Shunning

Shunning
Event Information
Location	Lafayette Cemetery
Date(s)	2010 2011 2013
Participants	Annie La Fleur † Davina Claire Vincent Griffith
Description	A sentence ritual that ostracizes a guilty witch from the community, stripping title and additional power granted by the ancestors.

“	By order of the law set forth by the Ancestors, in accordance to the decree of the nine covens, Davina Claire, you are henceforth banished from this community. Your title is revoked, as is your link to those who came before. You will no longer have contact with the Ancestors. To the New Orleans witches, it will be as though you were never born.	”
	— Vincent to Davina in Out of the Easy

Shunning is a magical act utilized by the nine covens of New Orleans, all of whom practice Ancestral Magic, in order to punish a witch who has broken their laws.

Crimes punishable by shunning can be anything from practicing Dark Magic to killing a fellow witch. Witches who have been shunned by the community have their communication with their Ancestors completely cut off and stripped off additional power granted by the Ancestors such as the Regency, and they will essentially be banished from their community. According to Vincent Griffith, the nine covens treat shunned witches as though they had never been born, completely erasing their existence from their history.

Shunning Ritual

As seen when Davina Claire was shunned in Out of the Easy, a witch who has been proven to have broken the laws of the nine covens of New Orleans will be brought to Lafayette Cemetery before the Elders. If the crime that the witch committed is ruled to be punishable by shunning, one of the Elders (or, in some cases, a witch involved in the criminal proceedings) will stand next to the accused and declare that the witch in question has officially been exiled from the New Orleans witch community. Afterward, the Elders will arrange themselves into a tunnel of two rows, and as the banished witch is marched out of the cemetery, the Elders will use a form of representational magic where they strip away the shunned witch's connection to the Ancestors and their magic by each one symbolically turning their backs on them until the shunned witch is left unable to practice ancestral magic and has been forced out of the only home they know.

Throughout The Originals Series

In Long Way Back From Hell, it was revealed by Marcel Gerard that, at some point in late 2010 or early 2011, a witch named Annie La Fleur was shunned by the French Quarter Coven for practicing dark magic. However, unbeknownst to the rest of the coven, Annie had actually been possessed by the spirit of Celeste Dubois, a dark witch who had possessed the bodies of dozens of female witches in the coven over the course of at least two centuries. Once Annie was shunned from the coven, Céleste, having no further use for her body, caused Annie to kill herself by jumping off a bridge where Céleste first kissed Elijah Mikaelson. This "suicide" allowed Céleste's spirit to jump into the body of Sabine Laurent to repeat the cycle anew.

In Farewell to Storyville, Davina Claire, one of the four Harvest girls reveals that she, unlike the other witches, was shunned by the Ancestors into the darkness after she was sacrificed to complete the Harvest.

In Out of the Easy, Vincent Griffith heard that The Strix were seeking the help of the young Harvest Witch Davina Claire, who had recently been named the new the Regent of the nine covens. Knowing that she wouldn't leave town for her own safety as he and Marcel thought was best, Vincent resorted to purposely exposing the fact that she had enlisted the hybrid Hayley Marshall-Kenner to kill Kara Nguyen, a witch who publicly attacked Davina in front of the other Elders at a meeting, and indirectly eleven other witches.

Using a pair of willow hoops and gaining help from Kara's son Van, Vincent tricked Davina into confessing to the murder of Kara (and, by extension, the eleven other Versailles witches Hayley was forced to kill in self-defense after the fact) while the rest of the covens' Elders watched outside. When it was revealed to Davina that she had been caught, she attempted to explain that her intention was to prevent Kara from starting a mutiny that would eventually grow into a full out civil war between the covens, Vincent reminded her that in the laws of the New Orleans witch community, a witch who kills another witch must be shunned by their coven. The Elders then made an aisle by standing in two rows, each turning their back on Davina as she was forced to leave Lafayette Cemetery, completing the ritual.

In The Devil Comes Here and Sighs, Van Nguyen approaches Vincent Griffith while he is trying to commune with The Ancestors. After a series of exchanges, He flings Vincent to an alter and informs him that he is now chosen by the Ancestors to be the Regent.

In Where Nothing Stays Buried, Van confirms that Vincent has been shunned by the Ancestors at the Lafayette Cemetery.

Trivia

• A shunned witch is still able to practice Ancestral Magic as seen with Vincent Griffith. However, they are left weakened as they no longer have the additional power supported by the Ancestors.