The Spirits Move Them

There are 25,000 practitioners of Voodoo in Philly. And not a single pin.

by Natalie Hope McDonald

T he drums are already playing softly as members of Le Peristyle II Voodoo sanctuary gather on the second floor of John Dowell and Roseanne O'Connor's home on North 15th Street, just a block away from Temple University. The regular participants, usually no more than a dozen women and men, wearing regulation white or funerary colors, languidly prepare for the service by exchanging greetings and salutations.

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As a persistent, throbbing drum beat creates a steady rhythm, and the faint smell of burning herbs carries through the two white, airy, high-ceilinged rooms, a spiritual guide called the "mambo" recites a litany of prayers, upon which the sanctuary is consecrated and believed to become a very powerful gateway to the spiritual world.

Papa Legba, ouvri baye-a pou mwen
Pou mwen pase.
Le ma tounen, ma salyie lwa yo.

Papa Legba, open the gate for me
So I can go through.
When I return, I will salute the loa.

Just about every Sunday, an ecstatic group of parishioners gathers to commune with Creole spirits called "loa." As they chant songs and even sacrifice animals within the sanctuary, Dowell and O'Connor, both mambos, can become possessed by a pantheon of deities. Not only do the possessed — who often make jerking motions — walk and talk in the manner of each effigy, but they change costumes and take on well-known characteristics embodying the male and female characters of this ancient religion.

The first to be channeled, Papa Ogu, is known for smoking fat cigars and flirting with the women. It's a far cry from the comparatively staid services at nearby Catholic and Baptist churches.

The trancelike evocations can last for hours into the night. Drumming signals the presence of spirits, becoming more intense as each loa is channeled. Sweaty believers — some of whom take their turns being possessed — dance, melt to the floor and swoon from the heat as the excitement climaxes with the unexpected arrival of each new "prophet." One witness describes the event as both physically and emotionally exhausting.

Dowell and O'Connor, the middle-aged married couple at the center of this celebration — known respectively as Mambo Balefua and Mambo Rinmin — are the priest and priestess of Le Peristyle II, the given name of their Voodoo house, which serves as a sanctuary, wedding chapel and guidance center for practitioners of Haitian Voodoo in Philadelphia. He's a college art professor; she's an administrator at a Center City architectural firm. Together they have built candle- and favor-filled altars to worship ancient Haitian spirits they believe walk among us.

Known for his uniform of crisp white slacks and white button-down shirts, Dowell, a nationally known African-American artist and composer, first became interested in Voodoo as an alternative therapy for his depression. "Before I came to this," he says, "I did many other things." He was raised Baptist, practiced Buddhism and explored other forms of African religion. "A lot of people didn't know what they were doing and got messed up," he says. It's one of the reasons neither he nor O'Connor advocate using Ouija boards. "You have to respect the spirits," she says. When, more than 15 years ago, Dowell started attended services at a Voodoo sanctuary in Fern Rock, O'Connor, a longtime Roman Catholic, was doubtful. "I believed very deeply in God, Jesus Christ and the saints, but I no longer felt comfortable going to a Catholic church," she says. "So I went to the [Voodoo] sanctuary myself. They were in the middle of service. I met the loa Papa Ogu."

In a modern world dominated by truth in science and even materialism, it's easy to be suspicious of anyone who claims to see physical manifestations of the spiritual world — not just once, but on a regular, you might even say expected, basis. Yet Dowell and O'Connor, devout Voodoo mambos for as many as 13 years, speak as effortlessly about loa and gede (spirits of the dead) in the same tone as they might a reclusive next-door neighbor who's often unseen, but very much within reach. They both glide around the house with a certain God-fearing respect of the other side.

Despite conflicting myths about Voodoo, these mambos and their eager followers are not alone when it comes to practicing the native West African tradition. It's estimated more than 25,000 people in Philadelphia openly practice some form of Haitian Voodoo or Cuban-based Santeria, with possibly 5 million practitioners throughout the U.S., says George Ware, president of the National African Religion Congress (NARC), an advocacy organization headquartered in Philadelphia.

Devotees believe in one God and a pantheon of spirits, not unlike Christian saints, but with decidedly human attributes. Papa Legba, for example, is believed to guard the gateway between the spiritual and material worlds, while Ogu is associated with fire and war. Each of the loa is represented by homemade altars in the couple's home, where everything from bottles of perfume to candy and whiskey honor them.

"Each of the loa has their own color," says O'Connor, a Caucasian woman who wears a white flowing dress, layers of beads around her neck and a white scarf wrapped around her head. "You see things that are pleasing to them," like Agwa's water-themed altar, featuring shells, blue trinkets and champagne.

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The couple recently hosted a wedding in the sanctuary for two local members. A usually serious O'Connor gushes like a bride's mother as she points to where the couple stood for their vows, swirling her arms, all smiles. For the most part, a Voodoo marriage follows many of the tenets of a Roman Catholic wedding, complete with a lively reception. The difference: A guest regularly becomes possessed by a spirit, who gets billing on the Voodoo-sanctioned marriage certificate. "It's for life," says O'Connor.

Just a few feet from Dowell's art studio downstairs and in the backyard of the home is a loa house, which is a small sanctuary built to honor one of the religion's more important, albeit quirky, spiritual guides: Baron Criminel. "He comes out for possessions," says Dowell matter-of-factly, pointing to a photo of his Voodoo godmother, Gro Mambo Angela Novanyon Idizol — formerly Jocelyn Smith of Germantown High School's Class of 1980 — engaged in a possession at her own sanctuary a mile east of Broad and Olney.

Within what looks like a simple garden shed — a place where most people might ordinarily store a lawn mower — small red lights are pinned to a low-hanging ceiling, and a humble altar is stocked with symbolic favors people leave for the spirit, including alcohol, folk art and a pipe.

"He has a favorite pepper drink," explains Dowell. Like most loa, the Baron is said to be quite fond of liquor.

"Voodoo is a living religion," says O'Connor, which explains why spirits are associated with human attributes like a sweet tooth or tendency to curse. "In African-based religions, we have one God and the loa. We have parties to celebrate and give thanksgiving to these various forces."

O'Connor also does personal card readings for individual clients and happily accepts "donations."

"We're not psychics," she says. "We look for things in your life to help you live well." When she divines, she says the loa speak to her in Creole, which is not her native language. But as an Irish Catholic graduate of Rosemont College, O'Connor sees plenty of parallels between the two religions.

"The word Voodoo means 'holy' and 'of God,'" she says, admitting that most people don't realize practitioners like her and her husband believe in God and even Jesus Christ.

Because of many negative connotations associated with Voodoo, like confusing it with Satanism and black magic, not to mention immigration fears in the Haitian and Latino communities, many practitioners stay underground.

"In the Latino community, the practitioners are invisible and often indistinguishable from Catholics," says Ware. Many Catholics in Philadelphia also practice Santeria.

"These religions are poorly understood by the American public," adds Ware, who spends much of his time with NARC educating law-enforcement authorities in Philadelphia and throughout the U.S. on Voodoo. He's currently petitioning for therapeutic services, such as herbal baths and healing rituals, to be covered by standard health insurance. NARC also certifies Voodoo priests and priestesses, and resolves legal conflicts, like when neighbors protest services in their communities.

It may be because Dowell's a professor at Temple that Le Peristyle II has met little or no complaints from neighbors. Other conflicts tend to make the news, including a local murder case in 1997 against wheelchair-bound Theodore Stevens, then 69, who was convicted of manslaughter after a Common Pleas judge believed his "Voodoo" defense, according to the Daily News. He claimed retaliation against his common-law wife, whom he believed cast an evil spell against him.

Since most local Voodoo services take place in private homes in residential neighborhoods throughout North and West Philadelphia, there can be an uncomfortable mix of boisterous practitioners and suspicious neighbors.

"When we have ceremonies, the neighbors — already being suspicious and disturbed by the practice — call the police," says Ware. "If you're living next to a row house in West Philadelphia and there's drumming at 11 o'clock at night, many people are going to call the cops."

That's why NARC invited law enforcement officials to attend local services and set up a system identifying Voodoo priests and priestesses with IDs and automobile stickers. "If it were a Pentecostal group who were making a lot of noise in a storefront," he says, "the neighborhood would not dream of calling the police." Philadelphia's interactive, pro-community model, he notes, is used all over the country.

But when animal parts, for example, are found along Frankford Avenue, as reported by the Northeast Times in 2002, Voodoo immediately becomes the leading suspect, though Ware says cults and other underground collectives are more often responsible.

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"We work with precincts on what to look out for," he says, but there's still plenty of misinformation in Philly. Ware recently set his sights on Euless, Texas, where the city is trying to prevent practitioners from sacrificing animals.

"There's an ordinance that says you cannot kill animals inside the city limits," says Ware, who brought suit against Euless this year for violating laws he says govern religious freedom. "In that same city, the Hawaiian community at the local Methodist church kills about 80 pigs." Because they are a religious institution, animal ordinances don't necessarily apply to them.

Gro Mambo (Jocelyn Smith), one of the most outspoken Voodoo priestesses in Philadelphia, and godmother to Dowell and O'Connor, has been governing her own sanctuary, Le Peristyle, for 25 years. Because of a general misunderstanding about Voodoo, she takes particular offense to many of the rituals that come out of New Orleans, a veritable hotbed for the occult in the U.S.

"The Voodoo religion of Haiti is not the same as New Orleans," she writes in an e-mail. "What you see there today is the residue of the Voodoo religion. You see many rituals that have nothing to do with the Voodoo of Haiti for the sake of tourism."

In fact, Sallie Glassman, a well-known priestess in New Orleans and owner of Island of Salvation Botanica, a shop and gallery specializing in religious supplies and medicinal herbs, refused to offer comment for this story because of the animosity several Philadelphia-based sanctuaries, particularly Le Peristyle, have against New Orleans traditions. "Ordinarily I wouldn't at all mind answering a few questions," Glassman e-mailed, "anything to promote the understanding of Vodou (an African spelling of the word). However, the people at Le Peristyle really don't like me or approve of my work or my outlook. They have also expressed some pretty intense hostility toward New Orleans Vodou and have said that there are no Vodou practices in New Orleans. Their disrespect for the initiated priests and priestesses practicing in New Orleans was quite disturbing to me."

Animal sacrifice may be among the biggest conflicts between Voodoo sects. "Groups complain about it all the time," says O'Connor. But while Le Peristyle II is a fairly public sanctuary, there is a persisting concern about how sacrifices are performed in covert environments. By all accounts, Glassman, a Ukrainian Jew who moved from Maine to New Orleans before studying a decade ago with priests in Haiti, is a vegan. She's among several Voodoo priestesses opposed to rituals like the one described in The Philadelphia Inquirer, in which Gro Mambo straddles a goat before slicing its throat with a paring knife.

But Philadelphia has laws governing animal welfare. According to Jeff Moran, Department of Public Health spokesman, farm animals are banned from the city except in certain cases, including those killed for food. If an animal is purchased to be killed for food, says Moran, it cannot be kept within city limits for more than 24 hours.

"Animal sacrifice is a spiritual practice," argues O'Connor, who says she has invited members of the SPCA to witness how the sacrifices are performed on chickens, goats, sheep and bulls. Participants often go to a farm in New Jersey to slaughter larger animals outdoors. "This is kosher or blessed meat," she says, explaining that sacrifices are performed by severing a nerve that makes an animal go numb. After it is killed, O'Connor says, the majority of remains are used for food and to make pelts that are placed in the sanctuaries. "We place our orders for animals just like a supermarket," she says.

There have been cases in which Voodoo and Santeria have been taken to task on animal treatment, however. "Anti-cruelty statutes are perfectly fine and constitutional," says Gary L. Francione, a professor of law at Rutgers University School of Law who regularly lectures on animal rights.

More than 10 years ago, he argued against a Santeria group in Hialeah, Fla., that sacrificed animals outside of regulated slaughterhouses. The case went to the Supreme Court, which outlawed the ban against sacrifice, saying it violated the First Amendment's religious-freedom clause. It was a coup for religious groups, but similar cases have kept many of them on the radar with groups like PETA.

Martin Mersereau, manager of PETA's cruelty casework division. "

animal sacrifices in the name of religion are not exempt from state and local anti-cruelty laws. "Chickens, goats, pigs, turtles, pigeons and other animals awaiting slaughter are often kept tied up or in tiny crates in basements with no food or water," says Mersereau. "During the ritual, animals' throats are slit, often with dull knives or scissors, and their heads are often sawed off."

In Philadelphia, there are many different kinds of practitioners of Voodoo, some of whom — like Tatyana Mescheryakova, a 34-year-old Russian who now makes her home in Brewerytown after fleeing Hurricane Katrina with her boyfriend and young son — blend Haitian tradition with New Orleans legend. Originally from the Ukraine, Mescheryakova became interested in Voodoo through Russian mysticism.

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"Voodoo is practiced differently in regions of the U.S. and the Caribbean," she says, "so every experience is different." She recently took part in a service honoring Baron Criminel at Dowell and O'Connor's sanctuary where the loa was channeled through several guests in a powdered white face, top hat, tuxedo and carrying a cane.

In a sea of heated local worshippers, including many Temple students described by Mescheryakova as acting like they were "at a rock concert," the first-time attendee says loa appeared to the crowd throughout the evening, even possessing a few people in the room.

"Baron Criminel drank firewater infused with hot pepper and cherry Kiafa, smoked little brown cigarettes and danced with everyone," she says. "I felt faint a few times the loa plucked me out of the crowd to dance. Just being near a supernatural force so strong and so ancient is overwhelming."

Like many of the women that night, Mescheryakova rested on a nearby sofa as loa spoke to the mambos in Creole until dawn, while English translators repeated revelations to a swooning crowd dressed in dark gray and black to honor the funerary theme of the evening. Unlike the sanctuaries Mescheryakova has visited in New Orleans — filled with snakes, overstuffed altars and parrot cages — she says Le Peristyle II is downright streamlined. O'Connor explains it's because hers is a relatively young sanctuary. The mambo regularly showers gifts on each of the altars, as does Mescheryakova, who built her own altar at home, a block from Girard Avenue.

"My Russian relatives are puzzled by how a Russian, baptized in the Russian Orthodox faith, would find some obscure and foreign 'cult' a good fit," she says. However, it's not uncommon for Russians to bring food and drink to a grave. "You would also acknowledge a deceased member of a family by placing food and drink — sometimes a piece of bread on top of a glass of water or a shot of vodka — at the table during a family dinner."

The fledgling practitioner took it a step further by building her own altar and creating one-of-a-kind Voodoo dolls, a much criticized effigy among many Haitian practitioners, including Dowell and O'Connor.

"The biggest misconception is that we stick pins in dolls," says O'Connor.

"The inspiration comes from folklore, mostly Southern, but also Russian," says Mescheryakova. She stuffs dolls with Spanish moss collected in New Orleans' City Park. "I have also used pine cones and grass I've collected in Fairmount Park," she says. "The fabrics are a tutu here, a vintage fur coat there. A lot came from my mom, and my girlfriends donate their old party dresses. I use beads and feathers, coins, and occasional Mardi Gras doubloon or beads we caught in a parade."

In her two-story home, a rental property wedged in an increasingly gentrified neighborhood, surrounded on one side by multimillion-dollar condos and on the other by malt liquor bodegas, many of Mescheryakova's dolls sit on an altar similar to those at Le Peristyle II. Not only is the altar filled with treats and favors for the loa, but there's soil collected from Holt Cemetery, a potter's field in New Orleans. "Holt is below ground," she says. "Many graves are unmarked, some only have a piece of cardboard." It flooded severely during Katrina.

For Mescheryakova, familiar artifacts create a praiseworthy place of worship, even if the altar is housed on a small table in her upstairs bedroom. For all accounts, she's selected elements of both Voodoo and Santeria to create her own highly symbolic altarpiece. Even for those who aren't certified priests or priestesses, this is not an unusual practice.

"In New Orleans, Voodoo does not have a liturgy, initiation ritual or doctrine, unlike Haitian Voodoo," says Don "Tribble" Glossop, owner of New Orleans Mistic, a botanica shop in the French Quarter. Most shrines and altars are found within peoples' homes.

It is believed that by building sanctuaries at home, a person can become closer to the loa and truly make Voodoo a part of daily life. But for every private practitioner, there is a fair share of those people interested in less spiritual pursuits. "Voodoo has taken on mythological status for tourists, residents and entrepreneurial Voodoo clergy who make good use of its mysterious and indefinable nature," he says.

In 2005, high priestess Jenavia Thompson-Weaver and her husband, Jeffrey Weaver, were the first to be defrocked by NARC last year for unlawfully removing shrines from a Voodoo sanctuary in Philadelphia. "The court said the shrines had to be returned," says Ware, who in NARC's newsletter estimates the cost for stolen goods and legal fees totaled more than $20,000. A black eye for Le Peristyle, perhaps, but both defrocked clergy are forbidden to practice Voodoo, says Ware, though they did return the goods after Philadelphia Common Pleas Court ruled in NARC's favor.

Despite the challenges some people encounter openly practicing Voodoo, both Dowell and O'Connor say they'll pursue high priest and priestess when they are called by their guiding voices. They're already planning for NARC's annual conference at the convention center starting Aug. 9, this year called "Healing Waters." They're also chartering buses to the Jersey shore that same week for a Grande Voodoo Gede Ceremony and Spiritual Bath in which dozens of people will perform highly symbolic rituals to the surprise, perhaps, of local beach bums.

Mescheryakova, whose interest in Voodoo grew after chance encounters with such rituals in the South, expects to attend another service at Le Peristyle II.

"I was told during a recent card reading that I needed to honor [the loa] Ezili Dantor, so the next step is to build an altar to her," she says. "She's a jealous deity — I need to build an altar soon and start honoring her properly."

(editorial@citypaper.net)