Dark Magic of the Sunken City

She is as old as time itself, and she smells like swamp, sex and death. New Orleans is my home and heart, I carry her inside me, like a devotional, though I now live far from her. New Orleans has potent magic, ancient magic of the swampy mire that surrounds her - an abyss that welcomes its dead and holds its secrets. The city was never supposed to exist there, and the land remembers.

The city has always resisted easy narratives. She's not gothic romance, she's not vampire porn, not Mardi Gras excess, although on the surface, she embraces all of these narratives, and this is part of her charm. What she truly is -  a palimpsest of indigenous burial grounds, colonial violence, the spiritual practices of enslaved peoples, catastrophic engineering hubris, and through it all, a genuine magic and warmth coexisting with profound danger. Most cities don't hold that kind of contradiction. New Orleans is that contradiction.

It is wise to treat her with fear and respect, for I have seen the impossible there, things that should not exist in our world. I wish I could tell you all I have seen, but there are some secrets that should never be told. There are, however, a couple of tales I can divulge, dear reader, should you be blessed enough to connect with her on a deeper level, should you be unfortunate enough to see the unseen. 

By all means, go as an oblivious and happy thrill seeker. Enjoy her pleasures, visit the French Quarter, explore the mausoleum cities of the dead, take a paddle boat cruise, and eat the food, the decadent and divine food. New Orleans welcomes all, even those who leave her, are always welcomed back home.

Now, where shall I start?

The bayou serpent god

After graduating university, I tried to make my way in life, as you do. My first attempt at a career was not what I wanted, so I took a job at a company that fixed up abandoned or repossessed homes to make them suitable for new owners. My job was literally to suss out what needed to be done and book the work in. I would go to houses and, if they were empty, take lots of photos, if they were not empty, but the people were being foreclosed on by their bank, I would talk to them, if they didn’t try to shoot me that is. My territory was all of southern Louisiana. I was able to explore many fascinating places that hummed with dark energy and sordid history. One of those places was just west of the city, in the area near Lake Maurepas. The company warned me that paved roads in the area were non-existent, and to “be careful”. I had no smartphone, only a foldout map and an address. The road was not on the map but I had a hand drawn piece of paper showing where a gravel road should be. As I drove into the swamp, I was enchanted by the moss-draped cypress trees, the dense humidity, the earthy, dank smells. I saw no people, only a small cabin. Horror movie images flooded my mind, and I could see myself ending up in a “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” situation out here where no one would ever find my body.

But instead of finding hostile swamp folk, I found old magic. I got out of my car and was walking to one of the trees to collect Spanish moss to take home with me, it was so beautiful. That’s when I saw it - a huge white serpent rising from the swamp to my left, a creature so large he blocked out the trees and the sky. He was as real as the tree I was standing before, his huge scales pure and glistening as undulations shook the ground beneath me. Time stood still, I felt fear, but also reverence, because I knew this was not a snake, but a god. He lowered his head to watch me, his eye ten times bigger than my car, and he let out a hiss that shook tree branches. It was a friendly warning, he did not have menace in his eyes, but caution. I knew that whoever lived in that cabin, they were not to be disturbed. I gathered a handful of moss and left without seeing a soul. I remember the drive back, but it was like I was watching myself drive rather than actually driving. The god that appeared to me was none other than Damballah,  the primordial serpent lwa of Haitian vodou. To this day I honour Damballah and Papa Legba, who I met many years later. It is not everyday you meet a god in the swamps.

But the city's magic isn't confined to the swamps. In the city, death can wear a very different face.

Cabin in the Louisiana swamp

At death’s door

In the early 90's I was promoting concerts in New Orleans, and I would frequent the Garden District - then a paradox of mansions on one street and shotgun houses and poverty three blocks over. I frequented the area to put out fliers, visit Underground Sounds on Octavia Street (where I bought my first Fields of the Nephilim t-shirt!), and if they were home, visit Leilah and Daniel at Westgate Necromantic - the infamous purple and black house of death. The entire area around Westgate was a goth magnet, and you were likely on any given day to bump into Trent Reznor, Anne Rice, Poppy Brite, or a horde of black-clad vampire worshiping fiends rolling into or out of the clubs and haunts on Decatur Street. 

Leilah was obsessed with death, and on multiple occasions I spotted her at local cemeteries searching for bones, sometimes amid decaying flesh as the city’s mausoleums are all above ground. She would lovingly carry them home, cherished treasures that she utilised in her magical works - connections to her beloved Azrael, angel of death, who she said, called New Orleans his home.

Leilah often spoke of Azrael as her lover. There was a great statue of him in the house, and the way she spoke to him - with genuine tenderness and intimate devotion - unsettled me more than the bones she'd collected from cemeteries. Those bones, she explained, weren't desecration. They were connections to the beloved dead, treasures that let her commune with Azrael himself.

I had worked with dark energies before, but never had I come so close to Death as presence. Leilah showed me Death as a teacher who helped me see beauty in putrefaction, in decay; something natural and pure that most people recoil from. You cannot unsee what death truly is once you've been shown with love rather than fear.

Daniel and Leilah moved from New Orleans after their home was damaged by hurricane Katrina, but their legacy will forever remain part of the city of the dead.

Westgate Necromantic on Magazine Street, also known as the House of Death

New Orleans, the great “wild lady of the swamps”,  is a Sunken City on every level: from the literal subsidence, the spiritual weight pulling her down, the sense that she's always been half-submerged in something older and darker than the French Quarter architecture suggests, and the knowledge that eventually the water will win. She's a city living on borrowed time, built on borrowed land, and she knows it. That's part of her magic—the defiance, the beauty in impermanence, the fierce life lived in the face of inevitable drowning. And that transfers to her people, living so close to the edge of survival, they see through the veil more clearly, a veil already so thin in this liminal place.

In all the years I lived there, I never experienced crime, never felt like I was in real danger. The city protects her own, she shares her revelations with those who feel the magic, who share a deep connection with her. And that is why I love her.