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Just click the link in the show description to support now. Welcome to Tales to Tales, Part of the

Part of the District of Wonders Network, featuring Starsuring Starship, Sofer and Far-Fetched

Fables, everyone has a story in the District of Wonders. Come and find yours.

Good evening, Children of the night, and welcome to Louisiana, home of Cajun cuisine,

the birthplace of jazz, and the cultural heart of voodoo in America.

Thanks in large part to its portrayal in pop culture, voodoo gets a pretty bad rap,

usually limited to curses, zombies, and quote-unquote voodoo dolls.

Truth is, voodoo is really just a caricature of the Afro-Caribbean religion of Voudon.

There's a lot to Vodon as a belief system, but much of it is rooted

in personal creeds and practices. That includes folk medicine and a system of ethics that are

passed down the generations through proverbs, stories, songs, and folklore. That's not to say that some of the more sensational aspects of pop culture voodoo

don't have their roots in Voudon as well.

Animal sacrifice was definitely a thing,

and zombies absolutely do feature in Voudon as well.

But rather than the malicious flesh-eaters we see in books,

and on screens nowadays, they were most often victims. Corpses that were reanimated and

controlled by priests, either as a means of punishment, or sometimes, even a cheap source of slave

labor on plantations.

But despite being a largely misunderstood and misrepresented religion,

...