The Mothers of the Craft

Parents Appreciation Day

The Mothers of the Craft

Five women who came before, and one who keeps the hearth today. Written for Parents Appreciation Day. True all year.

Nineteenth-century portrait of a Creole woman in a madras tignon, traditionally identified as Marie Laveau
Portrait traditionally identified as Laveau, after George Catlin. No verified portrait of her exists.
I · New Orleans

Marie Laveau

1801 – 1881

Born a free woman of color in the French Quarter, Marie Laveau worked as a hairdresser to the city's elite and became the most renowned practitioner of Louisiana Voodoo, a living religion then and now. She was an herbalist and a midwife. When yellow fever swept New Orleans, she stayed and nursed the sick, and she ministered to prisoners the rest of the city preferred to forget. Two blocks or two hundred years away, this city still speaks her name with reverence.

Pamela Colman Smith, photographed in 1912
Photographed for The Craftsman, 1912
II · London

Pamela Colman Smith

1878 – 1951

In six months of 1909, Pamela Colman Smith drew all seventy-eight cards of what became the most widely used tarot deck on earth. The scenes on the minor arcana, the images most readers picture when they think of tarot at all, were her invention. She was paid a small flat fee, received no royalties, and for decades her name was left off the box. Every deck opened at our reader tables descends from her hand. Say her name: it belongs there.

Doreen Valiente seated at her altar, 1962
Photograph courtesy of Preston Manor
III · Brighton

Doreen Valiente

1922 – 1999

Initiated in 1953, Doreen Valiente looked at the ritual words she had been handed and decided she could write better ones. She was right. Her Charge of the Goddess became the most recited text in modern witchcraft, and the craft as practiced today is shaped by her pen more than any other single hand. She is remembered, plainly and worldwide, as the Mother of Modern Witchcraft.

Miniature portrait of Marie Anne Lenormand by Francois Dumont
Miniature by François Dumont, Cleveland Museum of Art
IV · Paris

Marie Anne Lenormand

1772 – 1843

Orphaned at five in Normandy, Marie Anne Lenormand made herself the most famous card reader in Europe. Revolutionaries and an empress sat at her table in Paris, and the authorities jailed her more than once for daring to practice. She outlasted them all and died wealthy and celebrated. The thirty-six-card deck that carries her name was published after her death. Her fame was that great: the cards came looking for her.

Mary Oneida Toups, photographed in her occult shop in the 1970s
Photograph via Rachel Clinesmith, Southern Renaissance
V · New Orleans

Mary Oneida Toups

The Witch Queen of New Orleans · d. 1981

Founder and high priestess of the Religious Order of Witchcraft, the first coven legally chartered as a religion in Louisiana, she was one of the most public witches in America in her decade. Then the record thinned: she died in 1981 with no obituary, her book Magick High and Low is nearly impossible to find, and her order's paper archives were lost to Katrina's floodwaters. Ask the city's witchcraft community today and few remember her. That forgetting is exactly why she is here.

History drawn, with thanks, from Rachel Clinesmith's "Mary Oneida Toups: The White Witch" at Southern Renaissance.

Deanna Holdcraft in a flower crown, seated at a candlelit table at Witches Brew Coffee Co.
The hearth is in good hands.
VI · Mid-City, New Orleans

Deanna Holdcraft

Co-Founder · Owner · Head Kitchen Witch

The lineage continues at 2940 Canal Street. Deanna Holdcraft co-founded Witches Brew and leads its kitchen and baking program. Trained in archaeology, anthropology, and historic preservation, she now keeps older things alive by different means: family recipes, slow rituals, and a kitchen that feeds a community. The case you see each morning is her program, her standards, her craft.

We Remember
A candlelit bake counter at Witches Brew Coffee Co., with an open recipe book and gathered herbs

To the mothers, godmothers,
and foremothers

In craft and in blood: thank you. Light a candle with us this week, or pull a card in their honor.

Pull a Card ✶ See the Menu

2940 Canal Street · Mid-City, New Orleans · Open daily 8 AM – 6 PM

Sources & Further Reading
  • "Marie Laveau," 64 Parishes, the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities' encyclopedia of the state.
  • Carolyn Morrow Long, A New Orleans Voudou Priestess: The Legend and Reality of Marie Laveau (University Press of Florida), built from the city's own archival records.
  • The Louisiana State Museum, holder of Creole Woman in a Madras Tignon, the portrait traditionally identified as Laveau.
  • Rachel Clinesmith, "Mary Oneida Toups: The White Witch," Southern Renaissance, the source for the Toups chapter, used with thanks.
  • The Craftsman, October 1912, source of the photograph of Pamela Colman Smith.
  • Stuart R. Kaplan with Mary K. Greer, Elizabeth Foley O'Connor, and Melinda Boyd Parsons, Pamela Colman Smith: The Untold Story (U.S. Games Systems, 2018).
  • The Doreen Valiente Foundation and Preston Manor, Brighton, keepers of her collection.
  • The Cleveland Museum of Art open-access collection, home of François Dumont's miniature of Marie Anne Lenormand.