Louisiana Voodoo

Louisiana Voodoo grew in New Orleans and the surrounding parishes from the late eighteenth century, out of the meeting of enslaved and free West and Central Africans, many of them from Dahomey and Kongo, with French and Spanish Catholicism, and then with the refugees who came from Saint-Domingue during and after the revolution of 1791-1804. In the nineteenth century it was public: Sunday gatherings in Congo Square, priestesses who read and worked for paying clients, and a reputation that newspapers made as much as practitioners did. Its most famous priestess, Marie Laveau, is known almost entirely through legend and report rather than through anything she wrote, and the twentieth century re-formed the tradition through the Spiritual churches and then through the tourist trade.

The nineteenth-century ritual line ran on dance, drumming, song and spirit possession, led by priestesses and priests; the working line around it used candles, oils, powders, gris-gris bags, saint images, the dead and the cemetery. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries much public practice has moved into Spiritualist churches and into the shops of the French Quarter, while the ritual and initiatory line is kept by families and houses apart from the tourist version.

Louisiana Voodoo is the religion of a specific Black and Creole community, and it is not the 'voodoo' of films and Halloween shops. Its initiatory and possession rites are closed, its priestesses and priests are made by other priests and by the spirits rather than by reading, and the tradition's own people have objected for two centuries to outsiders selling an imitation of it. The entry describes the tradition's public history and does not reproduce what is held by its initiates.