LC-A+: Capitol Building, Baton Rouge, LA

I shot this in August and kind of stuck it in a drawer and forgot about it for a few months.

Saint Lucy

Maybe I'm getting a little too into this whole Southern Conjure/New Orleans Voodoo/Folk Catholicism thing, but today is Saint Lucy's feast day and I made her an altar. I'll leave it up until the winter solstice, because Lucy is a solstice saint whose name comes from the Latin word for light, "lux".

My interest in Saint Lucy actually predates my interest in NOLA Voodoo, back to my teenage years. I mean, she's a teenage girl carrying around a tray with eyeballs on it and a sword. That's awesome. And at the same time I was getting interested in photography, in which vision is kind of important.

In regular Catholicism, Lucy is the matron saint of blind people or people with vision problems, either because her eyes were gouged out during torture, or because she pulled them out of her head to dissuade a pagan suitor who admired them. (In that version, God miraculously restores her sight.) In folk or magical Catholicism, she is associated with more mystical forms of sight, and people often keep her image near divination tools (hence, my tarot cards).

I don't like saint statues, because unless you spring for a really expensive one they tend to look kind of cheesy, so I always use other images. This is actually a bottle spell I made a couple weeks ago, it contains a petition paper, an eye milagro, and some herbal ingredients associated with eyesight--mundane and mystical. The idea behind bottle spells is they last as long as the bottle stays sealed. The front is decorated with Domenico di Pace Beccafumi's portrait of Saint Lucy, painted in 1521.

I chose the flowers and cookies that I did because they kind of remind me of both eyeballs and suns!