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Today we celebrate the Voodoo Queen
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A special offer for my loyal subscribers! Get a free gris gris bag with every purchase of a Marie Laveau Conjure Candle! To take advantage of this offer, you MUST indicate in the comment section upon checkout that you are a loyal subscriber and wish to collect
your Laveau Voodoo gris gris bounty. This is an email subscriber list only offer.
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Queen Marie Conjure Candle
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Celebrate your inner Queen and reclaim your power with a Queen Marie Laveau Fixed Conjure Candle! If anyone knew how to live as a Queen, it was the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans, Marie Laveau.
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Magic of Marie Laveau Vévé Candle
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This beautiful candle is the ritual symbol - referred to as a vévé in New Orleans Voodoo - for Marie Laveau, the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans. It is the version that appears in my book, The Magic of Marie Laveau. It is perfect for your altar or to create sacred space anywhere you decide to burn it.
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This exquisite candle is another version of the ritual symbol - referred to as a vévé in New Orleans Voodoo - for Marie Laveau, the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans.It is the black and white version of a painting I did back in 2008. It is perfect for your altar or to create sacred space anywhere you decide to burn it.
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Marie Laveau Wishing Tomb Candle
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As a way to have access to Marie Laveau's Wishing Tomb at all times, you may use our Marie Laveau Wishing Tomb Candle. Using the principles of sympathetic magic, you can interact with the photograph – which serves as a sympathetic link from the physical world to the spirit world – to make your crossmarks and petition the great Voodoo
Queen.
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The Marie Laveau Voodoo Grimoire
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Early reviews are coming in from some powerhouse OGs of witchcraft and the African traditional religions. I am so blessed to receive such endorsements of my book. It was a true work of love. “Mam’zelle Marie and the legacy of Voodoo have often been maligned by mainstream media and treated with cock-eyed reporting from well-meaning apologists. Denise has done the research needed to tell the whole story. She portrays the life and works of Mam’zelle with respect, understanding, and emotional sensitivity. It reads well as the history of a community led by the influence of powerful and compassionate women. Sit back, read, gather your altar
items, and prepare to conjure your best life. Power forward.”
—Yeye Luisah Teish, author of Jambalaya and A Calabash of Cowries “The Marie Laveau Voodoo Grimoire is the stuff! Everything about this book feels just right. It’s spare yet lush; vintage
but with a fresh tone. Like Grandma’s dresser, it’s filled with sensual delights and well-kept secrets. I was hooked from page one. I want this book. I need this book in my magickal library, and you will too. Sister, you had me at Potlikker!”
—Priestess Stephanie Rose Bird, magick-maker, artist, and author of Motherland Herbal, African American Magick, The Healing Tree, and numerous others “The Marie Laveau Voodoo Grimoire is, without a doubt, the most delightful book I’ve read this year! Offering a glimpse into Marie Laveau’s life via historical tidbits, newspaper clippings, and quotations from those who knew her, this book is anything but a typical grimoire. While you’ll find the anticipated fare of charms,
spells, formulas, and rituals, there’s also the unexpected surprise of recipes for bath and beauty, laundry and cleaning products, cures and remedies for minor afflictions, and—my personal favorite—traditional Southern dishes to prepare for family and friends. What Denise Alvarado has given us with this book is much more than a simple grimoire. It’s a rare gift—a quintessential guide to conjuring a magical life—and one that all practitioners will use and cherish.”
—Dorothy
Morrison, author of Utterly Wicked
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Marie Laveau's Influence on New Orleans Culture
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Marie Laveau has influenced New Orleans culture in at least three distinct ways: 1. Her name is embedded in the tourist industry and remains a prime attraction in that context, 2. She is the subject of a whole body of folklore associated with the city, and 3. She is remembered through her magickal and spiritual legacy which is most easily seen in the commercial Voodoo
and Hoodoo sector.
First, the Voudou Queen’s presence is obvious to anyone visiting the French Quarter in New Orleans. Shops are named for her, products are crafted bearing her name, ghost tours include her cottage and grave site, and practitioners take on her last name whether or not they possess any biological ties to her. Much to the chagrin of Christian adversaries,
her name alone drives much of New Orleans’ tourist industry. Her reputation for innovation and entrepreneurship, as well as her overall business acumen, served to fuel a niche market for herbalists, diviners, ritual performers, and Hoodoos that didn’t exist before New Orleans was graced with her presence.
This hybrid commercial/spiritual space did not come without a price, however. The local police routinely harassed Laveau, but she kept them at bay with the mere threat of her conjure.
And journalists often mocked the Voudous in local newspapers with the most salacious stories going viral the old-fashioned way, copied and redistributed in newspapers around the nation. Nonetheless, Marie Laveau excelled at navigating an oppressive, racist society. She walked gracefully as a Christian, just as easily as she danced with Li Grand Zombi, the sacred serpent.
Second, Marie Laveau is at the center of New Orleans’ folklore. Her spirit can be seen in and around the city, flying over graves, dancing in cemeteries, walking down streets in the French Quarter and haunting local shops. Take the story about Elmore Lee Banks, for example, who reportedly saw Marie Laveau’s ghost one day in the mid-1930s near St. Louis Cemetery No. 1. As Banks recalled, an old woman dressed in a long white dress and wearing a blue tignon came into the drugstore where he
was a customer and stood next to him. He had been telling the drugstore owner what he needed when he noticed the owner became bug-eyed and “ran like a fool into the back of the store.” Not knowing what was going on, Elmore turned and looked at the old woman, who started laughing and laughing. Finally, the woman asked, “Don’t you know me?” Elmore replied, “Why, no ma’am. Where did the drugstore man go?” Apparently, that was the wrong answer, because she suddenly slapped Banks upside the head.
According to Banks, she then “jumped up in the air and went whizzing out the door and over the top of the telephone wires. She passed right over the graveyard wall and disappeared. Then I passed out cold.” Banks said he was awakened to whiskey being poured down his throat by the proprietor, who told him, “That was Marie Laveau . . . she been dead for years and years but every now and then she come up in here where people can see her. Son, you just been slapped by the Queen of the Voodoos!”
(Tallant 1946, 130–131).
Third, Marie Laveau left a very specific legacy in her magick and spirituality. Yes, she has achieved rock star status in death, inasmuch as a Voudou Queen can achieve that status, but if we look at how she lived her life, she seemed to be more concerned with serving the people in her community than seeking recognition or fame. Evidence of her
spiritual legacy can be seen in untold accounts written over the years of rootdoctors claiming to be descendants, relatives, or apprentices of Marie Laveau. They each profess unequivocally that the Hoodoo they do was the Voudou she did. Her legend is “kept alive by twentieth-century conjurers who claimed to use Laveau techniques, and it is kept alive through the continuing practice of commercialized voodoo in New Orleans” (Salzman, Smith, and West 1996, 3:1581). It is also kept alive through
hybrid truth/fiction storylines found in books such as The Voodoo Queen and Voodoo in New Orleans by Robert Tallant. Writers and academics continue to rely on these storylines as primary sources of information. A participant in the Louisiana Writers’ Project during the 1930s and ‘40s and one of Louisiana’s best-known authors, Robert Tallant (1909–1957) had access to numerous interviews by people who knew Marie Laveau or were alive during her lifetime. Instead of adhering to facts in his books,
he sensationalized much of the material and transformed it into popular novel format. His choice to do so influenced the Laveau legend perhaps more than any other single factor.
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