David Rae Morris for The New York Times.
A New Orleans voodoo priestess, Miriam Chamani.
EW ORLEANS — Last year, doctors told a 41-year-old New York woman who had been bedridden with meningitis and other ailments that she should prepare for the worst. Rather than resign herself to her fate, she boarded a train to New Orleans — her illness does not permit her to fly — and made an offering at the tomb of Marie Laveau, the "voodoo queen" who died in 1881 but has re-emerged as the center of a far-reaching religious movement.
After what she called a nearly complete recovery, the woman, who asked to be identified only as Jackie, recently made another trip to Laveau's tomb "to close the circle."
"If you believe there are spiritual forces with great power," she said, "this is definitely a place to come."
New Orleans is the center of what scholars and others say is a surging revival of interest in voodoo, a centuries-old belief system rooted in Africa. Laveau, who was hugely influential...