In Lafcadio Hearn's account of a voudou ceremony, we encounter a vivid first-person depiction of African rituals, music and belief systems in nineteenth-century Louisiana from the perspective of a white European observer. His evocation of the Gothicized landscapes surrounding Lake Ponchartrain, with flickering campfires casting grotesque shadows, and his description of the voudou “queen” convey the simultaneous fear and fascination with which these rites were regarded.

Text: W. H. Coleman (Compiler), Historical Sketch Book and Guide to New Orleans and Environs (New York: Will H. Coleman), 229–31.

ST. JOHN's EVE—VOUDOUISM (1875)

St. John's eve is specially devoted to the worship of the Voudous. It is on that night that they congregate at some secret meeting-place on Lake Pontchartrain—changed from time to time—and hold their religious dances and impious ceremonies of worshipping the prince of evil, for, in their theology, the devil is God, and it is to him they pray. Voudouism is rapidly dying out, even among the negroes of Louisiana, but, for all that, a negro is frightened to death if he is “hoodooed,” and with reason. The secret magic of the Voudous was nothing more than an acquaintance with a number of subtle vegetable poisons, which they brought with them from Africa, and which caused their victims to fade gradually away, and die of exhaustion.

Every St. John's eve thousands of persons visit the lake ends in the hope of coming upon the Voudous, but few succeed in finding them.

On St. John's eve, last year, the night was dark, and on the eastern sky hung a black cloud, from which now and then burst flashes of lightning, which lit up the road, the bayou and the surrounding swamp with a lurid glow, in fit introduction to what was to follow. The scene on the lake coast from Spanish Fort to Milneburg, was one which cannot easily be forgotten. All along the shore, at intervals scarcely more than 300 yards, groups of men and women could be seen standing around blazing pine-knot fires, their dark copper-colored faces weirdly gilded by the red flames and their black forms thus illuminated appearing gigantic and supernatural against the opaque background of the lake and sky on one side and the mystical darkness just tinged with starlight of the seemingly limitless swamps on the other.