She led voodoo dances in Congo Quad and sold charms and potions from her home in the 1830s. Sixty living after that she was idle holding ceremonies and looked as near the beginning as she did past she started. Her income at St. John's Fen on the banks of Basin Pon[t]chartrain resembled a place from hell, with bonfires, undressed dancing, orgies, and animal sacrifices. She had a odd power another time order and bench and succeeded in positive sure criminals from hovering.
Writer Charles Gandolfo (1992), create of Marie Laveau of New Orleans, states: "Quite a few bear that Marie had a mysterious genesis, in the weigh up that she may concede come from the spirits or as an delegate from the Saints." On the other hand a medal on her alleged resting place, located by the Catholic Clerical, refers to her as "this common voodoo queen."
Who was the real Marie Laveau? She began life as the unauthorized baby of a reminiscent Creole plantation landholder, Charles Laveaux, and his Haitian slave mistress. Sources wrangle but Marie may concede been uneducated in New Orleans in 1794. In 1819 she wed Jacques Paris who, in the function of her, was a free individual of color, but she was without delay free or widowed. Exclaim 1826, she began a instantaneous, common-law marriage to Christophe de Glapion, assorted free individual of color, with whom she would concede fifteen children.
Marie was introduced to voodoo by dissimilar "voodoo doctors," practitioners of a popularized voodoo that emphasized therapeutic and occult magic and seemed to concede a exceedingly contract aspect. Her own practice began past she teamed up with a "heavily tattooed Voodoo doctor"-known variously as Deal with John, Fen John, John Fen, etc.-who was "the youthful contract Voodooist in new Orleans to whip up potions and gris-gris for a proposition" (Gandolfo 1992, 11). Gris-gris or "juju" refers to magic charms or spells, recurrently conjuring gear containing such items as bones, herbs, charms, airstream strip, etc., coupled up in a lump of cloth (Antippas 1988, 16). Deal with John reportedly confessed to friends that his magic was sea humbuggery. "He had been easy to tantalize," writes Robert Tallant in Voodoo in New Orleans (1946, 39), "past he told of retailing a credulous white female a insignificant jar of starch and water for five dollars."
