A spiritual church opens in New Orleans as a legal shelter

Mother Leafy Anderson founded the Eternal Life Spiritual Church in New Orleans in 1918, the first of the Spiritual churches of that city. The form was protective. With Vodou practice exposed to prosecution, a congregation with a spiritualist name was legally safe, and the churches carried Vodou, Pentecostalism, spiritualism and Catholicism together: elaborate altars to ancestors, saints and spirit guides, women serving as priests and as mothers, prophecy and healing performed in ecstatic trance. Catholic Creoles of colour used a second cover, the seance, in which a medium delivered detailed messages in French from the dead. Rene Grandjean, born in France and resident in Haiti for several years, kept written records of those Creole seances. Zora Neale Hurston, working in the city in this period, put the arrangement plainly: the practice was in disrepute and parts of it were illegal, so a spiritualist name protected the congregation and worked as camouflage.