The Mothers of the Craft

Parents Appreciation Day

The Mothers of the Craft

Four 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.

Deanna Holdcraft in a flower crown, seated at a candlelit table at Witches Brew Coffee Co.
The hearth is in good hands.
V · 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.

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