New Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum

This guide to the New Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum follows Wade Davis, a Harvard-trained ethnobotanist who in the early 1980s crouched in rural Haiti collecting a grayish powder from bokors, the Vodou priests said to raise the dead. It walks through the pharmacology he proposed, step by step, using a toxin drawn from a puffer fish and a hallucinogenic plant called datura, and then the Japanese chemists who later tested his samples. Along the way you'll see the museum's own relics, including a kneeling board said to have belonged to Marie Laveau. Look closely at the cluttered shelves before you decide what you believe.