eventually, Marie the Second wound up creating a strong religious area that became a town north of New Orleans (called Millnesberg or something like that) whose cultural mixing and voodoo heart helped forge the emerging art-form of jazz (Jelly Roll Morton wrote a song honoring Millnesberg, Louis Armstrong started his career playing there before it was torn down). It was also at Millnesberg that Southern Hoodoo began to shape the form of New Orleans voodoo due to the influx of non-Creole southerners, and it became less Catholic afterwords.

4) Spiritual Churches have a strong link to New Orleans-style voodoo – the Widow Paris’ version of Voodoo could be thought of as Catholic Christianity with spirit possession.

5) The “hate” and wild claims made against voodoo (babie sacrifice, among other things) directly tie into repression of people of color, the fact that is was a woman-based religion, it had a common sense approach to sexuality (as did all Creole culture) and it gave people hope that they could break through slavery.

6) Marie the Second seems to have disappeared off the map. After she was last seen in public, there is no formal story of what her fate was. Zora Neale Hurston, when trained in voodoo by a Laveau ancestor, heard the story that she tried to call down a storm to sweep away her house and life (she was a child of storm, she had the power of weather like that) but she was saved by her followers, and she only allowed herself to be saved to spare their lives. But her snake died after that, and she gave the snake-skin to her relative before expiring herself. But nobody seems to know, and her mother and sister downplayed their conenction to voodoo in their later life to try and keep the news and government from using it against people of color.

One of the possible last resting homes for her bones (at least in folk tradition) was probably demolished to build a football stadium in New Orleans.

7) Both Maries danced with snakes, and were both supposed to be extremely beautiful.

If anybody needs to know something about her, let me know and I’ll see what I can find out.
 
I thought I might as wll merge the two threads as similar territory has been covered in them both and one of the important articles is one I linked to on the first page from SI:

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2843/is_1_26/ai_80924578/

which includes this:

Among the most fabulous legends about Marie Laveau is an often-repeated one alleging "her perpetual youth" (Hauck 1996). According to a segment of "America's Haunted Houses" (1998) which aired on the Discovery Channel, Marie was "said to be over 100 years old when she died and as beautiful as ever." Moreover, "There were some unexplained and mysterious sightings of the great Voodoo Queen even after her death," writes Gandolfo (1992, 29). "People would swear on a stack of bibles that they saw Marie Laveau herself." Indeed, he adds, "A number of people say they were at a ritual in the summer of 1919 given by the Great Queen."

The solution to this enigma is the fact that, according to Tallant (1946, 52), there were "at least two Marie Laveaus." The first Marie, the subject of our previous discussions, died June 15, 1881. Her obituaries say she was then ninety-eight ("Marie Lavaux" 1881; "Death" 1881). One of the same obituaries ("Death" 1881) states more credibly that she had been twenty-five when she wed, consistent with her having been born in 1794, as most sources now agree, and thus about eighty-seven when she died. Indeed, the doctor who attended Marie at the end publicly stated his doubts that she was as old as her family had claimed, and he judged her age to be in the late eighties (Tallant 1946, 117).

Whatever her actual age, far from appearing to be a figure of eternal youth, Marie Laveau spent her last years "old and shrunken," stripped of her memory, and lying in a back room of her cottage (Tallant 1946, 88, 115). In her stead was her daughter, Marie Laveau II. The younger Marie gradually took over her mother's business activities, which included running a house on Lake Pontchartrain where rich Creole men could have "appointments" with young mulatto girls (Tallant 1946, 65-66). She died in 1897.

The claim that Marie Laveau was active in 1919 is thought to have been based on a third Marie, possibly a granddaughter (Gandolfo 1992, 29), or another voodoo queen with whom she was confused.
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In Hurston (1931: 326 she says:

Marie Leveau is the great name of Negro conjure in America. There were three Marie Leveaux, of whom the last, the daughter and grandaughter of the other two, was the most renowned. The first was said to be a small Congo woman. The daughter was a mulatto of a very handosme body and face. The grandaughter was an octoroon of great beauty.

.........

This grandaughter became the greatest hoodoo queen of America. She was born Febuary 2, 1827, according to the birth reocrds in St. Louis Cathedral, New Oreleas and studied hoodoo with one Alexander.
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The dates appear to work out as Nickell says:

Who was the real Marie Laveau? She began life as the illegitimate daughter of a rich Creole plantation owner, Charles Laveaux, and his Haitian slave mistress. Sources conflict but Marie may have been born in New Orleans in 1794. In 1819 she wed Jacques Paris who, like her, was a free person of color, but she was soon abandoned or widowed. About 1826, she began a second, common-law marriage to Christophe de Glapion, another free person of color, with whom she would have fifteen children.
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and so this Haitian slave mistress would be the first Marie Laveau - the "small Congo woman".

Which raises the possibility that there were 4 although with all the people claiming ancestry from various people and the 1919 sighting being distinctly I'd be happy to settle with 3 (although leaving the door open for 4).
 
The Widow Paris, according to my article, was born in 1800, so a mother for her born in 1794 would have been 6! :D

She also didn't have 15 children. She had 5, and three died in childhood, probably due to one of the many influenza epidemics. Her two daughters had a number of children, they all lived in the same house, and when they made the inscription on the Widow Paris' tomb, they didn't do a very accurate job of it and assigned all 15 to her.

There was also much misdirection from the Widow Paris' longest lived daughter, Philomene (who died in 1897). From what the book could acertain, she was trying to leave a cleaned-up legacy for her children, neglecting the voodoo side of the family, her mother's illegitimate relationship (they weren't allowed to marry due to his being white), and the fact that she wanted to leave her children teh option of "passing" for white.

And the Laveaus had a history of misdirection in regards to themselves (as witnessed most spectacularly when Marie the Second invited newpapermen out to see a St. John the Conqeror celebration, but the directions misled them and they never witness her "evil rites"). Philomene purposefully left out various facts or misrepresented whenever she could, because the race relations at the end of her life made it very hard to avoid being utterly destroyed by journalists and the government and still be connected to voodoo in the way her mom and sister were. All of this, as well as many documents bearing the Widow Paris' mark on legal papers being stolen, leaves a scant paper trail, but I think the book did a good job of tracking down what there was by way of primary documentation, as well as pulling together ethnographic data, history, and "journalism".
 
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