The Voodoo Queen

Her name was Mae. She became my Madrina — my spiritual mother, appointed by God, not by blood — and I've called her that ever since. If you see me reference something Mae taught me, or a ritual that came from her, this is who she was: a woman raised in the tradition of the New Orleans Voodoo Queen, who claimed me as her Ahijada, her spiritual daughter, the way my Grandma claimed me as her own on the other side of my family. She passed a couple of years after I met her, but what she gave me didn't leave with her.

A Crown Passed Hand to Hand

The Voodoo Queen of New Orleans is not elected, ordained by a church, or self-declared. Traditionally, the title is inherited — passed from mother to daughter, or from teacher to the student who was already carrying the gift before anyone taught her a thing. The most famous of them, Marie Laveau, learned from her own mother and grandmother before her, and passed the title on to her own daughter when she died. The crown moves through blood and through chosen family alike, and it has always been women who have carried it.

She is not a witch in the Hollywood sense, and she was never meant to be frightening. In the traditions of New Orleans, the Voodoo Queen holds a role that is at once spiritual and deeply practical — part oracle, part healer, part mother to everyone who comes looking for her.

More Than a Title

Ask five people what a Voodoo Queen is and you may get five different answers, because she has always worn more than one hat at once:

• Sister, mother, and mentor to her spiritual community
• Medium between the living and the ancestors on the other side of the veil
• Teacher, passing down what she knows only to those ready to carry it
• Healer, tending to the sick, the grieving, and the lonely alongside the spiritually troubled
• Keeper of the old ways — dance, chant, herb, and prayer woven into one practice

She was never paid a fee for what she did the way a business is paid. In the old tradition, and still today for many who carry this work, a reading or a blessing is traded — produce, eggs, a favor, whatever a person has to give. What she offers isn't for sale. It's given.

What She Carries

The gifts a Voodoo Queen tends to are practical as much as they are mystical — the kind of knowledge a community actually needs, not performance for an audience.

Madrina and Ahijada

That last gift is the one I know best now, from the inside. Across these traditions and the ones neighboring them, a spiritual godmother — a Madrina — can claim a goddaughter, an Ahijada, as her own. It is not a ceremony you stumble into by accident. It is a bond someone older and further down the path chooses to make, and once it's made, it doesn't come undone. She becomes family. Not instead of the family you already have — alongside it, on the days the family you have doesn't have what you need.

My own Madrina told me plainly that the things I had always carried — knowing before the news arrived, feeling someone who had crossed over standing near — were never something wrong with me. They were mine. They had always been mine. She didn't hand me anything I didn't already have. She just told me I was allowed to use it.

I want to be honest about something before I go further: I am not a Voodoo Queen, and I don't claim to be one, no matter how a few kind people around here have teased me with the title. The title I claim, the one I've earned the long way, is old crone — a woman standing where two bloodlines meet, an Appalachian granny witch tradition on one side and what Mae taught me on the other, both of them held together under the same God the whole time. Neither one asked me to give up the other. Neither one asked me to give up Him.

A Voodoo Queen is not a costume, and she is not a curiosity for a walking tour. She is a woman who was needed, who answered, and who spent her life making sure the people who came to her left steadier than they arrived. Some of us are lucky enough, once in a lifetime, to sit at her kitchen table and be told the truth about ourselves.