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To: alt.religion.orisha,alt.lucky.w,alt.paranormal.spells.hexes.magic,alt.magick,alt.magick.tyagi From: catherine yronwodeSubject: Marie Laveau, Voodoo, and Hoodoo Date: Fri, 11 May 2001 19:30:23 GMT I am bringing this to usenet from an e-list in mid-stream because i would like more input... in what follows i outline my theory about the "authenticity" of Marie Laveau's claim to being a Voodoo Queen, and ponder the relations between hoodoo and Voodoo. In earlier posts in this thread, i had quoted Lucky Hoodoo's statement that Voodoo rites usually involve food offerings, and had posted the entirety of Mambo Racine's Voodoo "money wanga" rite for non-initiates in confirmation of what he said. Jo wrote: > I have seen spells thought to be authentic from Marie Laveau herself > that did not involve an offering of food, yet she is referred to as > the Queen of Vodou is she not? This is an IMMENSE topic, Jo! I shall attempt to briefly do it justice, but it would require about 25,000 words to truly document and explicate. I'm just gonna hit the high spots here... First, Marie Laveau lived during the mid 19th century, but the spells "thought to be authentic from Marie Laveau" are usually constructed according to typical urban New Orleans hoodoo paradigms, much like any other spell Harry M. Hyatt collected there during the 1930s. That is, among other things, many of the supposedly authentic Laveau spells require the use of free-standing paraffin candles (household candles, 6" offertory candles, tapers, etc.), which were not available in commerce until after the Civil War. Those candles alone mark the spells as adaptations from Laveau at best -- and fabrications in her name at worst. Cf. "Black and White Magic of Marie Laveau" by the pseudonymous author "Bivens, N.P." Sure, there are some spells attributed to Laveau that do not require candles -- but ascribing those to Laveau still begs the question of whether any of spells in question really ARE similar to what Marie Laveau taught, because no true chain of provenance has been established by Bivens or others. But let's say, just for the sake of argument, that Bivens' spells really do acurately echo Laveau's spell-work of the mid 19th century, okay? The Bivens spells are hoodoo, much like the spells that Harry M. Hyatt collected in New Orleans in the 1930s. They do not look like Voodoo rituals at all. If they actually came from Laveau, then she was working hoodoo, not Voodoo, and her claim to being the Queen of Voodoo is false. On the other hand, let's assume that the hoodoo spells ascribed to Laveau by Bivens are modern constructions written by Bivens, not by Laveau -- and that Laveau herself actually taught material that truly WAS Voodoo. If that were the case, we could look also to Laveau's RELIGIOUS rites and expect to see echoes of authentic Dahomeyan or Haitian Voodoo in them. But instead we see a lot of inaccuracies. For instance, Laveau is well known to have had a snake that she called "Zombi," but the name of the snake-god in Voodoo is Damballah, not Zombi -- and Zombi means "a corpse reanimated for the purpose of doing day-labour." So Laveau seems to have actually known VERY little about Voodoo -- probably just a few African words that she gleaned from slaves who came to New Orleans in the wake of the Haitian slave rebellion -- and which she applied almost at random to the props she used in her dances and performances. Let us look more deeply the things that characterize Voodoo rites -- those food offerings LuckyH mentioned and which we saw in Mambo Racine's post of a Voodoo money-drawing ritual suitable for non-initiates to perform -- and the use of praise-songs to the deities, which also appeared in Mambo Racine's post. If Voodoo survided in New Orleans in any coherent form, we would expect to see remnants of food offerings in New Orleans hoodoo, whether or not we saw them in the writings attributed to Marie Laveau. Food offerings do not appear in the texts ascribed to Laveau by Bivens but, in fact, we DO see remnants of food offerings in spells that Hyatt collected from New Orleans -- and from Georgia, Tennessee, and Florida as well. The food offerings in hoodoo are not organized or liturgically ordered, as in true Voodoo, but they show up over and over, in little hints and flashes. Setting candles into saucers of Karo syrup and rock candy ... killing a rooster and taking his leg to a crossroads ... pinning a name-paper into a beef tongue and setting it up in a bucket of vinegar with candles on it ... these ALL are obvious African Traditional Religion survivals in hoodoo. But they are remnants, not the religions per se. Another reason we can say that hoodoo spells lack religious coherence is because the other major liturgical activity that characterizes Voodoo rites -- praise songs and dance (with or without trance possession) -- is lacking almost entirely in hoodoo root work. The use of brief spoken exhortations -- especially "In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost," found in many hoodoo spells -- is formulaic and is a direct borrowing from European spell-books such as "Pow Wows or the Long-Lost Friend" by John George Hohman. Such formulaic invocations bear little or no resemblance to the leborate dancing, praise singing, and trance-possession that charcterizes ATRs. So on the whole, it seems that Marie Laveau was not an initiated Voodoo Mambo and that the form of New Orleans paraffin-candle-centered hoodoo practiced today in Laveau's name developed in its present form after the Civil War (and thus after her death), and, like hoodoo elsewhere in the South, contains African religious remnants mingled with elements of European folk magic. Okay, that's enough for now -- like i said, this topic could legitimately fill a book or a PhD dissertation. All i am trying to do here is to get people to apply critical thinking to what they are told rather than to accept it unexamined, not to nail down a thesis. cat yronwode Hoodoo in Theory and Practice -- http://www.luckymojo.com/hoodoo.html Lucky W Amulet Archive --------- http://www.luckymojo.com/luckyw.html Lucky Mojo Spells Archive ------ http://www.luckymojo.com/spells.html Hoodoo and Blues Lyrics --------- http://www.luckymojo.com/blues.html No personal e-mail, please; just catch me in usenet; i read it daily. Lucky Mojo Curio Co. http://www.luckymojo.com/luckymojocatalogue.html Send e-mail with your street address to catalogue@luckymojo.com and receive our free 32 page catalogue of hoodoo supplies and amulets Copyright (c) 2001 catherine yronwode. All rights reserved.
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