 There's a great saying that says don't judge people because they sin differently than you. Well I have also learned in my life not to judge people because they pray differently than you. A teacher I had once pointed out that all the trees in the forest look different. Come from different tree families and different tree lineages. But all the trees in the forest have one thing in common. They are all reaching up to the same light. One thing that this time period has taught me, a beautiful thing that this time period has taught me is that instead of judging others we should learn from others because we've all been taught inaccurate information about each other and it's time that we take our power back and start to learn things for ourselves. But before we go any further you know what to do please hit that subscribe button and give us a like. As always thank you so so so much to all of our patrons and our producers on this channel. Without you we could not do what we do. If you would like to join our patreon community there is a link down in the description box below. Welcome to esoteric Atlanta my name is Bryce and today on part one on our deep dive into voodoo we are going to be talking about Congo Square. Now as you can see I have disabled the comments on this video. As most of you know I personally along with many other researchers on this journey have experienced extreme from people who claim to be Christians. Mostly from people who come from fundamentalist Christianity. This and bullying will absolutely not be tolerated. So by disabling the comments on this video I am putting up a boundary for those people who think it's okay to be that horrific to other people especially when the other people are just looking into something and especially since it has come out that people who are big in the Christian movement are allegedly guilty of crimes that are far more horrific than the alleged crimes of those who practice voodoo. So if you are a follower of Christ especially for those who are fundamentalist followers of Christ I will remind you that Jesus told us our job was to love each other as he loved us. He also reminded us not to judge others. So that tells me that it is my job and your job to not condemn other people especially if you don't have any proof to back up the crimes you are accusing someone of. Most of what we hear about voodoo is hearsay a smear campaign. Again our job isn't to condemn our job rather is to love and to try to understand. Before we get into Congo Square I'm going to go through a couple of misconceptions about the voodoo faith. We know that the powers that be have often used scapegoats to cover up their dastardly crimes. We know that New Orleans was founded as a hot spot for the House of Bourbon. Again if you missed all of our deep dives into the House of Bourbon and their satanic practices I will place those links down in the description box below. The more and more and more I research into voodoo the more similarities I see between the true faith of Christianity and the true practitioners of this religion that comes from Africa. And I have also found that while the powers that be from the House of Bourbon and the Catholic Church were laying claim on places in Louisiana they were allegedly and from my own opinion and from my own research smearing the voodoo practitioners as their scapegoats so that no one would figure out what they were actually doing. The practice of voodoo made its way into the Americas with the West African slave trade. You still prominently see a voodoo practiced in Charleston, South Carolina and along the rest of the low country like Savannah Georgia as well as of course in New Orleans, Louisiana. New Orleans, Louisiana has definitely made more of a market off of its history of voodoo than say Charleston or Savannah. In fact I don't know if many people knew that voodoo was practiced in Charleston or Savannah until the book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil came out back in the 90s. Now if you've been on this channel for a while we have discussed parts of the low country on the Atlantic coast including the book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. As most of you know this is where my family is from. My mother's family comes from the low country of South Carolina. We would spend our summers on the coast of South Carolina in the low country. I grew up around this religion so for me the religion of voodoo has never really scared me and from what I see and what I've experienced and what I've researched it shouldn't scare you either. Again as we have learned the powers that be in our world have gained their power by two really big tactics. One is infiltration and the other is to conquer and divide. I definitely believe the information that we've been told about voodoo was a tactic used to conquer and divide. Now over the course of history from my understanding there are different sects of voodoo, different lineages. Kind of like in the Christian faith you have the Presbyterians, you have the Baptist, you have the Catholics. The basis of the faith might be the same but they might do certain things a little bit differently. Now in New Orleans you will see a lot of intermixing with the spirits of voodoo and the saints of Catholicism. In fact there are a lot of similarities between the spirits of voodoo and the saints of Catholicism. Still to this day in New Orleans you might see voodoo altars with Catholic saints. If you remember from our video where we broke down the Cajun people and the Creole people, the Creole people got their name because they are an eclectic combination of many different cultures coming together as one. In my opinion that's most of the deep south. And when the slaves were brought into New Orleans they were forced to be baptized into the Catholic faith. And at that point you started to see this marriage between the voodoo faith and Christianity. Now notice I said they were forced to be baptized. There was no choice about it. It was either get baptized into Christianity or risk your life. So as survival mode crept in along with the need to hold on to your own heritage, we again started to see this merging of two different religions. Now before we go any further I do want to give a special thank you out to two different people. Besides reading loads and loads of articles and reading loads and loads of books. On the subject there were two individuals that also helped guide me. One I know personally and one probably has no idea who I am. The one I know personally is a dear friend of mine. I'm not going to say her name in order to keep her privacy but she has really helped me a lot dive through this information and understand what is misinformation and what is actually correct involving the faith. The other person is a tour guide down in New Orleans called Robi. He is a voodoo priest and I am going to link one of his videos down in the description box below. When I am able to actually get to New Orleans I definitely want to set up an interview with him or at the very least take one of his tours. When people think of voodoo a lot of times they think of black magic. They think of people putting out spells against other people and even though all religions carry an element of white and black magic the heart of voodoo isn't really about that. Anytime you're casting a spell it's you putting a vibrational demand out into the universe. Our friend Cindy who comes on this channel often has said that any time you're spell casting you have to actually embody the essence of that demand into the universe yourself first. So if you're trying to curse someone or put something bad on someone you have to harbor that as well. Now yes spell casting can involve rituals but it also can be in the form of a that you send to somebody who shares a different opinion from yourself. As I said on David's show on Tuesday when I personally receive emails from fundamentalist Christians I know that they are harboring a lot of hate and pain and hurt inside of them in order to be able to project that onto me. Those emails in that essence of spell casting are black magic. That's why I've been saying don't judge least you be judged. But on the other hand if you're sending somebody a beautiful email saying I love you or I'm wishing you all the many blessings in the world that's white light magic. That's the essence of God the higher vibration of the heavens not the lower vibration of hell. Now the word voodoo translates into ancestor or spirit. However the word voodoo is not actually the word for this faith. Just like the powers that be changed Jesus's name and basically changed everything about Jesus's life so the powers that be have also changed the name voodoo. Now forgive me if I say this wrong if you are a voodoo practitioner but I believe the correct way to say voodoo is voodun and that basically means pure light. Now I'm going to go ahead and continue saying voodoo because that's how we all know it even though we are aware that that's not its real name just like I have continued to use the name Jesus even though we know that was not actually his name. This is just simply a means for us to all continue to be on the same page as we deep dive into this information. But all in all I do want you all to remember that the official word voodun of voodoo means pure light. And as you guys know as I've said in almost every episode Genesis 1 3 God said let there be light that was divine spark and so already we're starting to see some similarities It seems to me that this practice from Africa is celebrating that divine light that comes from God. You also see things in religious ceremonies called the Vive. Again I hope I'm saying that right and that is like this mural that is painted on the ground. Now in a lot of my research there wasn't a whole whole lot I could find about each Vive because they are specific to specific practitioners and there is something very sacred for them and so with that being said I don't want to try to dig too deeply because I do want to respect boundaries as I myself am not a practitioner of this faith. But from what I see this Vive is very similar to the Scottish coat of arms. A lot of times practitioners will also use what is called Florida water. This is a concoction of different things within the water. Some people have compared this to the Christian holy water. Blessings are done with Florida water just like blessings are done in the Christian faith with holy water. These blessings are done by priests who are held responsible for healing. These blessings are also done for people to find peace. A lot of the priests of this religion are also responsible for understanding herbs, how to use herbs to heal people. So as you can see as you start digging deeper into this faith you find a lot of similarities and a lot of actually really interesting stuff. It seems that at the heart of this faith there is a great need to heal people and to help people connect higher to God through their own pure light or divine spark. For many voodoo practitioners the woman is actually the voodoo queen. It's very much a matriarchal society for the woman is responsible for caring on life. The woman is the element of water and earth while men are the elements of air and fire. This sounds again a lot like the way Jesus taught the original teachings of Jesus not the edited teachings of Jesus where Jesus worked with women too where he anointed women to also teach the joining of the divine feminine with the divine masculine. In the gospel of the holy 12 or the gospel of the Nazarene way as it was originally called we see Jesus refer to God as father mother the joining of two different divinities but one of the biggest similarities that I found between the Christian faith and voodoo is an entity known as papa legba. Now papa legba himself has gone through a complete sneer campaign by Hollywood and again we we know what Hollywood really is it's not just there for our entertainment it's there to tell us things sometimes things that aren't true in order to again conquer and divide we saw papa legba in season three of american horror story coven papa legba was shown as this demonic entity who funnily enough like to I mean talk about projection but that's not true that's not who papa legba is papa legba is the master of the crossroads the crossroads between the living world and the world on the other side of the veil he is described as taking the high road not the low road in christianity we have a figure just like papa legba and this is saint peter at saint peter's gate we are taught in christianity that saint peter is the guard of the crossroads he is the one that lets you into the realm of heaven or cast you down into the pits of hell and again when you start to see papa legba in this way you realize we're not so different after all as you are all very well aware a lot of the voodoo ceremonies involved dancing and eating this was again a celebration of the light and the divine spark of god to me and in my opinion this is all a misunderstanding of culture in the western culture we dance and eat to celebrate as well however our dancing looks very different white people dance differently than black people it's just cultural you even see this in churches there's quite a difference between a white church and a black church usually the black church or the african-american church is way more animated there's way more dancing in fact black church seems way more fun to go to than the white church so if we start to understand this cultural difference that's when we can start to see how the powers that be were able to manipulate what was actually going on in voodoo ceremonies there were not possessions there were not any of that stuff it was just literally a celebration while the people in europe were waltzing in their celebrations the people in africa were also dancing the way they culturally dance too just like westerners eat with cutlery asians will eat with sticks just like asians eat with sticks indians eat with their hands none of them are wrong and none of them are right it's just a cultural thing and as our friend liz on tiktok said so eloquently her husband being from africa has expressed that our cultures are something we should be proud of and something we would want to share with other people well this idea of ceremony is what made congo square and new orleans so famous in the year 1808 a law was passed in new orleans that you could not dance at the public markets again they would see dancing in the markets because as the africans were coming into new orleans they were doing everything they could to hold on to their culture now this to me is extremely fascinating because i find human beings to be very very fascinating and i am very intrigued by other people's cultures i'm even intrigued by my own culture i find it simply fascinating just like i find psychology simply fascinating now for us who are in america who are of european descent or a k a white people you can see where different areas of europe settled in the new world for example again where i am from in georgia and south carolina the whole eastern side of the deep south was mostly people of english descent this is why a lot of people down here in the deep south still have english last names like jones smith thomas watson but if you go up north to the northern side of the east coast you're going to see a lot of people of italian descent like in new jersey you have a lot of people with italian last names just look at the real house why is of new jersey most of them carry italian last names you also have areas where dutch people settled german people you find a lot of german people up in the west consen michigan area and so within these different pockets of america you are going to have the overall american culture but you also are going to see remnants of the old european cultures you're going to see us doing a lot of things down here in the south that mirror what the culture was in england you're going to see a lot of things happening up in new jersey that mirror the culture of italy well the same thing in new orleans with the french and the spanish and also the african slaves now in this time there were more slaves in new orleans than white people in fact it was like three to one so the white people had to be very very careful about how they went around working with their slaves so after they passed the law in 1808 they designated an area for the slaves to congregate and dance this area became known as congo square and a lot of people believe that it was congo square in the evolution of the music and the dancing that came from congo square that started the sensation of jazz now if you remember from our past videos especially the ones we did on delphine la larie we spoke about the code noir now again i will place a link to the new orleans playlist down in the description box below in case you missed any of those videos but in new orleans because it was a french settlement and not an english settlement there were different laws involving this type of slave labor and one of these laws was that on sundays the slaves were off of course they were required to go to mass in the morning because as i said earlier they were forced to be baptized once they got brought into the port into new orleans but after mass was over they would hop a wall and meet and congregate in congo square this was a chance for them to catch up with their friends and perhaps even some of their extended family members who had been sold onto other property now congo square is located in armstrong park in the neighborhood called the tramé we are going to be looking into the tramé later on in this series now over time congo square became known as a must-see attraction in new orleans from the 1800s into the 1900s it became a show for people who were not used to seeing this kind of dancing or this kind of ceremony but what was a show for them was essential to the african americans again even though on the outside they had to be catholic they were still able to meet on this one day a week to continue to tell younger generations the stories of their heritage and celebrate the religion that they knew from their homeland now i know most of us are fortunate that we've never been in the situation where we were stripped of everything that was ours and forced to take on a new identity i can't imagine what life was like for the slaves anywhere in the world but i can understand a little bit how important this day of sunday became to them it was again the one day where they could truly be who they were with each other and so the power in this congo square the joy the celebration grew and grew and grew in congo square still to this day there is a tree called the agoon tree this is the ancestor tree this tree has been there since the 1700s and i don't know about you but if the tree could talk to me i would love to hear what it had to say because a tree that's been there since the 1700s has definitely seen a lot this tree was a place for people to meet and to pray and it's still a place for voodoo practitioners in new Orleans to meet and to pray if you go to congo square you might see offerings left at the tree and according to roby with the offerings left at the tree that involve food the voodoo priests will then come and collect all the food that's left as offering and cook it and then go and feed the poor according to him this was supposed to be a celebration of feeding the village but in a country like america where we're all pretty privileged anyway in our villages they take the opportunity now to feed the less fortunate kind of like soup kitchens in a church within congo square lies a monument it's called the congo square monument this monument was built as a tool to help descendants of slaves understand their own history now again i have to thank roby for pointing out things on this monument that someone like myself would have probably missed there are chains at the bottom that represent that they are slaves but however on this monument the chains are off the feet because sunday they were off now the main dominant person on the monument is a woman again this represents the matriarchal society that lived within this voodoo faith you also see a man with marks on his face that represent an initiation into the faith and if you look closely you'll see a native american woman this is because in new orleans the native americans and the africans have an alliance in the early 1700s if a slave were to run away the only place they could go that would be safe would be into the native american nations at this time the africans and the native americans became very very close they too started sharing in their culture and the native american nations were also very influential in the culture around congo square in fact the alliance between the africans and the native americans grew so much that under spanish rule of new orleans africans were not allowed to wear feathers i guess that speaks volumes for how afraid of this alliance the powers that be were we can also see the power of that alliance in mardi gras today there is a crew called the mardi gras indians made up of mostly african americans who dress in the way of the native american nations out of respect for the alliance that the two communities held together the mardi gras indians celebrate the same way that their ancestors celebrated in congo square they sing by call and repeat there is no sheet music and it's open dancing as i said this is allegedly the birthplace of jazz and it's for sure the birth place of the brass band funerals a cultural side of new orleans that has been shown in many many movies and something that i think is quite fantastic and when i pass away one day i think i would want to brass band funeral as well it also reminds me a lot of the funerals that i see in india where they parade with the deceased relative in almost a celebration now again this is only part one into our look into voodoo and as always i do suggest that each person do his or her own research again after all that's what this time period is all about and i hope as we start to research more and more and more we start to realize that we are way more similar than we are different and i hope that as humanity we start to realize that we are not each other's enemies but we are each other's friends we are not our brother's keeper but our brother's brother and our sister's sister and i hope as we move forward into the dawn of a new day that we learn to celebrate and appreciate each other's cultures to watch the beauty of the differences between us instead of condemn each other for the differences between us all right guys thank you so much for sitting through this video i'm dropping this video a day earlier i was planning on dropping this on a friday you know our normal schedule is monday wednesday friday with videos that i do myself and the other videos i do with other people are kind of scattered throughout the week however i have a very special video that i'm going to be dropping tomorrow instead so i wanted to bump this one up a day now this afternoon i will be back with john claude on beyond mystic for another episode at 4 p.m i believe that's going to be live so make sure you tune in so you can be interactive within the conversation on the live show again if you can't make it at 4 p.m obviously he will have it up on his channel so you can watch the replay all right guys have a fantastic day and i will talk to you all soon bye