From Marie Laveau to Voodoo Festival in New Orleans
The True History and Faith Behind Voodoo
Every year now, The Voodoo
Experience, with its taglines “join the ritual,” and “worship the music,” pegs
its calendar to Halloween. This has become a tradition in New Orleans, much
like All Saints’ Day, when families head to the graveyards of the French
Quarter and beyond to whitewash and sweep the tombs clean and decorate them
with fresh flowers.
Jerry Gandolfo, a native New
Orleanian whose family has run the Voodo Museum in the French Quarter since
the 1970s, has seen oodles of products and places that take the name voodoo.
Sometimes the term is used derogatorily, in terms like voodoo economics and
voodoo science. But at a festival held outdoors, under the live oaks, the drums
and music could summon the spirits and echo the past, living up to its name
Voodoo. “If done right, the music should take possession of you. You won’t be
able to stand still. And if that happens, you are doing voodoo,” he said.
“There is a continuity.”
Voodoo’s New Orleans Roots
Vodou in Haiti played a central role for enslaved people as a “mental and emotional resistance to [the] bitter hardship” that they faced every day. Plantation owners, unaccustomed to Vodou, were intimidated by the religion and forbade the enslaved people in the West Indies from practicing it. Beginning in 1791 enslaved people in Haiti fostered their own rebellion and expelled all French from the island. Many of the French then fled to Louisiana with their own enslaved people, who brought Vodou back to New Orleans.
Like so many things New
Orleans, Voodoo was then infused with the city’s dominant religion, Catholicism,
and became a Voodoo-Catholicism hybrid sometimes referred to as New Orleans
Voodoo. In New Orleans, for instance, Legba, the Voodoo deity who controls the
gates to the spirit world, becomes St. Peter, who holds the keys to the gates
of heaven.
MARIE LAVEAU
The hybrid was evident in
Marie Laveau, a devout Catholic who attended Mass at St. Louis Cathedral and
was a close friend of the cathedral’s priest, Pere Antoine.
In front of Laveau’s
brick-and-mortar tomb in St. Louis No1 cemetery on the outskirts of the French
Quarter, fans lay out stacks of nickels, paper flowers, and other offerings.
When Laveau was alive and
living on St. Ann Street, people used to knock on her door at all hours,
looking for legal help, food, or advice about a straying husband. Her death in
1881 didn’t stop that. “In Voodoo, an ancestor is as much alive as a living
person,” Gandolfo said. “You just go to her new home now.”
Laveau, who was also known as
the Widow Paris after the death of her first husband Jacques Paris, was a striking
spiritual figure, a do-gooder and a free woman of color. She adopted orphans,
fed the hungry, visited prisoners, and nursed countless patients back to health
during the yellow-fever epidemic. She also was a skilled naturopath, treating
patients with massage, teas, herbs, salves and tinctures, which likely was more
successful with yellow-fever parents than bloodletting and other medical
techniques of the day.
She was
born on Santo Domingo in 1794. Her father was white and she was born a free
woman. The first record of her in New Orleans was in 1819, when she married
Jacques Paris, another free black. He died in 1826 and Marie formed a liaison
with Christophe Glapion, with whom she had a daughter, also named Marie.
During her long life, she gave birth to fifteen children.
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That same year, Marie embraced
the power of Voodoo and became the queen of the forbidden but widely practiced
culture. She was a hairdresser by trade and this allowed her access to many
fashionable homes in the city. In this way, she and her daughters had access to
a intelligence network that gave Marie her "psychic" powers. She knew
everything that was going on in the city just be listening to her customers and
her employees.
Marie became a legend in New
Orleans, which is particularly amazing in such a segregated culture, but she
was more than just a Voodoo practitioner. Marie had an imaginative mind and has
been credited with changing Voodoo into much more than just an African
superstition. It was Marie who brought the Virgin Mary into Voodoo as the central
figure of worship and she borrowed freely to bring Catholic traditions into the
culture.
Marie died in June of 1881 but many people never realized that she was gone. Her daughter stepped in and took her place and continued her traditions for decades to follow.
Today, Marie and her daughter still reign over the shadowy world of New Orleans Voodoo from the confines of St. Louis Cemetery No. 1. Both are entombed in this cemetery in two-tiered, white stone structures. The tombs look like so many others in this cluttered cemetery, until you notice the markings and crosses that have been drawn on the stones. Apart from these marks, you will also see coins, pieces of herb, beans, bones, bags, flowers, tokens and all manner of things left behind in an offering for the good luck and blessings of the Voodoo Queen.
Voodoo In New Orleans Today
Hoodoo is a non-religious
belief in the objects of Voodoo, or gris gris. Gandolfo likens it to a belief
that a four-leaf clover is lucky. New Orleans has had a long line of famous
hoodoo practitioners and shops, and people here still talk about spells that
use images of saints, chicken feet, graveyard dust, brick dust, gunpowder, pins
and needles, candles and incense.
Voodoo Festival
Voodoo is a musical
gumbo stirring together music, art, community, cuisine and all
the mystery and adventure that Halloween weekend in New Orleans conjures up.
With more than 65 bands over
three days, Voodoo is more than just a Festival – it is an experience
There’s plenty to do in
between sets. Across the Festival Grounds of City Park, Voodoo hosts interactive and immersive large-scale art installations,
the Brew Dat Beer Hall, a
handcrafted shopping experience at the Market
Place, and more.
It will be held this year
from October 25th to 27th in the New Orleans City Park.
https://www.voodoofestival.com/
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