University of Wisconsin

Dear Mr./Ms. Atheist, 

So I've been working down the list of deities from your "graveyard".  It is quite the eclectic collection of divinities and has taken quite a bit of my time to research each one.  You see I've been writing something in their honor as a small way of making up for your assertion that they do not exist.  

I've run into an issue though...you've got Mademoiselle Charlotte on the list.  Number 34 of 90 (BTW thanks so much for sending me that list!). Now I'm not a practitioner of  Vodou but I do know how to google.  As a college student, I would have thought you knew how also, but maybe you or one of your fellows got in a hurry due to a test or party or something.  So let me share with you what I found. Hopefully my information is more correct than yours.

Mademoiselle Charlotte is a loa (lwa) in Haitian Vodou.  Loas are not gods, more like ancestors.  They are spirits that are subservient to a distant and rather busy deity known as Bondye (derived from the French words for "good god").  Since Bondye does not intercede in human affairs, practitioners honor or serve the loas (lwas).  Mademoiselle Charlotte is interesting in that she is a loa of European descent, commonly believed to have come to Haiti with the colonists.  She is known for giving her "horses" the ability to speak French and is quite the stickler for ritual protocol.  Rarely seen and difficult to work with as she only assists those to whom she has taken a fancy.  Think of the typical idea of a difficult French woman and that seems to describe, Mademoiselle.  I can tell you about her general likes and dislikes but unfortunately not how a white French woman came to be honored among mostly African spirits. Now THAT sounds like an interesting tale.

However, I do imagine, as a stickler for protocol that she'd, at the very least, like to rap someone on the wrist with her fan for such impertinence of first placing her on a god list and second of all for even having a god graveyard.  Be that as it may, I hope her displeasure is mild and her pleasure is great at being remembered.

Blessings, Me

P.S. I wanted to include a veve of Mademoiselle Charlotte to show you but wasn't sure about the appropriateness of it.  So you are stuck with a picture of a pink rose from my mother's garden...rose is Mademoiselle's color.

b2ap3_thumbnail_2015-05-31_14-47-30_620.jpg