Louisiana Voodoo

Louisiana Voodoo
Voodoo Altar New Orleans.jpg
Voodoo altar in New Orleans
Type Syncretic
Classification African American
Theology Revised West African Vodun
Associations New Orleans Voodoo Spiritual Temple
Origin 1719 to 1731

French Louisiana

Louisiana Voodoo (French: Louisiane Voodoo), also known as New Orleans Voodoo describes a set of spiritual beliefs and practices developed from the traditions of the African diaspora in Louisiana. It is sometimes referred to as Mississippi Valley Voodoo when referring to its historic popularity and development in the greater Mississippi Valley. It is a cultural form of the Afro-American religions developed by the West and Central African populations of the U.S. state of Louisiana, though its practitioners are not exclusively of African descent. Voodoo is one of many incarnations of African-based spiritual folkways, rooted in West African Dahomeyan Vodun.

Voodoo's liturgical language is Louisiana Creole, one of the two main heritage languages (the other being Louisiana French) of the Louisiana Creole people. It became syncretized with the Catholic and Francophone culture of New Orleans as a result of the African cultural oppression in the region as part of the Atlantic slave trade. Louisiana Voodoo is often confused with Haitian Vodou and Deep Southern Hoodoo, but, while related to these forms of the religion, is a belief system of its own. It differs from Haitian Vodou in its emphasis upon gris-gris, Voodoo queens, use of Hoodoo paraphernalia, and Li Grand Zombi. It was through Louisiana Voodoo that such terms as gris-gris (a Wolof term)[citation needed] and "Voodoo dolls"' were introduced into the American lexicon.

History [ edit ]

Original African influences [ edit ]

Gris-gris by Charles Gandolfo


The enslaved community quickly outnumbered white European colonists. The French colony was not a stable society when the enslaved sub-Saharan Africans arrived, and the newly arrived sub-Saharan Africans dominated the slave community. According to a census of 1731–1732, the ratio of enslaved sub-Saharan Africans to European settlers was more than two to one.[3] A relatively small number of colonists were planters and slaveholders, owners of sugar plantations with work that required large labor forces. Because the Africans were held in large groups relatively isolated from interaction with whites, their preservation of African indigenous practices and culture was enabled.[4] In the Upper South and other parts of British Colonial America, slave families were usually divided; large numbers of African slaves who were once closely related by family or community were sent to different plantations. However, in southern Louisiana, families, cultures, and languages were kept more intact than in the north. This allowed cultural traditions, languages, and religious practices of the slaves to continue there.[5]




Popularity in the Mississippi Valley [ edit ]

Voodoo practices were not only present in Louisiana but across the general Mississippi Valley. Reports of popular voodoo ceremonies date as late as 1849 in Ohio and 1891 in northern Missouri. Despite general similarity some differences have been noted between the voodoo practiced in the Lower Mississippi Valley and the Upper Mississippi Valley. In the Upper Mississippi Valley a differing pantheon of gods seemed to have existed, this is inferred by evidence of worship to a god named "Samunga" which has never been present in Louisiana Voodoo.[11]

Voodoo after the Haitian Revolution [ edit ]

Following the beginning of the Haitian Revolution in 1791, the lives of Voodoo practitioners in the North American colonies became more difficult. Due to the revolution being started by slaves who were supposedly possessed by a deity during a Vodou ritual, the French colonists became aggressive in trying to suppress Voodoo rituals as a precaution against uprisings.

Unlike their Haitian counterparts, the slaves in Louisiania did not rebel in great numbers against their slave-masters. Instead, Voodoo followers used amulets and charms in their daily lives. The people used them mainly for healing, protection, guidance, and to keep a connection with their loved ones. Some charms were used to hurt enemies, and involved the deceptions of curses.[12]

Famous Characters in Voodoo [ edit ]

Influence of voodoo leaders [ edit ]

Voodoo queens, powerful female practitioners of the religion were known to exercise great power in their communities, and had the role of leading many of the ceremonial meetings and ritual dances. These drew crowds of hundreds and thousands of people.[13] They made a living through the selling and administering of amulets, or "gris-gris" charms, and magical powders, as well as spells and charms that guaranteed to "cure ailments, grant desires, and confound or destroy one's enemies".[14]

Their power and influence were widespread and largely incontestable. It was recognized by journalists, judges, criminals, and citizens alike. These women of African and Creole descent emerged as powerful leaders in a society that upheld an oppressive slave regime and a dichotomy of freedom between blacks and whites. Their influence was felt in black and white circles alike, partly due to the early history of the city, in which "a shortage of white women resulted in a high number of interracial liaisons."

As in other French colonial communities, a class of free people of color developed who were given specific rights and, in New Orleans, acquired property and education. Free women of color had a relatively high amount of influence, particularly those who were spiritual leaders.[14] In addition, the religious traditions in West and Central Africa, from where many voodoo customs are derived, provided for women to exercise extraordinary power.

Tomb of Marie Laveau

Marie Laveau [ edit ]

Among the fifteen "voodoo queens" in neighborhoods scattered around 19th-century New Orleans, Marie Laveau was known as "the Voodoo Queen", the most eminent and powerful of them all. Her religious rite on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain on St. John's Eve in 1874 attracted some 12,000 black and white New Orleanians.[15]


Although her help seemed non-discriminatory, she may have favored enslaved servants: Her most "influential, affluent customers...runaway slaves...credited their successful escapes to Laveaux's powerful charms".[15] Once the news of her powers spread, she dominated the other Voodoo leaders of New Orleans. Also a Catholic, Laveau encouraged her followers to attend Catholic Mass. Her influence contributed to the adoption of Catholic practices into the Voodoo belief system.[16] Marie Laveau is remembered for her skill and compassion for the less fortunate.[17]

Laveau also gained influence over her clientele by her work as a hairdresser, which gave her intimate knowledge of the gossip in town. Her customers also came to her to buy voodoo dolls, potions, gris-gris bags, and the like.[18] Her influence continues in the city. In the 21st century, her gravesite in the oldest cemetery is a major tourist attraction; believers of Voodoo offer gifts here and pray to her spirit.[15]


Doctor John [ edit ]

Doctor John, also known by many other names, such as Bayou John and Prince John, was born in Senegal and kidnapped as a slave before becoming a prominent Voodoo king in late 19th-century (1800s) New Orleans. He brought the knowledge of the craft from his home country Senegal. He joined an already prominent voodoo community that existed in New Orleans since the early 1700s developed by African slave groups such as the Bambara, Mandinga, Wolof, Ewe, Fulbe, Nard, Mina, Fon (Dahomean), Yoruba (Nago), Chamba, Congo, Ibo, Ado, Hausa, and Sango (Hall). Previous natives of Senegal were already enslaved in New Orleans by 1720.

Through Doctor John's work in the medicinal aspects of Voodoo, he gained a reputation for being an excellent healer. Some reports went as far to state that he had the ability to resuscitate patients on the verge of death through his rituals. This is one of the earliest Voodoo accounts of reanimation, leading to the myth of zombies in Louisiana.[19]

However, it has been reported that Doctor John confessed to friends that his magic was a sham. "He had been known to laugh," writes Robert Tallant in Voodoo in New Orleans (1946, 39), "when he told of selling a gullible white woman a small jar of starch and water for five dollars"[20]

Fred Staten

Born in 1937 in Haiti, Fred Staten, moved with family to New Orleans as an infant, where he was raised by his grandparents, also of Haitian descent. His grandfather was a practicing Baptist minister. When Fred was young, his grandparents told him that he was of royal African descent and had supernatural abilities. His true name was revealed to be Prince Ke'eyama. Papa John Bayou taught him the ways of Haitian Voodoo. As a young man, Staten made many trips to voodoo communities in Haiti and the United States to learn more of the art.


Beliefs and practices [ edit ]

Voodoo ritual in St. John's Bayou, New Orleans





Voodoo in society [ edit ]

Commercialization [ edit ]

During the 1930s, Voodoo went underground as New Orleans became an increasingly popular tourist destination. Voodoo was portrayed exotically in the 1932 feature film White Zombie. A popular misconception developed that the principal elements of Voodoo are hexing and sticking pins into dolls. At this time, some exploited the tradition, making a "business of superstitions" and selling fake potions, powders, and gris-gris.[citation needed]

New Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum


A more recent example of commercializing New Orleans Voodoo is in the 2009 Disney film The Princess and the Frog. The film's villain, Dr. Facilier (voiced by Keith David) plays a bokor, a witch doctor. This is exemplified through his costume, his ominous presence and the talisman he carries around. Conversely, the film's fairy godmother figure Mama Odie (voiced by Jenifer Lewis) is a Voodoo queen who only dresses in white. She has a familiar named Juju, a snake that serves as everything from a walking stick to a bridge, and lives in an abandoned ship in the Bayou.


Louisiana Voodoo in the Media [ edit ]

While media content exists that portrays Voodoo practices with accuracy, many popular novels (like Voodoo Season (2006) and Voodoo Dreams (1995) by Jowell Parker Rhodes), and horror movies (such as White Zombie (1932), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), The Serpent and the Rainbow (1987), Voodoo Dawn (1998) or Hoodoo for Voodoo (2006)), “do not provide the public with a truthful background of the African, Haitian, or New Orleanean Voodoo tradition. All too often these fictional sources fuel the already existing misrepresentations of the religion and represent it as something shadowy, highly secretive, and fearful”.[25] 

A more recent example of Voodoo being portrayed in popular media is in the well-known American TV-show, American Horror Story: Coven.  The series focuses on witches in New Orleans, and presents a group of white witches alongside a group of black witches who practice Voodoo. However, there is one black woman among the ranks of the otherwise white witches.  Her magical ability is that of a human Voodoo-doll; she can inflict pain on others by mutilating herself.  As writer Amanda Kay LeBlanc writes in her article, (Re)centering whiteness in American Horror Story: Coven, “Coven disproportionately relies on violence against black bodies in order to provide horror to the audience.”  The show uses portrayals of Voodoo to do this: it emphasizes Voodoo as a violent practice, as magic drawn from the pain of others— usually white people.

The show also portrays this violence as a large part of Voodoo as committed without empathy; Coven shows Queenie, the black Voodoo-witch, hurting people with her Voodoo magic without remorse: “Queenie uses her voodoo doll-like powers to violently attack a male customer who continuously insulted her at the fried chicken restaurant where she worked until she sticks her hand into the deep frying oil to burn the man. The camera lingers on Queenie’s smiling face: she is glad she hurt him. Queenie alone knows she caused this man’s horrific burns and, while we root for her, her smile is menacing and threatening”.[26]  The show connects voodoo to ruthless violence, contributing to unrealistic perceptions of the African religion.

A character named Marie Laveau, based on the real-life historical figure, also appears in American Horror Story: Coven as a Voodoo-practicing witch.  Voodoo, for both her character and Queenie’s, is connected to both anger and dangerous sexuality in the show.  “In Coven, the black women are portrayed as feminine, and certainly sexual, but unlike their white counterparts, femininity and sexuality become attached to their wild animalness”.[27]  For example, both of these women have sexual/romantic relations with a violent black minotaur.  While the show portrays the white witches as having sexual relations as well, “throughout the season, Leveau and Queenie’s connection to the Minotaur is their only sexual and romantic relationship”.[27]  What these two witches have in common, other than their race which is emphasized in the show, is their Voodoo.  American Horror Story ties both their blackness and their magic to anger, bestial sexuality, and grotesque images of violence, all feeding into a negative image of Voodoo in the media that is not based in reality.

This is just one example of Voodoo being portrayed inaccurately in the media and being given various connotations.  Many others may exist.

Louisiana Voodoo and Christianity [ edit ]


Other Catholic practices adopted into Louisiana Voodoo include reciting the Hail Mary and the Lord's Prayer.[16]

While Voodoo is practised among South Louisiana's Catholic population, Southern Protestants (who comprise the majority of the population in North Louisiana and in the American South as a whole) are more likely to practice Hoodoo than Voodoo.

Louisiana Voodoo and racism [ edit ]

Discourse among the white community concerning Voodoo has often fed into negative stereotypes of black people.  The religion became a viable area of discourse for white supremacists because of its subaltern existence, connections to African practices, anxieties about its connection to black conspiracy and slave rebellion, and its powerful women of color.[29]

For example, in the 1800s, Louisiana newspapers typically portrayed Voodoo practices in a negative way, with articles such as “Voodous on the Rampage”.[29] They described rumors of animal sacrifices, zombies, and spirits, sensationalizing stories of depraved acts Voodoo had driven black people to commit. This portrayal of Voodoo contributed to the concept of black people as superstitious primitives.[30]

Narratives about Voodoo practices also were typically used to demonstrate the threat of black and female rebellion, and were thus used as rationale for the need to regulate communities of color.  Voodoo narratives served as validation of rationalizations of white supremacy for white publics, by portraying the “wildness” and “barbarity” of people of African descent, and thus in contrast, the stableness and intelligence of white people.  These views were used to emphasize the terrors of black voting rights, desegregation, and interracial mixing— especially since white supremacists viewed Voodoo as a symbol of the threat of “Negro domination”.[29]

Narratives of Voodoo also helped to make black criminality an accepted social fact, and to create and solidify perceptions of black men as primitive, animalistic, and often as rapists, feeding into arguments for black men’s lack of suffrage and legal segregation, as well as excusing political violence in the South for years to come.[29]  However, even after black male enfranchisement was achieved, Voodoo narratives often emphasized the dangerous intermingling of white women and black men in ritual spaces, continuing to paint men of color as rapists. This perception was one of the central arguments provided for continued segregation and “repressive violence”.[29]  Later, this authentication of black criminality contributed to justifications for the “mass incarceration, labor exploitation, and regulation of female sexuality”[29] that shaped the Jim Crow-era social order.

Hoodoo [ edit ]




Hoodoo practitioners have used different tools throughout the history of the practice to solve their customer's ailments. The generic name for the items is“gris-gris”—talismans, amulets, voodoo charms, spells, or incantations “believed capable of warding off evil and bringing good luck to oneself or of bringing misfortune to another” (as defined by the Mirriam Webster Dictionary). Examples include: Five Finger Grass, Dragon Blood Sticks, Dixie Love Perfume and Brimstone. Explanations in a 1946 book said that Five Finger Grass was a leaf split into five sections. The belief was that if hung in one's house, it would ward off any evil. Dragon Blood Sticks were said to bring good luck in money, business, and love. Keeping a stick close on a person was said to bring luck. Dixie Love Perfume was noted for a fragrance to encourage romance. Brimstone is used to keep away evil spirits and counteract spells cast on households, and was burned in rooms needing to be deodorized. These were traditionally available in local shops.[33]

The user often had to take additional steps in a process before using such items, such as washing their hands in "Two Jacks Extract." Only hoodoo shops have been known to sell these supplies. Many voodoo practitioners were believed to be afraid of these hoodoo items.[34]

In American South, hoodoo is mainly practiced by Protestant Christians.[35]

Voodoo and Spiritualism [ edit ]

New Orleans Spiritualist churches honor the spirit of Black Hawk, a Sauk war chief who was influential in early 19th-century Illinois and Wisconsin.[36] The New Orleans Spiritualist religion is a blend of Spiritualism, Vodun, Catholicism, and Pentecostalism. The Voodoo-influenced Spiritualist churches that survive in New Orleans are the result of syncretism of these and other spiritual practices.[37]

See also [ edit ]

References [ edit ]

  2. ^ a b c Ravitz, Jessica (Nov 24, 2008). "Unveiling New Orleans Voodoo". The Salt Lake Tribune.
  11. ^ Anderson, Jeffrey (2008). Hoodoo, Voodoo, and Conjure: A Handbook: A Handbook. GreenWood Press.
  12. ^ Martinie, Louis (2010). A Priest's Head, A Drummer's Hands: New Orleans Voodoo: Order of Service. Black Moon Publishing. ISBN 978-1890399245.
  14. ^ a b Bell, Caryn Cossé Bell. "Review of The Mysterious Voodoo Queen, Mary Laveau: A Study of Powerful Female Leadership in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans by Ina Johanna Fandrich," Labour/Le Travail, Vol. 61 (Spring 2008) Print.
  15. ^ a b c Fandrich, J. Ina. "The Birth of New Orleans' Voodoo Queen: A Long-Held Mystery Resolved. Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Summer, 2005) Print.
  19. ^ Martinie, Louis (2010). Dr. John Montanee: A Grimoire: The Path of a New Orleans Loa, Resurrection in Remembrance. Black Moon Publishing. ISBN 978-1890399474.
  20. ^ "New Orleans Voodoo". Western Folklore. 16 (1): 60. January 1957. doi:10.2307/1497071. ISSN 0043-373X.
  22. ^ Mulira, Jessie Gaston. "The Case of Voodoo in New Orleans," in Holloway, Joseph E. ed. Africanisms in American Culture, 34–68. 1st ed. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1990.
  23. ^ "Katrina Disperses New Orleans' Voodoo Community", NPR, 2005
  25. ^ Reuber, Alexandra (2011-08-15). "Voodoo Dolls, Charms, And Spells In The Classroom: Teaching, Screening, And Deconstructing The Misrepresentation Of The African Religion". Contemporary Issues in Education Research (CIER). 4 (8): 7. doi:10.19030/cier.v4i8.5611. ISSN 1941-756X.
  26. ^ LeBlanc, Amanda Kay (2018-05-27). ""There's nothing I hate more than a racist:" (Re)centering whiteness in American Horror Story: Coven". Critical Studies in Media Communication. 35 (3): 273–285. doi:10.1080/15295036.2017.1416418. ISSN 1529-5036.
  27. ^ a b LeBlanc, Amanda Kay (2018-01-04). ""There's nothing I hate more than a racist:" (Re)centering whiteness in American Horror Story: Coven". Critical Studies in Media Communication. 35 (3): 273–285. doi:10.1080/15295036.2017.1416418. ISSN 1529-5036.
  29. ^ a b c d e f Gordon, Michelle Y. (2012). ""Midnight Scenes and Orgies": Public Narratives of Voodoo in New Orleans and Nineteenth-Century Discourses of White Supremacy". American Quarterly. 64 (4): 767–786. doi:10.1353/aq.2012.0060. ISSN 1080-6490.
  30. ^ Gordon, Michelle. "Midnight Scenes and Orgies": Public Narratives of Voodoo in New Orleans and Nineteenth-Century Discourses of White Supremacy," American Quarterly 64, no. 4 (2012): 767–86. Accessed April 1, 2015.
  31. ^ Alvarado, Denise (2008). "Voodoo Hoodoo Lore". The Mystic Voodoo. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  32. ^ Gandolfo, Jerry (2008). "Personal Correspondence". Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  34. ^ Tallant, Robert. Voodoo in New Orleans.
  35. ^ "The Difference Between Hoodoo And Voodoo – KnowledgeNuts". 26 December 2013.

External links [ edit ]

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