The Voodoo Priestess, Marie Laveau, is one of Earth’s most powerful sorceresses and will stop at nothing to retain her eternal youth.
Mystic Roots
Much of Marie Laveau’s history is fragmentary or self-contradictory, but per the most reliable accounts, the New Orleans-born Laveau enters the world in 1801 to her father, a white planter named Charles Laveaux, and her mother, Marguerite Darcantel, a biracial enslaved person. A Creole beauty whose childhood coincides with Louisiana’s induction into the United States, she works during her youth alongside her mother to treat victims of warfare and epidemic, a humanitarian effort with far less social status than in later decades. Eighteen years later while working as a hairdresser, she marries Jacques Paris, who mysteriously vanishes without a trace soon afterward. When 1827 rolls around, she becomes the common-law wife of Dominican Republic-born Christophe Glapion, to whom she bears five children, the first also named Marie, before he dies in 1835. Some records erroneously claimed that she and Glapion had fifteen children, a figure encompassing children and grandchildren alike.
Allegedly, Marie gets inducted into the rites of the Vodū (also Voudou or Voodoo) faith by houngan (Vod priest) Dr. John Bayou and/or manbo (Vod priestess) Sanite Dede. Marie, formerly a devout Catholic, becomes a well-known supplier of mystic charms and services before she turns thirty. She leads ceremonial snake-dances in Congo Square and at St. John’s Bayou on the banks of Lake Pontchartrain, accompanied by the serpent-god Dan-Ayido-Hwedo, AKA Damballah, himself.
Marie’s namesake daughter reportedly joins her efforts upon reaching adulthood. Marie befriends and bargains with Father Antoine, the local Spanish Inquisition officer, to guarantee peaceful coexistence between New Orleans’ Catholics and Vods. Accounts vary on whether mother or daughter ultimately become New Orleans’ foremost “voodoo queen,” but it is undeniably the name of Marie Laveau that earns the title.
Voodoo Priestess
Marie Laveau is one of the most powerful sorceresses on Earth and perhaps the single most powerful practitioner of Vodū magic. She possesses the powers of mesmerism, precognition, clairvoyance, astral projection, shape-changing, weather command, projection of mystic bolts, and other Occult abilities; she occasionally alters her appearance to that of a Caucasian woman when it suits her purposes. She can summon various gods and demons who, under ideal circumstances, can be bent to her will.
Even without magic, she is an expert at reading the emotions of others and manipulating them into serving her interests; in her early life, at least, she was renowned for her business acumen and commanding presence. Among the mystic artifacts she has used are the emotion-altering Arrows of Eros, which can induce either passionate love or equally devoted hatred; the time-transcending Black Mirror; and, for a brief time, the Darkhold, which she used to summon demonic warriors, create mystic shields, teleport, and otherwise perform magical feats apparently beyond even her formidable powers.
She regains and retains her youth through a magic potion requiring vampire blood. She reportedly employs familiars on occasion, including a serpent named Zombi.
Mystical Ties, Allies, and Enemies
Allying herself with the mystic arts, Marie becomes one of the most formidable sorceresses of Voodoo magic and rightfully receives the moniker of Voodoo Queen of New Orleans. She rarely teams up with anyone unless absolutely necessary to acquire that which she needs most, the blood of vampires, to keep manufacturing her magic-based eternal youth. Such allies include Chthon and Deacon Frost. She once allies with Dr. Steven Strange, AKA Doctor Strange, against Silver Dagger who enslaves her, but often finds herself at odds with the Sorcerer Supreme in her hunt for more vampires and their blood.
Zoe Laveau is Marie’s great-great-granddaughter and a student of the mystical arts at The Strange Academy, who seems to have inherited Marie’s Voodoo talents.
Voodoo Queen of New Orleans
By 1855 Marie, whose customary work was interspersed with treating yellow fever victims and performing missionary work for death row inmates, was living in a mansion on 1020 Saint Ann Street, supposedly earned by ensorcelling a judge to find a client’s son innocent. Both she and her daughter were said to have political influence, via secrets received from clientele and informants alike, to match their mystic powers; they used both not only for clients’ benefits but also to help slaves escape, rescue prisoners (whether unjustly accused or not) from execution, and, augmented by wits and personal magnetism, oppose oppression from a government that disdained their race and faith. If rumor is believed, Marie was the first American-born sorceress to win worldwide fame; indeed, to this day she is remembered in the devotions of Vodū practitioners in New Orleans and around the world.
Although reported dead in June 1881, years after her namesake vanished during post-war Reconstruction, the elder Marie in fact survived via an imperfect immortality potion obtained from the centuries-old Cagliostro, who had sought to steal her mystic secrets but instead became her devoted lover, like many other men before and since. The potion required the somewhat rare ingredient of vampire blood and, in some cases, a victim to whom she could transfer the years she was shedding. Admittedly, stories yet again differ on whether the late 19th century’s “Voodoo Queen” was the elder or younger Marie, but her power, to judge the ease with which she reportedly rode a downed tree through the winds of a hurricane in 1895, while singing Vodū songs, was indisputable. Regrettably, the good done by Marie and her family was eclipsed by slander against Vodū and its believers, and her surviving daughter, Philomene, dedicated herself to clearing the family name before her own death in 1897; eventually, Marie's name was linked to the charitable Howard Foundation, which she may or may not have granted mystic aid. Nonetheless, while Philomene denied tales of mystic corruption, such a fate may have befallen the true Marie herself via Cagliostro’s secrets, for she soon withdrew to brood and ponder in the Louisiana bayous, aging but undying, served by generations of retainers.
Marie’s New Orleans mansion became known as a haunted house, and her supposed tomb at St. Louis Cemetery a shrine to Vodū practitioners, but little is known of the activities of Marie herself for nearly a century. Sporadic sightings were reported, and tales about her grew taller and darker over the decades, until it was believed that to even approach the diabolical crone she had become was to court death. Finally, her last servant, Gaston, searched for Cagliostro but found instead his nemesis Dracula, whom he transported back to New Orleans and led to Marie. Using garlic and crosses, they restrained Dracula while they sampled his blood to complete her immortality potion. The process restored Marie's youth, at the cost of Gaston's, who unwittingly took upon himself the weight of Marie's century-plus years as she shed them. Marie released Dracula and offered an alliance and relationship, but, though intrigued, he refused, put off by her binding him by force previously.
In recent years, Marie, feeling challenged by the heroic Lord of the Loa Jericho Drumm, AKA Brother Voodoo (later Doctor Voodoo), schemed against the newcomer, but her endeavors were disrupted by the mystic fanatic Silver Dagger, who, prompted by the demon Basilisk, bound her to his will and used her to lure Sorcerer Supreme Doctor Strange into a trap. Strange, aided by the costumed heroes Peter Parker, AKA Spider-Man, and Carol Danvers, AKA Ms. Marvel (later Captain Marvel), confronted Silver Dagger at Marie’s latest New Orleans home and held him at bay in a mystic battle. Hoping to end the encounter, Marie was prepared to kill either Strange or his nemesis, but it was the latter who fell to her blade, earning her Strange’s wary respect. In the incident’s aftermath, the Basilisk cursed Strange with lycanthropy, but he was restored with the help of Spider-Man and Basilisk’s half-human host Satana.
When Strange and others, including the vampire hunter Eric Brooks, AKA Blade, mystically destroyed most of the world’s vampires via the Montesi Formula, Marie, now cut off from the vampire blood she would eventually need to replenish her potion, recruited Louisianan Super Hero Monica Rambeau to, via the mystic Black Mirror, travel back to 1784 and obtain fresh vampire blood, again from Dracula. Although the hero succeeded, the residual effect of Strange’s spell destroyed the prize, and the Mirror was later rendered unusable by Californian sorcerers Robert and Tina Minoru. After the blood of Doctor Michael Morbius, AKA Morbius, The Living Vampire, proved equally unusable, Marie mystically searched the world for any hint that Dracula’s strain of vampirism survived and, ironically, was ultimately led to Strange’s own comatose brother Victor, partially vampirized when Strange had failed to restore him to health years before. With Victor, dubbed the new Baron Blood, in her servitude, Marie stole the mystic Darkhold tome and—despite opposition from Strange, Brother Voodoo, and others—used it to resurrect Varnae, the long-dead first of the vampires, whom she dared think she could bend to her will in creating a steady supply of vampires. However, Varnae, caring as little for her goals as she cared for his, rejected her far more violently than had his former protégé Dracula, and he escaped both her and her opponents, spreading vampirism anew until his physical death in combat with Blade and his Nightstalkers teammates.
Showing little of the acumen for which she was once so renowned, Marie, served by a handful of newly made vampires, again sought to re-create and control Varnae by granting him possession of Blade’s body, but her second effort ended no better than her first as Blade disrupted the ritual. Varnae thus remained unbound to Marie and fled in the body of vampire vigilante Night Terror. Rescued from the debacle by vampire drug lord Steppin’ Razor, Marie resurfaced months later in an alliance with Deacon Frost, a vampire elder nonetheless younger than Marie herself, to seize control of New Orleans, the city that had both revered and despised her over the decades, only to face opposition from Brother Voodoo, Blade, and vampire detective Hannibal King. She captured all three men, then sought to cement her power via the Vodū gods, but when Brother Voodoo turned her spells against her by convincing the Vodū that Marie disrespected them, the serpent-god Damballah appeared and, in mockery of the snake-dances she had performed long ago, crushed her within his coils for her repeated misuse of her faith’s powers.
Left for dead, Marie eventually regained her health and, many months later, confronted the Minorus’ daughter Nico, AKA Sister Grimm, to break her parents’ curse upon the Black Mirror. Shattered in the effort, the Mirror was revealed to hide a lost Darkhold page, which she delivered to novice sorcerer Ian McNee as part of the elder god Chthon’s effort to conquer the Earth. Although McNee was spared, and the world with him, by the intervention of the Principality Oshtur, Marie remains at large.
