Louisiana Voodoo

Louisiana Voodoo is a New Orleans centred tradition, related to but historically and ritually distinct from Haitian Vodou, formed over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from the West African Vodun and Kongo religious practice carried by enslaved people, reinforced by Haitian refugees arriving after the Haitian Revolution, blended with Louisiana Catholic devotional practice and with the folk conjure tradition of Hoodoo. Its most documented nineteenth century leaders are Marie Laveau and her predecessor Doctor John; the tradition survives today in both reconstructed devotional lineages and commercialized public forms.