Workshop

A Conversation with Sallie Ann Glassman: The Manbo of New Orleans

Featuring Sallie Ann Glassman

Pull up a chair beside one of New Orleans' most beloved spiritual elders for an intimate conversation with Manbo Asogwe Sallie Ann Glassman.

Initiated in Port-au-Prince in 1995, Sallie is the artist of The New Orleans Voodoo Tarot, author of Vodou Visions, proprietress of the Island of Salvation Botanica inside the New Orleans Healing Center, and a co-founder of New Orleans International Vodou Day — the annual procession-and-symposium consciously modeled on Benin's Vodun Days. For nearly fifty years she has led La Source Ancienne Ounfò and presided over the city's most public Vodou observances, from the St. John's Eve head-washing on Bayou St. John to the Fèt Gede each November. Christian Day sits down with her for a wide-ranging conversation about the lwa, the work, and the new chapter she is helping to write for Vodou in New Orleans.

Christian and Sallie will explore:

• Her unlikely path from a Ukrainian-Jewish girlhood in Maine to initiation as a Manbo Asogwe in Haiti What Vodou actually is — versus what Hollywood has told us it is
• The real difference between Vodou the religion and Hoodoo folk magic, and the legacy of Marie Laveau and Congo Square
• New Orleans International Vodou Day and its sister-bond with Vodun Days in Benin.
• Vodou as a “technology” for opening the doors between the visible and invisible worlds
• Whether Vodou carries a message of empowerment for people of European descent — and how to receive it without crossing into appropriation
• What it costs, and what it gives, to be one of the most visible Vodou priestesses in the United States

Come ready to listen, and to be reminded that Vodou is not the dark, curse-fille

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