Voodoo, Its Roots, and Its Relatives
Authors: Anderson Jeffrey E. 
Published: February 2024

Voodoo, also known as Voudou, is an African diasporic religion that developed in the Mississippi River Valley. While it was most prominent in New Orleans, reports also describe its practice in St. Louis and St. Joseph, Missouri. It may well have existed elsewhere in the Mississippi Valley and along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Influenced by the traditional faiths of multiple African regions, including Senegambia, the Bight of Benin, and West Central Africa, its most direct ancestor was the Vodun religion of the Fon and related Gbe-speaking peoples of what are now Benin and Togo. Practitioners of these faiths, who arrived in the French Louisiana colony via the slave trade, interacted with each other as well as Native Americans and white Catholics beginning in the 18th century. Following the United States’ purchase of Louisiana, massive waves of Anglo-Americans began to arrive, outnumbering the Creole inhabitants of the area within a few decades. They brought with them their own enslaved workers who practiced a form of supernaturalism most commonly known as conjure. Another major arrival were refugees from the Haitian Revolution whose migration peaked in 1809–1810 when their numbers approximately doubled the population of New Orleans. With them came the religion of Vodou, which had helped spark the Haitian Revolution and would contribute strongly to the development of Voodoo in the Mississippi River Valley. By the mid-1800s, Voodoo had developed an initiatory religion, members of which served a variety of deities, including a serpent spirit known as Blanc Dani and the guardian of entrances called Papa Lébat. Believers held that these divinities corresponded to specific Catholic saints. Dani, for instance, was St. Michael, while Lébat was St. Peter. The spirits of the dead were likewise important to the faith, especially as the sources of power behind the magical aspect of the religion, known as hoodoo. Practitioners performed most of the religion’s rituals with some degree of secrecy, but a notable exception was the St. John’s Eve ceremony that happened each June 23. By the mid-19th century, these commonly took place on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain and involved the arrival by barge of a presiding queen, followed by dancing and feasting. These annual events not only attracted worshippers but sometimes drew substantial numbers of tourists. Following extensive persecution under the guise of preventing illegal slave assembly, putting a stop to fraudulent promises of supernatural aid, or even halting ceremonies designed to help the Confederacy win the Civil War, the religion’s adherents dwindled in numbers until the faith probably disappeared as a living tradition in the mid-20th century. Even today, many view Voodoo as little more than malevolent magic. In recent decades, however, attempts to revive the historical religion have flourished in New Orleans, inspired in part by the positive depiction of the faith pioneered by Zora Neale Hurston and her admirers. Most adherents base their practice on a form of Haitian Vodou modified to match what is known of 19th-century Voodoo.