Marie Laveau: Mississippi Queen
Although she’s more officially a Voodoo Priestess, we think we can count among working witches Marie Laveau, the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans. She lives as both someone from history and as a character who was most recently featured in AMERICAN HORROR STORY: COVEN, played by Angela Bassett, where she’s initially a sworn enemy of the witches, it’s really from a position of rivalry.
“Let’s put a pin in that, shall we?”
She was believed to have been born in the French Quarter in New Orleans, and was Creole, and that she and her daughter with the same name (Marie Laveau II) notoriously practiced Voodoo in New Orleans.
Her daughter drew as many as 12,000 spectators in 1874 on St. John’s Eve (June 23-24), practicing their rites on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain, and seemed to revel in theatrical spectacles of Voudoun.
Much of her magical reputation is based on rumor and legend: she was said to have a snake named Zombi, and was renowned as an oracle (although this may have been aided by her working as a hairdresser within prominent households and alternately tapping, curing and/or frightening the servants of the household for information.
X marks the spot…
She died in 1881, and her grave is a place where people go to do her honor and to mark X’s on it in hopes of her granting them a wish. Her legend continues long after her death, and she’s become a popular pop culture figure, appearing in many different guises.
The fictional Laveau’s got powers of necromancy, mind control, sympathetic magic, transmutation, and immortality.
Marie Laveau Working Necromancy
Wicked Marie Laveau Quotes
“I’m over 300 years old. Everyone I done ever met done followed after the Grim Reaper. Some willingly. Others kicking and scratching. I taught myself long ago not to waste tears for the dead.“
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