?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,500 - $ 3,500
(RELIGION.) VOODOO. A photographic hex or spell, cast via a sixth plate tintype photograph of a well-dressed African American man. Above which, on the glass cover is drawn or painted what appears to be the dried carapace of a spiderlike insect. In its original case with gilt frame and red plush. [New Orleans, LA?], circa 1870's
An extraordinarily rare authentic relic of Voodoo, representing a hex, or spell cast on the person in the photograph. Voodoo in the United States is most commonly associated with the African Americans of Louisiana and the Creoles of New Orleans, in particular. But it is also found in Haiti, and in Pernambuco in the interior of Brazil among the descendants of the Yoruba people brought there as slaves. Santeria, a form of Voodoo it is practiced among the people of the Latin American Caribbean. The word Voodoo is a corruption of the word Vodun, a form of animist religion practiced in Dahomey, which was carried to the shores of the United States via the Atlantic Slave Trade. Much of it is an admixture of Christianity with Voodoo.
