c. 1999 Religion News Service

NEW ORLEANS _ At the close of 1998, a mermaid appeared in a dream of Miriam Chamani, the priestess of the Voodoo Spiritual Temple here. The mermaid told the priestess to be prepared for a long journey.”She said she would return,”Chamani said.”And she did, in early 1999.” In the next dream, the mermaid told the 56-year-old priestess to put a book in her pants”and hold on tight.””We swished under the sea,”Chamani recalled. In the dream, the two surfaced later on a foreign shore.

On Thursday (Sept. 9), the priestess will be wide awake and leaving for the foreshadowed foreign shore. A Delta Air Lines flight will take her to Russia, where for three weeks she will serve as a sort of voodoo ambassador.”It’s an opportunity to introduce them to one of our traditions, exporting our culture,”she said.

Accompanied by two female associates, Sherry Taylor and Miriam Dorn of Wisconsin, the priestess will teach more than a dozen Russians spiritual practices that are a mix of African rituals and Roman Catholicism wedded in the Caribbean.

Chamani’s dreams came at about the time a Russian man began a 1 1/2-year-long campaign, initiated on the Internet, to persuade the priestess to teach voodoo to him and 13 others.

Long after the dreams, Osipov Nick solicited Chamani with letters, e-mails, photographs and telephone calls. The 31-year-old Russian, who described himself as a history teacher and a doctor, pleaded with her for more than a year to leave her home for the cooler climes of his city, Rybinsk, northeast of Moscow on the Volga River. His correspondence and telephone calls often reiterated how much he and his friends wanted to learn voodoo.”To our gread (sic) regret, we have no possibilities to get the information on voodoo which interests us greatty (sic) by Internet,”Nick wrote in the summer of 1998.”We can’t get books on voodoo in Russia (Rossija), either, as such books are not published here. We would kindly ask you to be our teachers in voodoo religion and magic. We look forward to hearing from you.” Neither his relentless campaign nor the apparent respect shown her in the calls and correspondence, though, sold the priestess on the idea of transporting herself and her spiritual practices to Rybinsk, a major inland port with shipyards and factories.

It was the mermaid.

Priestess Miriam _ as most people refer to her _ said she decided to take the journey after the second visit from what she described as a Simbi, a spiritual guide.

Nick has sent photos of himself and the other eager pupils, who range in age from 18 to 48. He describes the lot as a collection of homemakers, engineers, students, a clerk, a psychologist, businessmen and mechanics. Chamani said Nick has promised to cover her expenses, meals, lodging and interpreter.”He said there will be a room for me to sleep in with a small altar room for me to work out of,”she said.

A benefactor in the United States donated the plane fare.

Meanwhile, the priestess has shipped copies of the temple’s newsletter and brochure to Nick, as well as required reading that includes”The Secrets of Voodoo”by Milo Rigaud,”Macumba”by Serge Bramly, and her deceased husband’s”Belizean Herb Book.” A course outline prepared by Chamani calls for spending the first three days getting acquainted with the Russian people and their customs. Then she”will study the vibrations of the people who invited her, so as to best identify their needs.” Later, she will lecture about voodoo from a historical perspective, reviewing the religion’s universal principles and the ways it is practiced in the Western world. Demonstrations will follow. She will compare voodoo to Wicca, Santeria and other”magical sciences.”Other lectures will cover the many types of rituals and initiations of voodoo and”look at ways of establishing a voodoo community in Russia.” She will tour the spiritual landmarks in the country and”collect soil samples so as to ensure a safe return home.” In New Orleans, Chamani is among the better known voodoo practitioners. The priestess came onto the radar of many New Orleans area residents earlier this year when her temple became the repository for the ashes of Chicken Man, one of the French Quarter’s most distinctive street celebrities, so named because of his willingness to demonstrate the sacrificial voodoo rite involving biting the head off a chicken.

Priestess Miriam, born Miriam Adams in Pocahontas, Miss., founded the Voodoo Spiritual Temple in New Orleans in 1990 with her husband, Oswan Chamani, a voodoo priest from Belize who died in March 1995.

Most of her training in voodoo took place in Chicago in the 1970s.”Today America has its wits together about the culture that came from the minds and souls of people in Africa. It is a force that won’t go away,”she said, adding she will carry the”Bible of voodoo in my heart”to the Russians.

DEA END WILLIAMS