Marie Laveau, the Mysterious Voudou Queen: A Study of Powerful Female Leadership in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans

By Ina Johanna Fandrich

This study investigates the emergence of powerful female leadership in New Orleans' Voodoo tradition. It provides a careful examination of the cultural, historical, economic, demographic and socio-political factors that contributed both to the feminization of this religious culture and its strong female leaders.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press
• Release date: Feb 18, 2014
• ISBN: 9781935754220

Book preview

MARIE LAVEAU

THE MYSTERIOUS VOODOO QUEEN:

A STUDY OF POWERFUL FEMALE LEADERSHIP

IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY NEW ORLEANS

Ina Johanna Fandrich

University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press

2012

© 2012 by Ina Joanna Fandrich

All rights reserved.

University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press

P.O.Box 40831

Lafayette, LA 70504

www.ULPRESS.org

ISBN:978-1-935754-22-0

To the memory of my grandmother

Katharina Johanna Reichelt

Contents

Foreword to E-book Edition

Acknowledgments

List of Illustrations

Chapter One

Introduction

Chapter Two

The African Cultural and Religious Roots of Voodoo

Chapter Three

New Orleans’ Free Women of Color

Chapter Four

New Orleans’ Voodoo Women

Chapter Five

The Historical Marie Laveaux

Chapter Six

The Mythical Marie Laveaux

Chapter Seven

Conclusion: The Politics of Myth-Making

Appendix A

Illustrations

Appendix B

Genealogical Charts

Appendix C

Chronology

Appendix D

The Term Creole in Louisiana

Notes

Bibliography

Foreword to E-book Edition

Marie Laveau(x) had appeared in my dreams since I was a small child. I first discovered who the lady of my dreams was in 1984, while a first-year graduate student at Temple University in Philadelphia. I have since given numerous presentations about her around the world, wrote my Ph.D. thesis about her, which I defended in 1994, and published my first book about her in 2005.

The present e-book, entitled Marie Laveau, the Mysterious Voudou Queen: A Study of Powerful Female Leadership in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans is a reprint of The Mysterious Voodoo Queen, Marie Laveaux: A Study of Powerful Female Leadership in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans (Routledge, 2005). My editor from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press, James Wilson, and I decided to change the spelling of Marie Laveau without the x at the end in the title of for this book. The reason for this change is simply that today most internet search engines have her listed with this spelling. Historically, the original spelling with the x in the end would actually be more accurate, because Marie Laveaux, the great Voudou Queen herself could not read or write, but her sister and father could and left us many signed documents. Their signatures consistently show the x in the end. It is only after her death that the spelling of her name drops the x. For instance, her famous tomb site in the old St. Louis cemetery No. 1 mentions her name spelled without the x. An inscription describes the popular grave as of the family tomb of the Widow Paris, born Laveau (Veuve Paris, nee Laveau), spelled without the x. Most of the scholarly and non-scholarly publications about her that have appeared during the past decade—and there were many of them—have used this spelling of her name. Therefore, for easier reference and consistency with other publications, this book adopted the Laveau spelling without the x in the title only. Throughout the text of the book we have maintained the original text of the 2005 edition with Laveaux spelled consistently with the x. The only other minor change that has been made for this e-book edition concerns the images in the Appendix. Some of the original illustrations of the 2005 edition were of poor quality and had to be replaced with higher resolution versions of the original pictures.

At this point I want to express my gratitude to my publisher James Wilson from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette for creating this affordable e-version of my book, so that it is finally accessible to a large number of people who previously had not been able to read it. I am also grateful to my previous publisher, Routledge Press, for granting us permission to publish this new electronic edition of the book.

Ina Johanna Fandrich, Ph.D.

Acknowledgments

The present study is a revised and updated version of my 1994 Ph. D. dissertation, originally entitled The Mysterious Voodoo Queen Marie Laveaux: A Study of Power and Female Leadership in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans. The completion of this project marks the end of a long, arduous path. At many points along the way the project seemed impossible to do. Had I been all by myself in these dark moments I would have despaired. But encouraging words from all directions kept me going no matter what obstacles I had to face.

First of all, I want to give tribute to the ancestors who have gone before me. I want to thank New Orleans’ Voodoo priestesses, especially Voodoo Queen, Madame Marie Laveaux, for being who they were, strong, courageous, creative, independent and compassionate women whose powerful examples of female leadership have inspired me to write this study and whose proud and loving spirits have guided me through this work.

Then I wish to express my gratitude to the members of my dissertation committee, John C. Raines, my chief advisor, Gibson Winter, Donald Matthews (all professors in the Department of Religion at Temple University at the time) and Ann Matter (professor of Religious Studies and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Pennsylvania). All of them have been wonderfully supportive of my project and my academic career throughout the years. I received warm encouragement from each one of them when my work was interrupted by a recurring life-threatening illness and when financial difficulties forced me to take on distracting jobs in order to support myself.

During my time as graduate student at Temple University I also received much support and academic advice for my project from professors Molefi K. Asante, Kariamu Welsh-Asante, Charles Blockson, Teshale Tibebu, Karen McCarthy Brown, Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, Sonia Sanchez, Katie Cannon, and Robert Schneider. I am especially grateful to Brenda Dixon-Gottschild and Bob Schneider for suggesting to me to pursue this topic for my Ph.D. thesis after I had written research papers on Marie Laveaux in the courses that I took with them.

In this connection, I also need to acknowledge the support I have received from John Comaroff from the University of Chicago, who provided invaluable advice for my fieldwork in New Orleans. Both his thinking, published in numerous books and articles, and his insightful feedback to my dissertation thesis have been most helpful for this project.

The Graduate School of Temple University funded my last semester of Graduate school with a dissertation completion fellowship, which allowed me to finish my thesis successfully and defend it with distinction on July 13, 1994.

I am deeply indebted to my friends in New Orleans, without whom my research would not have been possible. I thank especially my dear friends Charles and Kristin Neville, who generously accommodated me in their home for most of my year-long stay in New Orleans in 1992, when I collected the bulk of my research data for this study. I also stayed with them during numerous visits to the Crescent City in the years before and since then, until I moved to New Orleans permanently in 2001. The music of Charles and his brothers and their band The Neville Brothers has been a magnificent inspiration for me throughout this work. Charles has lovingly supported my research on Marie Laveaux and Nineteenth-Century New Orleans Voodoo from the time on when I first met him in 1987, while working on my very first research paper on Marie Laveaux. His first-hand experience with New Orleans’ counter-culture has provided me with many important insights.

I thank Richard Campbell, librarian in the Louisiana Collection of the Howard Tilton Library at Tulane University, for assisting me with locating rare manuscripts, articles and books. I am much indebted to Charles Nolan, archivist of the Sacramental Records of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, for making the Church archives accessible to me for my dissertation research. I was honored to have been the first academic researcher who was permitted to do so. As the experiment with me went well, the Archdiocese has opened their archives to a number of other dedicated scholars since then. The data I was able to retrieve with Dr. Nolan’s assistance were maybe the most important pieces of information during my research in New Orleans. With the data that I could retrieve there, I was finally able to make sense of all the other records I had collected from sources such as newspaper articles, Conveyance Office and Notary entries. Sally Reeves, senior archivist in the Notary Archives of the City of New Orleans, was most helpful at every stage of my archival detective work in 1992. I am very grateful for all her suggestions. I thank the staff of the Louisiana Division of New Orleans’ Public Library, especially Greg Osborn, with whom I had many helpful discussions on Louisiana’s free people of color over the years that we have known each other. I also owe gratitude to Lester Sullivan, archivist of Xavier University, the staff of the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University, the staff of the Historical New Orleans Collection, Marie Windell, archivist extraordinaire of the Rare Manuscript Collection at the University of New Orleans, and Mary Linn Wernett, archivist of the Cammie Henry Archives at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, who was very helpful in assisting me with gaining access to the collection of the Louisiana Writers Project. She graciously copied for me all the files on Marie Laveaux and Voodoo that I needed and helped me understand important background information during the two trips I made to Natchitoches. During my stay in New Orleans in 1992, I received valuable information, suggestions, and encouragement for my project from the following esteemed Louisiana historians, the late Joseph Logsdon, the late Glenn Conrad, the late Kimberly Hanger, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Virginia Meacham Gould, and Mary Gehman. While conducting my dissertation research I also received assistance from musician Luther Gray, founder of the The Congo Square Foundation, Jamilah Muhammad and Aussettua Amenkum from the Kumbuka African Dance Ensemble, Voodoo and Yoruba Priestess Ava Kay Jones, Kaia Livers, Charles Gandolfo, the late director and founder of New Orleans Historical Voodoo Museum, and Voodoo priests Miriam and Oswan Chamani.

In the spring of 1994, Marc Auslander, Stanley Arnold, Samuel Reynolds, Terry Rey, Stacy Floyd, and Paul Mayer read sections of my original dissertation or the entire manuscript and gave me much appreciated minor editorial suggestions. Wyatt McGaffey, eminent scholar on the Kongo region, and Ladji Sacko, skilled linguist, provided translations from African languages for me and advised me regarding the history and culture of the Kongo and the Senegambian region, where most of New Orleans’ African population came from. Ten years later, in the spring of 2004, Manuel Vasquez, generously took the time to help me with proofreading the present revised manuscript. I am very grateful for his comments and suggestions.

I wish to express my profound gratitude to Albert Raboteau and Robert Wuthnow at the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University, where I spent two years as Affiliate Research Fellow 1997–99. They and the members of the weekly colloquium at the Center read through most chapters of my thesis and provided excellent comments for minor revisions.

A special thank you goes to my friend and spiritual teacher, the well-known, best-selling author and motivational speaker Iyanla Vanzant and my mastermind sisters, the late Edna Hassell, Tania Bey, Bernice Cain, Lynne Robinson and especially the late Dorothea Dowell who literally prayed me through dark moments and who celebrated with me my successes throughout my years in graduate school.

I am grateful to Dr. Graham Hodges, the series editor, and Kimberly Guinta the editor from Routledge, for publishing my revised dissertation ten years after the defense. My thesis was the first academic study of Laveaux; I have lectured on this research at national and international conferences since 1988; and many people have eagerly—and patiently—awaited its long overdue publication.

I thank my parents, Lothar and Dr. Barabara Fandrich, for moral support throughout the years, and New Orleans Voodoo priest Elmer Glover Haitian Vodou priestess Mama Lola for continued spiritual support. They kept telling me, Your research will be published. You will see! when I had to face major obstacles.

Last, not least, I want to express my gratitude to my late grandmother Katharina Reichelt, the beloved matriarch of my family. Her love, humility, grace, wisdom, faith, and never-ending joy will always be in my heart. Unfortunately, she did not live to see me with a doctor hat as she had wished. She joined the ancestors at age 98 in March of 1994, four months before I defended my thesis. It is to her that I dedicate this work.

List of Illustrations

Chapter One

Introduction

"Our practice is not to clear up the mystery.

It is to make the mystery clear."

—Robert Aitken Roshi¹

According to the tales about her (what the old folks say) Marie Laveaux (1801–1881), New Orleans’ famous Voodoo queen, must have been extremely powerful. For instance, an eyewitness who was interviewed at advanced age in the 1940s recollected the following childhood memory of Laveaux:

She come walkin’ into Congo Square wit’ her head up in the air like a queen. Her skirts swished when she walked and everybody step back to let her pass. All the people—white and colored—start sayin’ that’s the most powerful woman there is. They say, ‘There goes Marie Laveau!’ …²

Although stigmatized as a woman and a person of color and thus excluded from holding public office, narratives and eyewitness accounts seem to indicate that it was she who reigned over the city, not the municipal authorities. An obituary in the New York Times from 1881 remarks that lawyers, legislators, planters, merchants, all came to pay respect to her and seek her offices …³ It would be reasonable then to expect a great deal of information on such an influential character, but the contrary is the case. The historical material on her is fragmentary and contradictory.

The bits of information we have on Marie Laveaux, despite their conflicting, often tendentious nature, indicate that her prominence stemmed from the role she played in New Orleans’ counter-cultural religion Voodoo.⁴ This religion offered a model of and for⁵ female behavior that clearly contradicted the ideal of true womanhood⁶ of the dominant groups in New Orleans, i.e., the white, Catholic, French-Spanish Creoles,⁷ and the white Protestant North Americans.

According to this nineteenth-century ideal construction, a woman was characterized as modest, passive, self-sacrificing, and domestic.⁸ Laveaux, to the contrary, appeared to be the exact opposite: bold, active, self-assertive, and public.⁹ Also, she was not an isolated case in her faith’s traditions. There is substantial evidence that Voodoo priestesses were active in New Orleans before, during, and after her lifetime.

This study concentrates on the rise of powerful female leadership in the formation of an oppressed African-based religious culture, Voodoo, in nineteenth-century New Orleans. My investigation focuses in particular on Marie Laveaux, the controversial key figure of this tradition. Laveaux served as a symbol of resistance for the various oppressed groups in the city against the dominant sector. She represented the African heritage defiantly surviving the hegemonic¹⁰ strategies of a white-supremacist culture; she functioned as an assertion of female power in a patriarchal society; and she embodied outrage over the unjust distribution of power, wealth, and privilege in a profoundly class-stratified environment. In the following, I will provide a careful analysis of her legendary leadership role not only within her religious tradition, but also in context with her social group, the free women of color. As these two groups were deeply connected with one another, it is my contention that both find a paradigmatic exemplification in this famous priestess and community activist.

This book then is not a biography of New Orleans’ Voodoo icon per se, although it contains a wealth of carefully collected data about her. Rather, it explores Laveaux’s significance as the quintessential figure within a larger movement: the emergence of influential free women of color, women conjurers of African or racially mixed origin with strong ties to the Roman Catholic Church and a deep commitment to the spirits of their ancestors, who had considerable influence over the city despite their marginalized social and religious status. The heyday of this movement coincided with Laveaux’s lifetime. But, its origins go back to the colonial years. It challenged the rigid social hierarchies throughout the antebellum period, and slowly disappeared after the end of Reconstruction, under the pressure and merciless vilification and persecution during the Jim Crow years.

This study is a revised and updated version of my 1994 Ph. D. dissertation, whichwas the first comprehensive historical examination of the life of Voodoo Queen Marie Laveaux and the emergence of powerful feamle leadership in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans Voodoo. While there are four novels on her (Robert Tallant, The Voodoo Queen, 1956; Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo, 1972; Francine Prose, Marie Laveau, 1977; Jewell Parker Rhodes, Voodoo Dreams, 1994) my research suggests that none of these accounts are historically accurate. All of them stress in a dramatic manner the rivalry between Laveaux and Dr. John (a prominent 19th century New Orleanian Voodoo priest) and Laveaux’s internal struggle between her loyalty to the good Catholic Church and her calling to serve her evil African ancestral spirit world. Yet, the historical data reveal that: (1) Laveaux was hardly troubled by a conflict between the Christian God and the spirits of her African forbearers as popular Catholicism and most traditional African religions easily blend into one another in a coherent way; (2) Laveaux’s primary enemy was not a male rival in the Voodoo religion but the encroaching racism, sexism, and cultural imperialism by the strictly segregated, profit-oriented, Protestant, Anglo-American new rulers of the city who violently cracked down on New Orleans’ influential and predominantly female free people of color. Hence, by emphasizing a sensationalized, individual drama without providing any structural analysis of the historical context, all of these fictive interpretations of Laveaux’s legendary life miss entirely her enormous socio-political impact, an important omission, which in my view needs to be rectified. In this book, I seek then to debunk, unmask, and disentangle (as womanist theologian Katie Cannon puts it) the silly Halloween monster images of Laveaux that emerge from these soap opera style presentations and are currently sold to the tourists in New Orleans’ French Quarter. Instead, I hope to reinstate her as who she really was, an important leader in American history.

My 1994 thesis was also the first book-length study of New Orleans Voodoo since Robert Tallant’s sensationalistic and in many ways racist classic Voodoo in New Orleans, 1946. Regrettably, this problematic text is still widely regarded as the definitive study on this topic, despite its considerable historical inaccuracies and offensive tone. There are several shorter, more recent, publications on Louisiana’s Voodoo tradition. For instance, Joseph Holloway’s edited volume Africanisms in Ameican Culture, 1990, contains a chapter on The Case of Voodoo in New Orleans by Jesse Gaston Muliera. Unfortunately, the author of this essay relied exclusively on secondary sources, primarily Tallant’s work, instead of conducting archival research on primary sources and offers thus no significant new data. Ron Bodin created a small booklet with the title Voodoo: Past and Present in the same year, 1990, which contains some new interesting information on contemporary Voodoo practices, but no new historical information. Rod Davis mentions New Orleans Voodoo in his volume American Voudou: Journey into a Hidden World, 1999. Unfortunately, he addresses only Yoruba-derived traditions, which were marginal in New Orleans and misses thus completely the enormous influence from the Senegambia region and especially the Kongo region on South Louisiana. Carolyn Long has a well-researched, lengthy chapter on New Orleans Voodoo in her study of commerce in religious supplies, entitled Spiritual Merchants, 2001, in which she relied almost exclusively on primary sources. She displayed a fresh and original approach to the topic, provided a clearly structured overview of African-based spiritual practices in Louisiana from the colonial era to the present time, and included some previously unpublished data on Laveaux and her spiritual tradition. However, none of these authors came up with an extensive, systematic study of New Orleans nineteenth-century Voodoo tradition that draws from original archival sources and is sensitive to the complex shifting dynamics of social stratification along race, class, and gender lines.¹¹

Marie Laveaux has long been a popular Louisiana folk character and was somewhat known throughout the United States. Yet, during the last decade, I have observed a steadily growing interest in her. For instance, her tomb in the old St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 has become a major tourist attraction drawing daily thousands of visitors, and presently there are well over 20,000 websites on the internet mentioning her name (spelled either with or without the x at the end). There are also numerous popular songs and a full-length opera about her. Since we have so much fiction about her life, there is as well a growing thirst for reliable historical information on her. This study is a significant start in providing such data. It proves that serious historical research about Laveaux is indeed possible despite all the claims to the contrary. It is true, New Orleans’ mysterious Voodoo Queen must have taken many of her secrets with her into her grave. However, much of the mystery surrounding her life can be explained through concrete archival documents or circumstantial historical evidence.

OVERVIEW

The present study is structured like an onion, inviting the reader to peel off one layer after the other to uncover the mystery that has shrouded the life of Marie Laveaux, New Orleans legendary Voodoo Queen, and her powerful leadership role. This demystifying process will occur on seven distinct levels.

On the first level, in this introductory chapter, I will set the theoretical framework for my analysis revealing that the lack of research on Laveaux is not purely accidental but connects to structural lacunae in the fields of history (historiography), cultural anthropology (ethnography), and folklore (mythography) and to multiple forms of social stratification prevalent in the United States that originated in global Western imperialism.

On the second level, in chapter two, I shall explore the African cultural and philosophical roots of this urban, female-dominated religious tradition, Nineteenth-Century New Orleans Voodoo. Powerful leadership by women, whether in the religious or the secular realm, contradicted nineteenth-century American mainstream culture. With the exception of the queens of England, being female and a powerful leader was an oxymoron in the European heritage that arrived in the New World. Can the roots of this powerful female leadership within New Orleans Voodoo tradition then be traced back to its African religious and cultural heritage? To answer this question, I will identify the specific ethnic heritage of the African population that the Trans-Atlantic slave trade had forcibly brought to Louisiana. A gender analysis of the religions, cultures, and societies of the respective African lands of origin of Louisiana’s eighteenth and nineteenth-century black population will therefore be the task at hand. While such an analysis in detail would be a book by itself of course, it is possible within the scope of this study to denote some general trends.

In chapter three, I will trace the complex history of New Orleans’ free women of color. The unusual situation of these women provides the sociopolitical context for the feminization of this Voodoo tradition, which will constitute the third level of my investigation. I will provide a historical overview of the presence of free women of color in Louisiana through its French and Spanish colonial phases, the antebellum period, ending with Reconstruction. The history of these simultaneously famous and infamous women helps to explain the female preponderance in both the leadership and the membership of New Orleans’ Nineteenth-Century Voodoo tradition.

Having set the stage in terms of cultural background and socio-political history, I will examine in chapter four the particular constellation of Marie Laveaux’s cultural and religious community, New Orleanian Voodoo, on the forth level of my analysis. According to my research, this urban Louisiana African-based religion is not of Haitian origin but emerged independently from Caribbean influences during the eighteenth century. Louisiana Voodoo as exemplified in the beliefs and practices of Marie Laveaux, the quintessential leader of this tradition, is an indigenous American religious and cultural complex. It was only after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 that due to the turmoil caused by the Haitian War of Independence (1789–1804) large numbers of Haitian refugees poured into the city. About 10, 000 displaced Haitians (black and whote and many of whom free people of color) arrived alone in 1809, doubling the population of the city of New Orleans. These refugees first introduced Haitian Vodou beliefs and practices to Louisiana and blended into the already existing indigenous African-based religion. Regarding gender hierarchies, it appears that the urban New Orleans Voodoo tradition was overwhelmingly female-dominated in both its membership and its leadership. Most known Voodoo leaders were women.

On the fifth level, I am focusing more specifically on the key figure of New Orleans Voodoo, Marie Laveaux herself. Considering all the legends and folktales about her, I am challenged at this point to establish her very historicity. Was there, indeed, a concrete person with this name who triggered the creative imagination of a people to forge such fantastic stories? Which stories can be substantiated by archival data? Which might be fiction? The search for reliable information on the historical Marie Laveaux will be the subject of chapter five. For this purpose, I will comb through the bits and pieces of hard (written) data, unearthed during months and years of archival research. I will compare these findings with the soft (oral) data I have collected, such as the the rich narratives recorded between the late 1920s until the mid-1940s by Zora Neale Hurrston, the Louisiana Writers Project (LWP), and Harry Middleton Hyatt, and the interviews I have conducted since the late 1980s.

Much of the material on Laveaux, however, was never meant to be historical or biographical information but represents an altogether different genre of literature, the folktale or myth. I decided thus to look at the mythical Marie Laveaux in its various appearances on a sixth level. Like Martin Luther King or Mohandas Mahatma Gandhi, she grew beyond her historical limitations and became a symbol for a whole segment of society representing African and female wisdom and power alive and kickin’ in antebellum New Orleans, despite all the strategies of the governor and the white, male city officials to keep the Negro [this includes the Negro women] down.

As such, of course, she embodied a rather contested, controversial message. To counter the stories of her invincible strength, the ruling groups attempted either to silence the voices who told such stories or, if this was not possible, to create counter-myths of her despicable evilness. These conflicting discourses tell us much more about the people who created them and how they deployed their images—or imaginings—of her in order to confirm their social identity than they provide historical details. Hence, decoding the politics of meaning of a highly emotionally charged, complex symbol such as Marie Laveaux reveals the sociopolitical dynamics of the entire city. An examination of the various appropriations of Laveaux will constitute the seventh and final level of analysis presented in my last chapter. I will conclude this study with pondering on my own appropriation of New Orleans’ enigmatic Voodoo Queen who left us such an astonishing legacy of female spiritual authority and influence. By claiming her as a courageous Afrocentric prophetess and community leader I hope to restore the reputation of this so often grossly misunderstood and misrepresented great leader.

To pursue this project, I have borrowed from a host of analytical techniques, drawing from post-structural, post-modern, neo-modern, cultural-marxist, feminist, womanist, and Afrocentric theories. Recognizing the post-structuralist (and feminist) insight that there is no disinterested scholarship separable from the scholar’s autobiography, I will begin with briefly tracing my personal history with this topic, before offering a discussion of the theoretical issues of relevance in this study.

PERSONAL BACKGROUND

Having studied female religious leaders in Christian Europe for many years, I became increasingly frustrated with the dichotomy between saint and witch, between Mary and Eve. Female initiative and women’s control over their own lives (including control over their reproductive power) and over others appeared to be the key issue dividing the good, submissive, passive, vessel-of-God, saint/Mary type from the bad, insolent, self-assertive, active, and independent witch/Eve type.¹² Consequently, the strong women leaders I could identify either sacrificed their sexuality (and vowed strict obedience to a male clerical hierarchy) by joining a religious order like Hildegard of Bingen and Theresa of Avila or they were burned at the stakes as witches like Joan of Arc. Neither category appealed to me as a role model for female spiritual leadership. At the time, I was enrolled as a graduate student in Protestant theology at the University of Hamburg. I aspired to become a Lutheran minister, and looked desperately for foremothers in the past, who held leading positions in the religious field and could provide orientation for my own path. When I was in my last year of theological training, Mary Daly’s ground-breaking critique of patriarchal Christianity Beyond God the Father appeared in a German translation and caused great uproar among women in the church.¹³ After I had read this book, I started to wonder all the more whether female religious leadership is an oxymoron within the framework of Western Christian civilization.

I graduated as the best student of my semester in June 1984. Nevertheless, unlike my friends with whom I had studied for many years but who had been less outspoken regarding their views on women in Christianity, I was not ordained.¹⁴ Instead, I received a scholarship to embark on a Ph.D. program in the Religion Department at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

In the following fall, during my initial semester at Temple, I first encountered African-based New World religions. Not in a religious studies course, but in a black performance class offered in the Dance Department, I saw Maya Deren’s classical documentary film about Haitian Vodou, Divine Horsemen of Haiti. I was deeply fascinated by the spirituality, the mysticism, and the syncretism of this Caribbean religion. During my high school education in Germany I had learned much about African American history and culture. I had studied at great length the Civil Rights Movement and the history of Jazz music, which, according to my German music teacher, was the greatest musical innovation on this planet since Mozart and Beethoven whom she equally adored. In my spare time, I sang Gospel songs and Spirituals in the school choir, listened to African American Blues music and danced in a Rock n’ Roll performance group, but I had never heard of Voodoo before.

In the same fall of 1984, I also came first across the stories about Marie Laveaux and was instantly intrigued by her. Finally, I had found a convincing mixture of both saint and witch. It was precisely this mixture, I thought, that makes her so profoundly attractive and human. Moreover, I happily discovered that Laveaux was not the type of heroine who sacrificed her own life for a greater cause. She did not die of an unnatural cause like Joan of Arc or like any of the female martyrs of the early church. Instead, she led a long and happy life, was blessed with two marriages, and had many children and grandchildren who stood by her bedside when she passed. She appeared to be a very pragmatic, down-to-earth religious leader. She dedicated great portions of her life to helping the sick, the poor, and the dying, but she did not remind me of Mother Teresa. She was a devout Roman Catholic, yet she was also a famous Voodoo queen. Being a person of color in the antebellum American South, she was expected to be in bondage; being a woman, she was presumed to be in a submissive role; and being illiterate, she was surmised to be inferior and helpless in a written culture. Despite all these challenges, Laveaux was apparently able to reverse the power relations in her hometown. Not only was she free from bondage, but she also appeared to have been free from any sort of control or restriction, free to do whatever she wanted, a superwoman who in her own mysterious, almost invisible way controlled the entire city. That woman was the real boss of New Orleans! an eyewitness insisted.¹⁵ I wanted to know more about this legendary character.

Two years later, I decided to write my dissertation on Marie Laveaux. In my naïveté as a foreign student with little understanding of the stratifying principles prevailing in American academia, I had no idea what a can of worms I was about to open. Some of my fellow students started to tease me with Watch out that she [Marie Laveaux] is not gonna put a spell on you! and it seemed impossible to find an advisor for my project. Dr. Leonard Barrett, the Caribbean and African expert in the department, suddenly left due to a stroke, and it took many years until a permanent replacement for him was appointed. I asked almost every faculty member in the department to sponsor my project, but I received rather discouraging answers ranging from straight rejections (Your project is not doable.) to polite excuses (I am not competent in this field.). For a few years, I remained in limbo not knowing what direction my academic life would take. Although nobody specifically had told me, the message that I received between the lines again and again was that Voodoo in the United States was a taboo topic mired in a gray zone between amusement, bewilderment, and fear and definitely not considered to be an appropriate topic for a serious Ph.D. thesis in the field of Religious Studies. Furthermore, working on an obscure African American woman who did not have any significant publication record (In fact, by her own admission, Laveaux could not read or write) seemed not only inappropriate, but outright impossible.

Rewriting my thesis proposal about ten times, I realized that creating a sophisticated methodology could save my project, and poured French dressing over my thesis proposal (one cup Foucault, two cups Bourdieu, etc.) and voilà, in no time, I was able to gather a dissertation committee that was wonderfully supportive of my research plans. Then, the next hurdle had to be passed. I had to figure out how to finance the archival and field research in New Orleans. Although I had applied for several grants, none came through. In the end, I just left without funding, hoping something would work out. I received a refund check from my health insurance from which I lived for a while, and friends and family members came up with additional assistance in form of shelter, food, an old bicycle for transportation, a little pocket money for xerox copies and medical expenses, and occasionally free tickets from my musician friends who put me on their guest list to cheer me up and take a break from my hard work. In New Orleans, I realized that the research I had in mind did not require three months as originally projected, but took an entire year to retrieve a substantial amount of data. When the year ended, I was hooked and would have stayed longer to do more research, but I ran out of time and money and had to return to Philadelphia. Besides these academic and financial obstacles I had to surpass, the data in the field were rather difficult to obtain. For instance, it took me more than five years to attain permission to conduct research in the Sacramental Archives of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, which, in the end, turned out to be the most important part of my archival investigation and helped me greatly to put all my other findings into perspective. If anything, it was persistence and trust in God and the spirits that made this project possible.

My master’s thesis in Hamburg focused on women’s discrimination in early Christianity. I had analyzed the female as symbol of evil in the scriptures of Tertullian—a rather depressing moment in women’s history. In my Ph.D. thesis, I was determined to focus on a topic that primarily addressed resistance, not oppression. I was looking for something that could inspire hope, a