Hedley Lamarr just sent them away for a while:
Posted on 10/31/2005 11:45:04 AM PST by caryatid
The last time Don Glossop saw his customers they were ritually burning green candles, hoping voodoo would pierce the federal bureaucracy and hasten the arrival of desperately needed relief checks.
Glossop's shop, New Orleans Mistic, has been closed since Hurricane Katrina swamped the city two months ago, and most of his clients, who practice a local variant of voodoo, have scattered across the country.
He fears that Katrina, which laid waste to entire neighborhoods and claimed hundreds of lives here, may take another casualty: New Orleans' status as the country's voodoo capital.
"As of today I would say it's pretty dead," Glossop said. "Even the tourist shops are in jeopardy. There is a chance for a huge loss here."
Voodoo has long been entrenched in New Orleans, quietly practiced in homes with altars, candles and incense to solve problems of the heart and wallet. Before the storm tore through, about 15 percent of the city's population actively practiced, according to Lisa Fannon, a tour guide, though estimates vary widely.
Voodoo is part of the vernacular here, showing up in jazz and conversation. Some residents still sprinkle red brick dust on their doorway steps to ward off evil spirits.
It's an economic draw as well, enticing curious tourists and their pocketbooks into stores such as Glossop's.
While plans are still on for an annual voodoo fest for Monday, organizer Brandi Kelley said the event will be much smaller this year because many drummers and dancers were forced to relocate.
The ceremony at her shop will focus mainly on healing the city.
"We have got to call on the ancestors for help and get real serious about it," Kelley said. "The spirit is in the city. It's the spirit of this city that is going to rise from the ashes."
If only she could find her snake for the closing ceremony. He was supposed to be in a bathtub of a friend's apartment.
"They say he's somewhere in this room full of debris," Kelley said, her voice trailing off.
It wasn't supposed to be this way. The "go away" hurricane ritual was performed in July, just as it always is at the start of the hurricane season.
"It didn't quite work out so well," acknowledged Giselle Moller, manager of Marie Laveau House of Voodoo. But, she said, it may have helped a bit. Even before Katrina, some thought voodoo was fading in New Orleans because the younger generation was less interested in the complicated practice, which involves substantial memorization of rituals and songs, Glossop said.
But New Orleans is not giving up on voodoo, notwithstanding evangelist Franklin Graham's recent comments that the city's Mardi Gras revelry and ties to voodoo were adverse to Christian beliefs.
Defenders say voodoo is a legitimate African-based religion that has been unfairly maligned in movies and popular culture.
"Voodoo is not some kind of black magic cult," said Wade Davis, a Washington-based National Geographic explorer-in-residence who has studied the religion extensively in Haiti. "It's the distillation of very profound religious ideas that came over during the tragic era of slavery."
In New Orleans, much of what is practiced these days is a system of folk magic. Some also practice Haitian voodoo.
As the city revives, proponents hope voodoo will make a comeback, too, because it's part of the intrigue that draws visitors.
"I think it's going to be a very strong part of what will get people back here," said Jameson King, who works in one of the voodoo shops in the French Quarter. "We're here for more than drinking."
Well, no wonder their spells have not worked. I think I see the problem ... the voodoo folks think the city burned. Listen up, folks, a flood is not a fire ... fire is hot and burns ... flood is wet and drowns ...
* ping *
LAMARR: "Now go do that voodoo, you do, so WELLLLLLLL!!!!!"
Guess the voodoo priest won't be rising the dead from sleep anyway soon.
Well, they are the same idiots that think a spirit represented by a snake is a good spirit.
...voodeedoo...
http://www.illwillpress.com/voodoo.html
New Orleans may NEVER survive the exposure of their filthy, dependent and corrupt underbelly and infrastructure...
Maybe it would be best to simply explode the rest of the levees..and flush the toilet..
Semper Fi
When visiting N.O. about 3 years ago we took a guided tour of the St. Louis cemetery (can't remember if it was #1 or #3, it's the one behind the French Quarter).
At the end of the tour the guide took us to the house of a local voodoo priestess. Now I'm pretty flexible and I'm used to dealing with odd folks (I live in Vermont :lol: ) but this woman was easily the freakiest one I ever met. She made no sense, just rambled on and on. We were trapped in her backyard near the chicken coop for over a half hour because none of us in the group wanted to be rude and cut her off.
I often wonder what happened to her after Katrina....
Tweak
I love the esoteric mysticism of the green candles! A not too subtle association with the color of money and/or gubmint checks ... LOL
I would not go quite so far as recommending flushing the toilet [yet] ... but I do think this calls for a liberal applicaton of TidyBowl!
Isn't it this guy's job to make it, uh, un-dead?
It's a pity that places like NO that have so much flavor have to be so whacked out. Like San Francisco, it's a great place to visit, but you couldn't live there. In SF, after work, all the executives head out to the suburbs and the homeless come staggering in. Around dark, it looks like Dawn of the Dead. Thanks liberals.
Pat Robertson may just be right about divine retribution. Any city that prioritizes lap dances and voodoo deserves to be swept away. Likewise, some big Gay celebration got cancelled by Wilma's five feet of water in Key West.
Even though there are still some practioneers of the craftof voodoo( I remember going to a cool voodoo temple/museum/info center on north rampart last year. The main voodoo influence is in Florida and other areas like New york which have large Haitian populations. It was pretty much just a tourist thing in nola for years even though some old timers still practiced it some aspects of it.
I dont buy that 15 percent figure I dont include people such as my self that might have bought some candle or someharmless goodluck charm
My mother once told me of a time when the voodoo-prone residents of the French Quarter [along the ramparts] would wash their banquettes with urine each morning. Theoretically, this was to keep the ha'nts away. My mother, a practical woman, said ... well, they had to empty their chamberpots somewhere ... LOL
She also told me that 'they' were very careful not to allow anyone to take possession of their nail clippings or strands of hair ... to use to cast a spell. LOL
Much 'voodoo' of the old days was a result of no education and much superstition. All those old practices are long gone ... what we have now is faux voodoo for purely commercial purposes.
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