"The Birth of Marie Laveau, the “Voodoo Queen”" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "Vodou, Voodoo, and Hoodoo: Dispel the Misconceptions & Discover the Truth About Afro-Caribbean Magic"
ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
September 10
The Birth of Marie Laveau, the “Voodoo Queen”
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On
September 10th, 1801, in a small cottage in New Orleans's French Quarter, a
free woman of color named Marguerite Henry gave birth to a daughter who would
become the most famous religious figure in American folk history: Marie
Catherine Laveau, the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans. Laveau spent decades as a
working midwife, herbalist, hairdresser, and spiritual leader, known city-wide
for genuine acts of community care, tending the sick during yellow fever
epidemics and visiting condemned prisoners before their executions. She's also,
more than almost any other figure in American religious history, someone whose
actual biography has been thoroughly tangled up with someone else's.
That someone else was her own
daughter, and untangling the two Marie Laveaus is essential to
understanding either one honestly…
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Marie Laveau had at least two daughters who survived to adulthood, and one of them, following in her mother's footsteps, became known publicly as “Marie Laveau II,” continuing much of her mother's spiritual work and public role after the elder Laveau's influence began to wane. Historical records are genuinely unclear on which specific daughter took up that mantle; some sources point to Marie Euchariste Eloise Laveau, born in 1827, while others suggest her sister Marie Philomène Glapion, born in 1836, may be the more likely candidate. Neither identification is fully settled.
Because
two women, mother and daughter, held the same name and the same public role
across consecutive decades, observers at the time and storytellers ever since
have frequently blended them into a single, impossibly long-lived figure,
feeding directly into persistent legends that the “real” Marie Laveau possessed
supernatural agelessness, appearing mysteriously unchanged decade after decade.
The much more mundane, and in its own way more remarkable, explanation is
succession rather than sorcery: a mother built a position of genuine spiritual
authority substantial enough that her own daughter could credibly step into it
and carry the name forward.
Much
of what circulated as “established fact” about her for most of the twentieth
century traces back to the 1940s work of Robert Tallant, a
white writer working under the WPA's Federal Writers' Project who produced the
most widely read popular account of her life. Tallant's work is genuinely
useful as an archive of collected oral testimony, but it was filtered, as later
scholars examining his methods have noted, through a lens of curiosity,
exoticism, and preconceived assumptions about Voodoo as primitive superstition
rather than a genuine religious tradition. Tallant's own writing at one point
credits Laveau with having “reformed” Voodoo away from devil worship, a claim
that misunderstands the tradition at a basic level; Louisiana Voodoo, like the
Haitian Vodou it descends from, has never centered devil worship in the first
place, making the entire premise of a needed “reform” a fabrication built into
the historical record almost from the start. Because Laveau herself was
illiterate and left no diary or personal correspondence, accounts like
Tallant's, shaped by outside assumptions rather than her own voice, became
disproportionately influential in shaping her popular legacy.
More
recent scholarship has worked deliberately to correct that imbalance. Historian
Carolyn Morrow Long's biography A New Orleans Voudou Priestess
spent years separating documented fact from the semi-truths and outright
fabrication passed down through generations of retelling, drawing on
genealogical, legal, and sacramental records rather than folklore collected
secondhand. That kind of patient archival correction is slow, unglamorous work
compared to the ghost tours and gift-shop paperbacks that keep Laveau's more
sensational legend in circulation, but it's the work that actually lets us say,
with real confidence, what we know and what we don't.
Strip away the conflated timeline and the outside distortion, and what remains is still a genuinely remarkable figure: a free woman of color who built real civic standing and spiritual authority in a city and era that offered her little formal power by any other route. Her charitable work is documented with unusual specificity for someone of her era and status. In 1853, a committee of prominent New Orleans citizens formally called on her by name during a devastating yellow fever epidemic, and contemporary newspaper accounts describe her going out to nurse the fever-stricken “where it was thickest,” work she repeated during the equally deadly 1878 epidemic as well. A May 14th, 1871 article in the New Orleans Republican describes one of her many visits to condemned prisoners in detail, identifying her plainly as “a devout and acceptable member of the Catholic communion.” Her daughter Philomène later confirmed to a reporter from the Picayune that these visits followed strict Catholic ritual, her mother preparing the condemned men's last meal and praying with them rather than performing anything resembling the sensationalized rites later fiction would invent. The writer Lafcadio Hearn, who knew her personally, remembered her simply as “one of the kindest women who ever lived.”
Modern Occultist is proud to present today's “Daily Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the newly-launched Occult Reads... Today, in honor of the tradition Marie Laveau helped shape and the legend that grew up around her, we're recommending a guide written from inside the living practice itself.
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Vodou,
Voodoo, and Hoodoo: Dispel the Misconceptions & Discover the Truth About
Afro-Caribbean Magic
By
Sebastien de la Croix and Diamantino Fernandes Trindade | Llewellyn Worldwide
Sebastien
de la Croix, an initiated Houngan, a genuine Vodou priest, co-writes this guide
with renowned Brazilian spiritualist author Diamantino Fernandes Trindade
specifically to correct the kind of outsider distortion that has shaped so much
popular writing on this subject, Tallant's included. The book draws clear
distinctions between Haitian Vodou, Louisiana Voodoo, and Hoodoo, three related
but genuinely distinct traditions frequently flattened together in popular
retelling, and includes a dedicated exploration of Marie Laveau's own life and
legacy alongside practical spells, deity profiles, and prayers accessible to
readers without requiring formal initiation.
Having
an actual initiated practitioner as co-author matters enormously for a subject
this thoroughly shaped by outside misrepresentation; de la Croix writes from
lived religious authority rather than secondhand ethnographic curiosity,
offering exactly the corrective perspective a figure like Laveau's own legacy
has needed for the better part of a century.
This
is an introductory practical guide rather than an academic history, and readers
wanting the deeper documented biography, including the genuine uncertainty
around which daughter became Marie II, should pair it with a dedicated
historical source. But for readers of this magazine wanting to understand the
actual living tradition Laveau devoted her life to, from a voice actually
initiated within it, this is a genuinely trustworthy place to start.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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