Blessed Solstice to all my Pretties!

I hate the cold. I just can’t deal with it. In the winter I only leave the house when I absolutely cannot help it. I hibernate, as regular readers may have noticed: sometime around Samhain I just disappear. It’s a terrible thing to do, and I know that even as I’m doing it, but I just can’t seem to get my shit together in the winter.

Hooray for Summer, then! I usually begin to really get my mojo back around Beltane, and especially now, around the official astrological beginning of summer. So to celebrate, I’m pushing back my next mythology post (sorry, Lakshmi, if you can hang on until next week, I promise I’ll do you right) and examining the sabbat.

Marie Laveau: Voodoo Queen of New Orleans

Oh Marie Laveau! Anybody whose ever been the least bit interested in New Orleans voodoo has heard the many legends of Marie Laveau. She led huge dances is Congo Square that scandalized all of white New Orleans. She led enormous rituals at the shores of Lake Pontchartrain every St John’s Eve (the night before midsummer, or the summer solstice). At one of these rituals, she was taken by the lake, never to be seen again except for the type of glimpses usually reserved for ghost stories.

Trying to trace the historical Marie Laveau is a tricky business. She was actually two people: Marie Laveau (1794 – 1881) and her daughter, Marie Laveau II (1827 – 1895?), who sometimes went by the name of her father, Paris.

Yemaya: Magick & Motherhood

Once upon a time, many and many a year ago when I was a young single mother, strange things began to happen to me. I could smell the ocean all the time, even though I lived far from any coast. I had vivid dreams of hanging out on a beach with a motherly woman: fleshy but not fat, powerful and comforting. She wore a blue dress with a full skirt that had white frilly things underneath. Whenever I was faced with any kind of new baby dilemma, I would get these odd intuitions telling me what to do. Not really a voice in my head; more like somebody beaming ideas directly into my brain. At one point I noticed that all my clothes were blue.