08/18/2026
May the ancestors welcome her. I had the honour of being in her temple and meeting Priestess Miriam a few years back. An incredible and wise woman.
Priestess Miriam Chamani, 1943–2026
Priestess Miriam Chamani, mambo and co-founder of the Voodoo Spiritual Temple on North Rampart Street, New Orleans, died on Sunday, August 16, after a brief illness. We send our condolences to her husband, the environmentalist Allen Villeneuve, her priest and drummer Louis Martinié, Mishlen Linden, and all of the members and devotees of the Voodoo Spiritual Temple.
She was born Mary Robin Adams in 1943 to sharecroppers in Pocahontas, Mississippi, and raised Baptist in a segregated state that expected her to work cotton. Her family recalled her talking to spirits as a child. She left, first for New York in 1962, then Chicago, where she trained and spent eleven years as an operating room technician. That medical grounding never left her practice. She was one of the few people in the American esoteric world who could speak about the body from inside a surgical theater and from inside an apothecary in the same breath, and she never treated the two as rivals.
She left the Baptist church in 1975 for the Spiritual Church, and in 1982 was ordained a bishop in the Angel Angel All Nations Spiritual Church in Chicago. In 1989 she met Oswan Chamani, a Belizean practitioner of obeah. They married the following year and came to New Orleans, where they read at Marie Laveau's House of Voodoo and worked around the Historic Voodoo Museum before founding the Voodoo Spiritual Temple in May 1990. For four years the gatherings were held in their living room. In 1994 the Temple opened on North Rampart Street, across from the entrance to Armstrong Park and a short walk from Congo Square.
That address was the argument in and of itself. Congo Square is where enslaved Africans gathered on Sundays to drum and dance, and Priestess Miriam planted a functioning religious institution within sight of it, not a museum about one.
Oswan died on March 6, 1995. Priestess Miriam carried the Temple alone for thirty-one years after that, longer than they had together by an order of magnitude. She kept his Belizean herbal knowledge in active use rather than in a display case.
The hardest thing she did was refuse the tourist frame. New Orleans sells voodoo the way it sells anything else, in shot glasses and shrunken heads, and Priestess Miriam ran a healing house on the same street as the shops that traded on the cartoon. She gave bone readings, officiated weddings and funerals, prepared gris-gris and oils, and sat with people after Katrina who had nothing left to consult. She talked to the BBC, National Geographic, the Times-Picayune, and anyone else who came, and she used every one of those appearances to say the same unglamorous thing: Voodoo is a healing tradition. It is not what you were told.
Louis Martinié's role in all this deserves plain statement and gratitude. He served the Temple as drummer, bokor, and eventually priest across more than two decades, and he was the primary drummer for Priestess Miriam’s rituals. That is the substance of it, the labor of showing up to hold the rhythm for other people's work. His public role compounded it. The New Orleans Voodoo Tarot, made with Sallie Ann Glassman and published in 1992, put a specifically New Orleanian ritual vocabulary in front of a national readership at precisely the moment the Temple was establishing itself, and Black Moon Publishing, which he has edited for decades, gave that current a press of its own. He also led the Krewe of Nutria, the Temple's troupe of sacred drummers.
Mishlen Linden's contribution runs through the same institutions. She and Martinié were partners, and together they made Ritual Drumming: Evoking the Sacred Through Rhythms of the Spirit, which carried the sound of the tradition to people who would never stand in the Temple's altar room. Her own writing sits closer to the Typhonian current than to Vodou. What she did do was help build and sustain the publishing and recording world in which the Temple's work could be heard seriously rather than sensationally, and that is not a small thing.
Priestess Miriam Chamani has joined the ancestors, as Oswan did before her, and the Temple will say so in its own language and its own time. Lapè Bondye avè w.
