Voodoo queen www.voodoohealingspells.com Voodoo in New Orleans can scarcely be separated from its dominant figure, Marie Laveau, about whom many legends swirl. According to one source (Hauck 1996): She led voodoo dances in Congo Square and sold charms and potions from her home in the 1830s. Sixty years later she was still holding ceremonies and looked as young as she did when she started. Her rites at St. John’s Bayou on the banks of Lake Pon[t]chartrain resembled a scene from hell, with bonfires, naked dancing, orgies, and animal sacrifices. She had a strange power over police and judges and succeeded in saving several criminals from hanging. Writer Charles Gandolfo (1992), author of Marie Laveau of New Orleans, states: “Some believe that Marie had a mysterious birth, in the sense that she may have come from the spirits or as an envoy from the Saints.” On the other hand a plaque on her supposed tomb, placed by the Catholic Church, refers to her as “this notorious 'voodoo queen.'” 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. Marie was introduced to voodoo by various “voodoo doctors,” practitioners of a popularized voodoo that emphasized curative and occult magic and seemed to have a decidedly commercial aspect. Her own practice began when she teamed up with a “heavily tattooed Voodoo doctor"-known variously as Doctor John, Bayou John, John Bayou, etc.-who was “the first commercial Voodooist in new Orleans to whip up potions and gris-gris for a price” (Gandolfo 1992, 11). Gris-gris or “juju” refers to magic charms or spells, often conjuring bags containing such items as bones, herbs, charms, snake skin, etc., tied up in a piece of cloth (Antippas 1988, 16). Doctor John reportedly confessed to friends that his magic was mere humbuggery. “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.” In time Marie decided to seek her own fortune. Working as a hairdresser, which put her in contact with New Orleans’ social elite, she soon developed a clientele to whom she dispensed potions, gris-gris bags, voodoo dolls, and other magical items. She now sought supremacy over her rivals, some fifteen “voodoo queens” in various neighborhoods. According to a biographer (Gandolfo 1992, 17): Marie began her take-over process by disposing of her rival queens. . . . If her rituals or gris-gris didn't work, Marie (who was a statuesque woman, to say the least) met them in the
street and physically beat them. This war for supremacy lasted several years until, one by one, all of the former queens, under a pledge, agreed to be sub-queens. If they refused, she ran them out of town. By age thirty-five Marie Laveau had become New Orleans’s most powerful voodoo queen-then or since. She won the approval of the local priest by encouraging her followers to attend mass. While she charged the rich abundantly, she reportedly gave to the needy and administered to the suffering. Her most visible activities, however, were her public rituals. By municipal decree (from 1817) slaves were only permitted to dance publicly at a site called Congo Square. “These public displays of Voodoo ceremonies, however, revealed nothing of the real religion and became merely entertainment for the curious whites” (Antippas 1988, 14-15). More “secret” rituals-including fertility rituals-took place elsewhere, notably on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain. It is difficult at this remove to assess just how much of Marie’s rituals was authentic voodoo practice and how much was due to her “incredible imagination and an obsession for the extreme.” She staged rituals that were “simulated orgies.” Men and women danced in abandonment after drinking rum and seeming to become possessed by various loas (figure 1). Seated on her throne, Marie directed the action when she was not actually participating. She kept a large snake called Le Grand Zombi that she would dance with in veneration of Damballah, shaking a gourd rattle to summon that snake deity and repeating over and over, “Damballah, ye-ye-ye!” Once a year Marie presided over the ritual of St. John’s Eve. It began at dusk on June 23 and ended at dawn on the next day, St. John’s day. Hundreds attended, including reporters and curious onlookers, each of whom was charged a fee. Drum beating, bonfires, animal sacrifice, and other elements-including nude women dancing seductively-characterized the extended ritual. Offerings were made to the appropriate loas for protection, including safeguarding children and others from the Cajun bogeyman, Loup-Garou, a werewolf that supposedly fed on the blood of victims (Gandolfo 1992, 18-23). Voodoo healing spells http://www.voodoohealingspells.com Love spells http://www.voodoohealingspells.com/love-spells.html Witchcraft spells http://www.voodoohealingspells.com/wiccan-witchcraft-witches-spells.html Money spells http://www.voodoohealingspells.com/money-spells.html Protection spells http://www.voodoohealingspells.com/protection-spells.html Attraction spells http://www.voodoohealingspells.com/attraction-spells.html Fertility spells http://www.voodoohealingspells.com/fertility-pregnancy-spells.html Spells that work http://www.voodoohealingspells.com/spells-that-work.html
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