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).
Magic or Myth?
Claims regarding Marie Laveau’s alleged powers persist. She represented herself as a seer and used fortune-telling techniques such as palmistry (Gandolfo 1992, 26). There is no evidence that Marie’s clairvoyant abilities were any more successful than those of any other fortuneteller. We know that people attest to the accuracy of a reading because they do not understand the clever techniques involved, like “cold reading.” So called because it is accomplished without any foreknowledge, this is an artful method of fishing for information from the sitter while convincing him or her that it comes from a mystical source (Hyman 1977).Actually, many of Marie’s readings may not have been so “cold” after all. Far from lacking prior information about her clients, she reputedly used her position as a hairdresser for gossip collecting, discovering “that her women clients would talk to her about anything and everything and would divulge some of their most personal secrets to her” (Gandolfo 1992, 12). She also reputedly “developed a chain of household informants in most of the prominent homes” (Antippas 1988, 16).
Doubtless such intelligence gathering would be helpful to a fortune-telling enterprise (just as “mediumistic espionage” was utilized by later spiritualists [Keene 1976, 27]). It could also be beneficial to a business of dispensing charms, like Marie’s:
Most of her work for the ladies involved love predicaments. Marie knew the personal secrets of judges, priests, lawyers, doctors, ship captains, architects, military officers, politicians, and most of New Orleans’s other leading citizens. She used her knowledge of their indiscretions and blackmailed them into doing whatever she wanted. She was then financially reimbursed by her elite female clients. Most of the time, this was how her love potions and gris-gris worked, which is apparently 100% of the time (Gandolfo 1992, 12).Such tactics may help explain the claim, mentioned earlier, that Marie “had a strange power over police and judges and succeeded in saving several criminals from hanging” (Hauck 1996). But we should beware of taking such claims too seriously. When we seek to learn the facts, we soon realize we have entered the realm of folklore. There are, for example, rather conflicting versions of one case, ca. 1830, in which an unidentified young man was charged with “a crime” (rape, according to one source) and at the request of his father Marie performed certain rituals. Supposedly the case was either dismissed or the young man acquitted, and Marie was rewarded with a cottage on Rue St. Ann. However, as one writer concedes, “No one is sure how Marie actually won the case. . . .” Therefore, of course, there is no evidence that she did (Gandolfo 1992, 14-15; cf. Tallant 1946, 58; Martinez 1956, 17-19).
Legends of Marie’s beneficent aspect are rivaled by those of her sinister one. A story in this regard involves the alleged hex of a New Orleans businessman, J. B. Langrast, in the 1850s. Langrast supposedly provoked Marie’s ire by publicly denouncing her and accusing her of everything from robbery to murder. Soon, gris-gris in the form of roosters’ heads began to appear on his doorstep. As a consequence, Langrast reportedly grew increasingly upset and eventually fled New Orleans (Nardo and Belgum 1991, 89-92).
I have traced the Langrast story to a 1956 book of Mississippi folktales which describes the “businessman” as a junk dealer and bigamist (Martinez 1956, 78-83). Such a man might have various reasons for leaving town. Claims that Marie Laveau invoked a loa to curse Langrast with insanity are invalidated by a complete lack of proof that he ever became insane. In fact his alleged flight could easily be attributed to simple fear, the belief that “Marie Laveau’s followers might kill him if he stayed” (Nardo and Belgum 1991, 90-91).
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