This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Zora Neale Hurston, trained as an anthropologist under Franz Boas, conducted fieldwork documenting Hoodoo practitioners across the American South and in New Orleans in the late 1920s, entering communities as a formally trained researcher rather than as an outsider working from secondhand report. Her fieldwork did not stop at observation; she underwent initiation herself under the root doctor Luke Turner, who claimed descent from Marie Laveau, placing Hurston inside the tradition as a participant rather than only as its documentarian.
Hurston published her findings as Mules and Men in 1935, one of the first firsthand, participant observer ethnographic accounts of Hoodoo, a method that distinguished her work from the outside descriptions of the same practices that had circulated before it. That Boas trained anthropological method and personal initiation combined in a single fieldworker's account, rather than remaining two separate approaches pursued by different people, is what gives Mules and Men its particular documentary standing.
Hurston's own initiation under a root doctor claiming direct descent from Marie Laveau ties her firsthand ethnography back to the same New Orleans Voodoo lineage Laveau's own legend and documented life both belong to, a connection recorded in Hurston's own account rather than inferred from outside sources.