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

The religion originated in Haiti during the era of French colonization of the West Indies. Many of its customs originated in tribes of West Africa, specifically in Togo, Benin and Nigeria, but as enslaved people were transported from Africa to Haiti, they brought their customs with them, culminating in the religion of Vodou. At this time, Haiti remained relatively isolated from the rest of the world, allowing the Voodoo religion to formulate without interference from the Western world, with its own unique traditions.
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.

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 25^th to 27^th in the New Orleans City Park.

https://www.voodoofestival.com/