Meet the Catholics who practice Voodoo in New Orleans

An altar in Voodoo Authentica. Photo by Micah Danney.

NEW ORLEANS — In the heart of New Orleans’ French Quarter, a four-foot Voodoo doll is propped at the entrance to Voodoo Authentica Cultural Center and Collection. The shelves and walls inside are filled with items like sage and charms, and cluttered altars featuring a mix of African carvings and Catholic iconography.

Brandi Kelley, the shop’s owner, and her employees have been answering questions from curious tourists since she opened the place in 1996. In recent years the inquiries have gotten more earnest, Kelley said. There seem to be less assumptions based on sinister hocus-pocus references popularized by certain movies, and a lot of young people show interest in learning about Voodoo practices.

“Voodoo is a religion,” Kelley asserts, noting that she sometimes hears the New Orleans version referred to as a tradition. African Vodun and Haitian Vodou, precursors to the city’s version, tend to be more widely accepted as religion, Kelley said.

Whatever the classification, Voodoo is a spiritual practice whose evolution tells the story of New Orleans and the dramatic, often tragic, global forces that gave rise to the city. 

Africans who were kidnapped and transported to the Caribbean as slaves brought their religious practices with them. As different ethnic groups mixed, so did their traditions. Vodun, named for a West African word for spirit, originated in the West African Kingdom of Dahomey. In the French colony of Haiti, it evolved with other traditions into Vodou. 

The French plantation owners strictly prohibited Vodou rituals. Many enslaved people got around the rules by cloaking their activity in Catholicism. The altars they’d use to pray to spirits avoided scrutiny if they featured Catholic saints.

The intimate practice of spiritual traditions helped slaves in Haiti preserve a sense of autonomy and human dignity. Some historians argue that it contributed to their ability to organize the mass revolt that became the Haitian Revolution, the only slave rebellion that won national independence from a colonial power.

The revolution started with a now-legendary Vodou ceremony in August 1791. It was held in a forest and led by a Vodou priest named Boukman, who would go on to be a principal leader of the rebellion. 

The story unfolded differently for enslaved people brought to the port of New Orleans, but the preservation of religious practices remained a vital part of life. Those who were kept there lived in larger groups and tended not to be separated from their young children due to French legal norms and Catholic sensibilities about family, in contrast to others who were sold north. 

Traditional African spiritual reverence for ancestors included respect for living elders in these groups. The elderly averaged longer lifespans than in other regions. That meant more continuity for their religious practices.

Traditions continued to mix in the rich culture of New Orleans, with Spanish and French influences. Leaders of the Voodoo community there were influential and recognized by the wider society. White people of various stations in life would seek them out for blessings and prayers. Voodoo tradition is emblematic of the cultural cocktail that sets New Orleans apart among American cities.

Kelley grew up there. Though she was raised Catholic, she always felt that Voodoo was as much a part of the local culture. She still considers herself Catholic, even though she’s an initiated priestess, or mambo, in the Haitian house of Vodou, as it is called. The partial syncretization of the religions in New Orleans means you’ll see saints and crosses in Voodoo altars. But you won’t find Voodoo in churches. Its animalistic focus positions it too near paganism, despite the similarities that Catholics like Kelley perceive.

The Catholic Church does not accept any form of Voodoo as compatible with its teachings, but the Vatican does not officially condemn its practice. Pope John Paul II courted some controversy after he was photographed visiting a Vodun high priest in Ouidah, Benin, in 1993. The city is considered the religion’s cultural capital.

In 2011, Pope Benedict XVI publicly criticized the practice when he spoke at a seminary in Ouidah: “The love for the God who reveals Himself and for His word, the love for the sacraments and the church, are an efficacious antidote against a syncretism which deceives,” he said.

Jeff Tarantino, a houngan - an initiated priest in Haitian Vodou - works at Kelley’s shop. He prefers that Catholics who have questions or preconceptions about Voodoo ask him directly. “It isn’t heretical to ask about Voodoo,” he said.

Tarantino, 41, was introduced to the religion at a gathering of practitioners that he was invited to. He was drawn to what he saw there and went quickly down a path that led to his initiation to the priesthood.

The ceremony involved an animal sacrifice. He held a bird, feeling its heartbeat and chest expanding with each breath. He started sobbing.

“How often do we go to Popeye’s chicken and get a bucket of chicken?” Tarantino said. “But how many of us think about the life that fueled that food that we’re about to eat? And it made me think about it.”

He sat with the bird until someone took it away. He knew its fate. His chest felt like it was caving in, he said. That night he says he was visited in a dream by a spirit, “and it said, ‘I know that you’re hurt, but you have to understand that this death is a necessary death so that you can continue.’ And I said, but death is always a thing for other people to continue — like as carnivores we subside off of the death of other things just so that we can continue to eat. And that spirit said, ‘Well you know that may be true, but you felt it this time.’”

That experience was the beginning of one of the most profound benefits that Tarantino said Voodoo has had for him: a deep respect for life, and a recognition of his own mortality that affects how he conducts himself each day. “It taught me respect for things that are bigger than myself,” he said.

Voodoo dolls for sale at Voodoo Authentica. Owner Brandi Kelley said the items she sells are made by Voodoo practitioners in New Orleans, Haiti and Africa. Photo by Micah Danney.

The community of Voodoo practitioners in New Orleans was said to number between 2,500 and 3,000 before Hurricane Katrina, according to a 2014 Newsweek feature. After the storm’s devastation, about 300 are estimated to remain, Tarantino said. The drastic reduction produced another merging: while different traditions had operated independently of one another, usually along racial lines, they began to intermingle after Katrina.

That is evident at the Voodoo Fest she organizes each year on Oct. 31. This year will be the 21st. It offers free food from the religion’s different paths — local, Haitian and West African. Attendees learn drum rhythms and traditional songs. Most importantly, Kelley said, they learn about Voodoo’s contribution to New Orleans.

“It’s a positive experience so that you leave with the right taste in your mouth, literally and figuratively, about Voodoo — what it’s really about,” she said. “A lot of people come and they check those misconceptions at the door on the way out.”

The timing is because it is said to be when the veil between the spiritual world and the physical world is thin. The celebration involves calling out to relatives who have died. It can be a powerful experience for participants, especially first-timers. People cry.

The event normalizes that kind of communication to loved ones that people truly miss. It’s not something people generally do in their backyards, Kelley said, but at the festival it’s okay. 

It is often the best way for the uninitiated to learn what Voodoo is, Kelley said. “That’s all the beginning that’s needed for them to say, ‘I felt something real. I felt a real connection that I can not explain. I want to keep that going.’”