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Voodoo
Questions about the origins and nature of Voodoo are part of both popular and scholarly debates about African “survivals” and spiritual contributions to the New World. The word “Voodoo” came from the name of a great spirit or a deity in one or more West African languages. In New Orleans, the word was used as an invocation or call to spirits. After the 1820s, local French newspapers used the word to refer to the social group that engaged in the practice, rather than the practice itself. Voodoo never meant “snake worship” to its adherents, although that was a common Anglo-American interpretation; in the early twenty-first century, the most commonly accepted translation used by anthropologists and practitioners for the term is “those who serve the spirits.” The word Voodoo, however interpreted, calls up racial and sexual condemnation in contemporary popular usage.
In New Orleans and south Louisiana, Voodoo as a religion grew from the spiritual and survival practices that exiled, enslaved Africans brought to Louisiana. Under the extreme pressures of slavery, French-speaking Catholic Creoles of color fused their knowledge with the magico-medical knowledge of indigenous Native Americans and the folk theologies and practices of French and Spanish Catholicism. Through the eighteenth century, under French and then Spanish control of Louisiana, a large, strong community of free people of color grew. In the absence of effective city government, multiracial and multi-cultural families formed social and benevolent societies that buried the dead, tended the sick, and cared for widows, orphans, and the unemployed. Members of these Afro-Creole societies also held public rituals and dances and aided the citizens of the city in many ways. The good works and public performances of the societies headed by free women of color came to be labeled Voodoo.
Practitioners of Voodoo in New Orleans were called “queens,” “doctors,” or “workers.” They addressed both slavery and racism through spirit possession—sometimes called possession trance or trance mediumship. They knew extensive magical formulas and manipulated the legal system to help slaves escape bondage. By holding ritual gatherings, the female priests of Voodoo violated civil codes on “illegal assembly” and put themselves in danger. It is rumored that they succeeded in commuting jail terms for prisoners, and abolishing public executions using spiritual power and political strategies. They brought a variety of prayers and formulas to social relationships and to undertakings that involved love, luck, or the law.
Historic and Scholarly Background
In south Louisiana the intersection of sex and race forged a New World people called Creoles. Voodoo, jazz, American dance, New Orleans cuisine and architecture all share Creole roots. The majority of the African founders of the colony of Louisiana were Bambara-speakers from Senegambia. The next largest contingent came directly to Louisiana from the Kingdom of Kongo. Many were already Christians, well-versed in Catholic catechism and religious traditions. Africans in colonial Louisiana outnumbered the less powerful Europeans two to one, and brought skills in metallurgy, tropical agriculture, indigo production, irrigation, marketing, and medical care. Their imported cultural knowledge was crucial to the survival of the struggling colony. Africans also carried the knowledge of public dances of spirit possession, songs, bands, and musical instruments like drums, banjos, and tambourines, directly to French Louisiana. They practiced “conjure”—magical means to transform reality—and developed extensive practices of “master magic” called gris-gris, a potion or spell to help or harm someone. Gris-gris is the Voodoo name for conjure; its folk cognate is ju-ju. Many historical documents reveal that concepts of magical empowerment and the help of spiritual forces were deeply rooted in the Afro-Creole worldview of Louisiana.
The major sources of information about New Orleans Voodoo are as follows:
1. The staff of the WPA Federal Writers' Project in Louisiana, part of the Depression recovery programs of the 1930s, interviewed citizens who had known the practitioners of Voodoo. The interviews are housed in various state archives.
2. Zora Neale Hurston , novelist, anthropologist, and folklorist, did field research in New Orleans from 1929 to 1930 . An African American and graduate student in anthropology at Columbia University, Hurston was initiated into New Orleans Voodoo at least six times, the last time with the grand-nephew of Marie Laveau the Second. Her lyrical descriptions of these ceremonies are the best in the Voodoo-Hoodoo literature.
3. Harry Middleton Hyatt , an eccentric Episcopalian priest turned folklorist, privately published five volumes of interviews with Southern practitioners of what he called “hoodoo, witchcraft, root-work, and conjuration.” Between 1938 and 1940 , Hyatt interviewed about thirty to forty practitioners and clients in New Orleans.
4. White journalists, travelers, and regional writers in the nineteenth century published accounts in newspapers, books, and magazines.
The Voodoo orders met in parks, private homes, and businesses closed for the night, and at the bayous, swamps, or lakes near the city. The most important site was Congo Square, an open plaza on the northern boundary of the French Quarter. Historic evidence shows that African-born enslaved and free people danced there on Sunday afternoons from the mid-1700s to the late 1850s, when authorities closed it down. Congo Square was a market center, dance arena, community gathering spot, and ritual space—the crossroads, the pivot of Afro-Creole life, the center of its mystical geography. Scholars regard it as the cradle of African American esthetics, modern dance in America, jazz, and New Orleans Voodoo.
Practitioners and Pantheon
The best-known nineteenth-century priestesses or practitioners of Voodoo were MarieLaveau the First and Marie Laveau the Second , mother and daughter. Marie Laveau the First, also known as “the Widow Paris,” was born on 10 September 1801 ; she died on 16 June 1881 , and is buried in St. Louis Cemetery Number One, New Orleans's most historic “city of the dead.” She had a high social standing as a Creole “fever nurse,” and was an active member of St. Louis Cathedral and a counselor to men on death row in Parish prison. Marie Laveau the Second, also known as Eucharist Glapion , was born 2 February 1827 ; she had disappeared by 1877 —no reliable date of death, cause of death, and burial site for her are known. She was probably a hairdresser and ran a spiritual practice out of her home, calling in spirits to counsel citizens about matters such as unfaithful husbands, disloyal friends, gambling reverses, bad bosses, ungrateful children, and court cases.
Nineteenth-century New Orleans had the highest mortality rates, the deadliest epidemics, and the worst public health system in the United States. The population depended on fever nurses—women of color who had learned skills from female relatives, and who used techniques from African, Haitian, and American Indian ancestors. “Nursing women” such as Marie Laveau the First were routinely identified as Voodoo practitioners.
Women of color in New Orleans practiced an effective array of alternative, integrated, or holistic medicine. Besides documented nursing skills, they had an extensive pharmacopeia. Historic records mention hundreds of plants and minerals, many purchased at Native American markets. The first licensed pharmacist in America opened a French-style pharmacy in 1823 and ordered many materials and compounds from New York City or Paris. In the Voodoo section of the French pharmacy, there were oils of cinnamon, cassia, bergamot, “Sanguinaria Aragon” or dragon's blood, antimony, iron wire, coffee beans, verbena, lemon grass, cochineal, guinea peppers, lodestones, cayenne pepper, iron filings, kerosene, elm bark tea, St. John's root, and many other classic ingredients as well. The pharmacist sold love, luck, and control over capricious fate under various names: Love Success, Lucky Devil, As You Please, Attraction, Getaway Powder, Waste-away Tea, and the famous Love Potion Number Nine.
Since New Orleans Voodoo lives in the shadow of a larger and more famous relative, Haitian Vodou, it has been assumed that the spirits each honored were the same. In New Orleans, however, a place-specific pantheon arose which was dominated by a female spirit in direct contact with the Good God, or Bon Dié in Louisiana Creole French. This woman is variously called the Holy Mother, the Virgin Mary , the Good Mother, Mother-of-All, “lovely Lady dressed in blue,” or Lady Luck. She is also Our Lady of Prompt Succor, who saved New Orleans at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815 and from menacing hurricanes on many occasions. Other Catholic saints, particularly St. Anthony and St. John the Baptist, were honored. Folk records mention St. Peter , St. Rita , St. Michael , St. Joseph , and St. Expedite who makes things happen quickly.
The Laveaus danced with snakes and called on a serpent spirit named le Grand Zombi in their spirit possession rituals. The origin of the name is unclear. For African Christians from the Kingdom of Kongo, the name of God was Zambi a Mpungu; in St. Domingue-Haiti, a zombi is a person raised from the dead, a person whose immortal soul has been stolen. In New Orleans, however, the Great Zombi seems to have been a fierce spirit of resistance and protest embodied in possession. Although these spirits and saints have obvious parallels in Africa or in Haiti, names like Damballah for the snake spirit or Erzulie for the female spirit are not found in existing documentary sources for Louisiana.
Voodoo practitioners also earned a reputation for “fixing” or putting a curse on those who “crossed” them, and were reputed to know how to make their enemies ill or even kill them if necessary. The “voodoo dolls” sold in the French Quarter pay testimony to these abilities, although there is no historical evidence that practitioners like the Laveaus ever made such dolls. Nonetheless, even ordinary citizens in New Orleans knew and gossiped about various recipes or prescriptions that used common household materials and prayers to wound others. In the logic of Voodoo, however, the curse will rebound on the curser. If one can send misfortune to an enemy, a competitor, a rival, a bad boss, or an ex-lover, then that individual can, in turn, send it back.
Relationship to Other Spiritual Traditions of the Diaspora
New Orleans Voodoo is related through the diaspora to Candomblé, Macumba, and other Afro-Brazilian religions; to Afro-Caribbean religions like Shango of Trinidad; and to Santeria in Cuba. It is not the same as Haitian Vodou, Hoodoo in the American South, or Hollywood “voodoo.”
Several waves of migration shaped and shaded New Orleans Voodoo in the nineteenth century. In 1809 a group of about ten thousand French-speaking Catholic Creoles came to New Orleans from St. Domingue. The Caribbean island was renamed Haiti after a successful revolution brought former slaves to positions of power on the island. The “foreign French” roughly doubled the population of the city. The new Creoles did not bring what scholars now know as Haitian Vodou to New Orleans, but they probably enhanced some of the Afro-Catholic traditions already present, and certainly contributed to the French quality of the city in the period when Anglos and Protestants were trying to Americanize it. The second wave of influence in New Orleans Voodoo came from Southern blacks who had developed conjure, “master magic,” and hands-on healing from their experiences with the plantation and slavery systems of the rural South. These powerful traditions are generally called Hoodoo in the literature.
When Reconstruction ended in 1877 , Jim Crow—the doctrine of separate-but-equal and the cornerstone of American apartheid—began. “Creole” became a contested racial category, and “Voodoo” a stigmatized synonym for evil. Local press and police escalated their attacks on the women of Voodoo. Lawmakers enforced strict laws against “fortune-telling,” spiritual counseling, or any psychic activities which promoted good luck. Newspapers recycled stories about orgies, boiling caldrons, “black” magic, and human or animal sacrifice.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, African American women started a unique group of churches in New Orleans, the Spiritual Churches—not to be confused with Spiritualism or the Spiritualist Movement. These churches were based on native African spirit contacts through possession; an Afro-centric identification with Zionism, Israel, and the Israelites; Native North American Indian traditions; fundamentalist and ecstatic Christianity; nineteenth-century Spiritualism; and charismatic Catholicism. Twenty-first-century practitioners use titles such as spiritual advisers, palm readers, fortune-tellers, psychics, spiritual readers, prophets, or reverend mothers. Groups of women continue in the tradition of altars, personal adoration, contacts with saints and spirits, and sacramental services of initiation and baptism. They honor ancestors like “Mother Laveau.” They build elaborate altars with candles, pictures of saints and spirit guides, photographs or statues of respected Indian chiefs, crucifixes, holy water, food, flowers, perfume, incense, rosaries, and letters to spirits. But they cannot afford to acknowledge their kinship with New Orleans Voodoo.
See also Laveau, Marie .
Bibliography
• Cable, George Washington . The Dance in Place Congo and Creole Slave Songs, 3rd ed. New Orleans, LA: Faruk von Turk, 1976 .
• Domínguez, Virginia R. White by Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994 .
• Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo . Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992 .
• Hanger, Kimberley S. Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans, 1769–1803. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997 .
• Hirsch, Arnold R. , and Joseph Logsdon , eds. Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992 .
• Hurston, Zora Neale . Hoodoo in America. Journal of American Folklore 44.174 ( 1931 ): 317–417. Hurston's anthropological research takes up the entire issue of this prestigious journal and remains her most scholarly work; it is the best record of what Voodoo looked like in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
• Hurston, Zora Neale . Mules and Men ( 1935 ). New York: HarperPerennial, 1990 . Hurston later rewrote the article above into another version. Hoodoo in America, the last half of this collection, is a poetic and classic account of her fieldwork in New Orleans.
• Hyatt, Harry Middleton . Hoodoo—Conjuration—Witchcraft—Rootwork, Vols. 1–5. Hannibal, MO: Western Publishing, 1970 , 1973 , 1978 .
• Jacobs, Claude V. , and Andrew J. Kaslow . The Spiritual Churches of New Orleans: Origins, Beliefs, and Rituals of an African-American Religion. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991 .
• Johnson, Jerah . Congo Square in New Orleans. New Orleans: Louisiana Landmarks Society, 1995 .
• Kein, Sybil , ed. Creole: The History and Legacy of Louisiana's Free People of Color. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000 .
• Matas, Rudolph . The Rudolph Matas History of Medicine in Louisiana, Vols. I and II, edited by John Duffy . Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1962 .
• Thornton, John K. On the Trail of Voodoo: African Christianity in Africa and the Americas. Americas: 44.3 ( 1987 – 1988 ): 261–278.
• Ward, Martha . Voodoo Queen: The Spirited Lives of Marie Laveau. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004 . This is the first published personal, professional, and spiritual biography of the two Marie Laveaus, mother and daughter