Marie Laveau

The teaching

Taught from what the newspapers of her city recorded of her rites, with Zora Neale Hurston's Hoodoo in America (1931).

The Church and the spirits

Marie Laveau kept two services side by side. She heard Mass and kept her place in the cathedral parish, and she served the spirits of New Orleans Vodou, the religion that West African and Haitian people had brought to the city. In that faith God is above all, and beneath Him the spirits and the honoured dead come near to help the living; many of the spirits are honoured in the figures of the Catholic saints, so that a statue of St Peter or of the Virgin on a home altar can stand for a power of Africa as well.

The altar and the service

The service centres on the altar: statues of the saints, candles, flowers, and offerings of food and drink set out for the spirits, before which the priestess prays, sings and calls. In the larger rites that the newspapers describe there is drumming, song in Louisiana Creole and dancing, and a spirit may come down and mount a dancer, as the faith says, moving in the dancer's body; the priestess leads the gathering, keeps its order and speaks with the spirits on its behalf. The snake is honoured as the sign of a great spirit, the Damballah of Haiti, whom old New Orleans called Li Grand Zombi.

St John's Eve

The great feast of the year is St John's Eve, the night of 23 June, when the faithful gather by the water on the shores of Bayou St John and Lake Pontchartrain. The newspapers of her later years tell of fires on the shore, a shared meal, songs and dances through the night and washing in the lake at midnight, and some of them name Marie Laveau as the queen who led it. The feast of the saint who baptised in the Jordan is kept with water and with fire.

Gris-gris and the work

People came to the priestess for help in the trials of life: love, health, money, a case in the courts, an enemy. Her answer is the work: prayers and candles at the altar for the one who asks, and gris-gris, small charms of cloth holding herbs, roots, stones and other small things, blessed and given to be carried or kept for protection and luck. The herbs of the craft went into baths and teas as well, and some of them are poisons; the house teaches them as the craft's lore and gives no recipes.

Mercy for the sick and the condemned

The priestess's service reaches those whom others leave alone. In the epidemics she nursed the sick, and she went to men condemned to hang, prayed with them and set up an altar in the condemned cell with candles and the images of the saints, so that no man went to his death without prayer. In her faith the care of the dying is part of the service owed to God, to the saints and to the spirits.