recent reading roundup: poison, atchafalaya ethnology, faith healing in Louisiana

I don’t have time to summarize anything right now, but I’m hoping if I leave this here, it’ll spur me to do so later.

James H. Diaz. Atlas of Human Poisoning and Envenoming, 2nd ed. Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2014.

Hilda Roberts. “Louisiana Superstitions.” Journal of American Folklore 40: 156 (1927), 144-208.

We’re gonna have to talk about this one when I have some time. This sure does have some… stuff in it. I mean, totally aside from its being “a product of its age” and all that. The blanket conflation of hoodoo doctors and Cajun traiteurs is a pretty humongous one. This would never get published today, and it’s not because of the language. It’s because of shoddy scholarship / painting with too broad a brush.

F.A. de Caro. “A History of Folklife Research in Louisiana.” Louisiana Folklife: A Guide to the State. Nicholas R. Spitzer, ed. Office of Cultural Development, 1985.

John L. Gibson. Archaeology and Ethnology on the Edges of the Atchafalaya Basin: A Cultural Resources Survey of the Atchafalaya Protection Levees. Center for Archaeology Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana. Final report to the Department of the Army, New Orleans District, Corps of Engineers, Jun. 1979 – Jan. 1982.

Maida Owens. “Louisiana’s Traditional Cultures: An Overview.” Swapping Stories: Folktales from Louisiana. Carl Lindahl, Maida Owens, and C. Renée Harvison, eds. University Press of Mississippi and the Louisiana Division of the Arts, 1997.

Alec Sonnier. Cajun Traiteurs: Faith Healing on the Bayou / The Cajun Traiteur and Transmission of Cajun Folk Healing Knowledge. Master’s Thesis, Dept. of Anthropology. California State University Northridge, May 2020.

A quick note that Alec Sonnier’s preface reprints two prayers that a Louisiana traiteuse shared on her Facebook page in early 2020 as the coronavirus epidemic was spreading across the country. You really, really gotta love at least a couple of things about the 21st century – at least a traiteuse sharing healing prayers from her personal practice on social media.

I don’t know if that was her private Facebook page or what, so I haven’t posted those prayers here. I don’t know if everybody’s the same way about this, but a lot of times those prayers are not for public consumption. I’m not gonna be the one to assume they are. But in his conclusion, Sonnier prints a prayer shared by another traiteur, Mr. George, who received it in a dream. Mr. George said it “can be used by anyone who wishes to be healed of an ailment” and he encouraged people to use it “to help themselves in the healing process” (131). It goes like this:

“Heavenly Father, I call on You right now in a special way. It is through Your power that I was created. Every breath I take, every morning I wake and every moment of every hour, I live under Your power. Father, I ask you now to touch me with that same power, for if You created me from nothing, You can certainly recreate me. Fill me with the healing power of Your spirit. Cast out anything that should not be in me. Mend what is broken. Root out any unproductive cells, open any blocked arteries or veins, and rebuild any damaged areas. Remove all inflammation and cleanse any infection. Let the warmth of Your healing love pass through my body to make new any unhealthy areas, so that my body will function the way You created it to function. And Father, restore me to full health in mind, body and spirit so that I might serve You the rest of my life. I ask this through Jesus Christ Our Lord. Amen.”
(Mr. George qtd. in Sonnier 131)

He cites a 2008 article on traiteurs by one Julia Swett, too, which is a name one or two of y’all might know :). But careful, y’all, look – this Sonnier’s father is kin to those Heberts, and you know you gotta watch out for those Heberts!

(Just teasing an Hebert – I’m only playing 🙂 )

recent reading roundup: Becca the traiteur says this shit is real

Here’s journalist Aaron Millar on his 2017 trip to Louisiana, featuring some jazz, some swamp hunting, and a visit to a traiteur, from his Nat Geo UK story “Louisiana: Hoodoo and Voodoo, Ghosts and Graves.”

“Becca Begnaud is a sassy, sweet-looking older woman with warm hugs, gentle eyes and a mouth like a trailer park — surely the only faith healer on the planet to say the words ‘holy shit’ every other sentence. I like her instantly.”

He gets a treatment – for what he doesn’t say, none of our business I guess.

“And then, the strangest thing; for just a moment, it’s as if the river is real, the world disappears and I’m in a kind of peaceful, lucid dream. Afterwards, I open my eyes, but Becca’s already smiling: ‘See, I told you,’ she says. ‘This shit is real.'”

I think I’ll be quoting Becca the traiteur all the damn time.

For a more academic but still quite accessible look at traiteurs, see Julia Swett’s article “French Louisiana Traiteurs” in Folklife in Louisiana. Once I finally get this ship floating on its own again, so to speak, I’m gonna start doing interviews, and Julia’s gonna be one of my first ones.

The Twelve Truths of the World in curing/healing

There is so much here that I feel like a bit of an ass for tagging you in this, Julia, but there are about eight different things in this post I wanted to ask you questions or get your thoughts about. And I don’t have time to isolate them or make my questions into English just yet. But I definitely want to be able to find it again sooner rather than later.

So for anyone interested in faith healing/vernacular religious traditions, here’s part one of a two-part post at Serpent Shod on The Twelve Truths of the World/Las Doce Verdades del Mundo as used in Mexican and Spanish healing/curing. (And in a comment I left over there, I wondered quickly if the author and I might have crossed paths on the 1curanderismo yahoo group back in the day. Only after I sent that did I find the “about” button or author profile or whatever and see that the author in question is Jesse Hathaway Diaz, so yeah, might have crossed paths once or twice lol, and I feel a bit silly for that comment.)

There is something tugging at the corners of my memory here on this prayer, having to do with I think a *Scottish* prayer, maybe late medieval? that I can’t quite summon into full consciousness yet. When I finally do remember, it may turn out to be unrelated/my misremembering, but making a note to self just in case.

Also of note, I have been feeling like a real ass for the glacial progress of my Spanish [glacial is being polite, really]. I felt like an ass about it even before I knew I had a direct-line and fairly close ancestor as well as an entire branch of the family presumably still there in Mexico. I learned five dead languages to read obscure poetry nobody can be sure of the meaning of any longer and I can’t be arsed to learn the living language of our closest geographical neighbors? How lamely American is that? And then to find the proof of that branch of the family a few years ago was like opening a door onto a whole new world… but one in which everything is in Spanish, which i don’t read lol…but I guess now at least I have an ancestor I can petition for assistance?