Hey- if you’re reading this, you’re one of the people who showed up, and that means more than I know how to say without getting weird about it. So thank you. Genuinely.
This episode took longer to pull together than most. Marie Laveau kept expanding every time I thought I had her contained, which feels appropriate honestly. The further I got into her story the more I realized how much the popular version of her, the dramatic Voodoo queen, the Hollywood archetype, had flattened something that was actually much stranger and more interesting. She was a hairdresser running an intelligence network. A Catholic who built altars in death row cells. A woman whose clients spanned the entire social hierarchy of one of the most rigidly stratified cities in antebellum America. Every time I thought I had a clean handle on who she was, another layer showed up.
There’s a lot that didn’t make it into the episode. One thing I kept thinking about was the question of her daughter… there were actually two Marie Laveaus. Her daughter, Marie Laveau II, continued her mother’s practice after her death and looked enough like her that some historians believe the stories got blurred together over time, which means some of what we attribute to Marie may have actually been her daughter. The legend absorbed them both. I don’t know if that makes the story more or less interesting. Maybe both.
The psychology section is the part I’m most proud of in this one. The confirmation bias piece especially the idea that the belief self-perpetuates not because the doll works every time but because our brains are not neutral observers, they’re pattern-recognition machines running permanently in favor of the stories they already hold. That felt true in a way that went beyond the episode.
The manifestation section at the end was a last minute addition and I think it landed. That’s a full episode waiting to happen.
Anyway. This one is out now. I hope it gives you something to think about. And I hope you know that every coffee, every share, every time you tell someone about the show, it keeps this thing alive. That’s you. So again, thank you.
Until next time… stay curious and stay strange. 🖤