Back to July 2007
July 2007 Feature
An Interview with Vodou Priestess Sallie Ann Glassman
by Michael Love
Wherever you go there is truth, as long as you find the endurance to withstand, you will find it and it will protect you, and with the love of the universe your light will never go out.-Aysha Love
It was the morning of my interview with Sallie Ann Glassman‹writer, artist, owner of the Island of Botanica spiritual shop in New Orleans and one of the city's most well-known and respected Vodou Manbo (Priestess). I reached into my living room bookshelf for a copy of Glassman's Vodou Visions. On the inside cover of the book was this beautiful quote, written by my life partner Aysha some time ago.
It was one of those sublime, synchronistic moments. Aysha had passed away three and a half years ago. Seeing the quote was as if she was giving her blessing to this project.
Aysha pioneered work in the archetypes and emotional intelligence for thirty-five years. She discovered Sallie¹s book five years ago, soon after we arrived in New Orleans. She showed it to her friends saying it was the best representation of Vodou she had experienced.
Then, six months ago, I met Sallie through the ³Salon,² an eclectic assortment of writers, business people, artists, university professors, architects and others who share a love of New Orleans and a dedication to rebuilding New Orleans.
Impressed by Sallie's down to earth approach to the meshing of the spiritual and material worlds, I began to learn about Vodou.
Living in New Orleans is an energetic, challenging, hands-on experience. I have found that Vodou is much the same. Besides Aysha's work, Vodou has been one of the most practical real life spiritual processes that I have experienced. In the course of getting to know Sallie Ann and Vodou, the parameters of my energetic world have expanded and shifted in a good but challenging way.
In these times, with evolution speeding up, the spiritualist is aghast at the suffering, pain and misdirection in the world. What can we do? In my opinion, it is time to get real. It is time to weed out our personal delusions, false and inappropriate ways of being and to stop feeding energy into the illusions of the material world that exist within and without us. Vodou is a life you live. It is not going to retreats on the weekend or church just on Sunday. It is not about making the motions of a spiritual existence. It is about dispelling the fears of the mysterious world and seeing the truth ‹the invisible, the dance, sound and color that we can feel, see and hear if we have our hearts, minds and eyes open.
VM: What are the basic principles of Vodou?
SG: I think the thing that people don't understand about Vodou is that it is a monotheistic religion.
VM: What does that mean?
SG: Vodou recognizes one supreme deity called Bondye. Bondye is too abstract for humans to comprehend. So while God is honored, worshiped and recognized, he is not really a part of everyday life. The Lwa, the Vodou spirits who are the intermediaries between Bondye and the material world, are not God. They are not worshiped as such, but rather served. Service is immensely important in Vodou. Most people think of Vodou as godless pagan craziness. It's really not. The spirits that we are serving have a vaster perspective than we do. As they have been through death, they have a different understanding of what we are going through. ŠThey have very human characteristics and are also archetypal principles. They represent forces in the natural world as well. They are the air that we breathe and the wind and rain. They can be understood as all of these things at once.
VM: It is interesting that you say that because my next question is: What role do gods and goddesses play in Vodou?
SG: That brings up another question. Are they outside objective reality? Or are they internal psychological principles? In Vodou, the answer would be that it certainly doesn't matter. It is what we are experiencing. It is energy. We are energy. Nature is energy. We don't need to spend a lot of time mincing over this stuff. One of the things about Vodou is that it is very practical. It is about real life as we are living it. ŠLife in Haiti (where Vodou originated) is very difficult. There is no money and politics are very messed up. There has been struggle forever there.
VM: Why do you think that is?
SG: They were the first black nation to effectively achieve revolution in the Western Hemisphere. They defeated Napoleon.
VM: They had slaves before America had slaves?
SG: Slavery started in the fifteen or sixteen hundreds, once the Native population in Haiti was all but wiped out. There was a much higher percentage of African slaves to European Colonists in Haiti than in the USA. It was a very different situation. Life was extremely brutal in Haiti. Vodou originated as a religion of survival, so that people had something to live for, to strengthen them and connect them to one another.
VM: How much of Vodou today was created out of the slavery movement and/or synthesized with what was brought from Africa?
SG: It depends on where you are. Remember that slaves were not all taken from the same nation. They didn't have the same languages. They didn't have the same traditions. [In Haiti], it was already a gumbo of these different traditions that mixed and mingled with European Catholicism, Native Americans, the French, the Spanish. There were all these different elements and Vodou was a kind of roux (thick sauce) that held them together. In New Orleans, slaves were generally taken from Africa. However, after the Haitian revolution, from 1804 until 1810, there was an influx of Haitians. This included slave owners, slaves and free people of color. This embedded Vodou in Louisiana. But because there weren't the same percentage of Africans to Europeans, it didn't quite have the same religious foundation as it had in Haiti. You get a milder, more diffuse set of practices in New Orleans. If you examine the history of Vodou, it was a way for slaves to free themselves from enormous oppression. Disempowered people found power and personal strength through the practice of Vodou. It inspired the revolution and sustained it and these people.
VM: How would you explain the necessary fusion between light and dark in order to become whole? I see that Vodou embraces both the light and dark, in an almost organic manner.
SG: Vodou is about balance. Healing can only come through balance and through the acceptance of all of the elements of your self. I think it is fundamentally unhealthy to judge certain aspects of our own human makeup as evil. We live in such a neurotic society. In Haiti, where they have every reason to be stressed out because they cannot afford to eat, life is precarious. Yet they are easy going and even-tempered. There is not a lot of mental illness. The stress indicators we have here don't really exist there.
VM: Since the 1960¹s, the feminine has truly begun to emerge out of what seems to be an eternity of patriarchal imbalance. How does Vodou bring forth the wisdom of the female?
SG: When Vodou was formed, it was by and large the women that planned the ceremonies. The men generally worked as field hands and were exhausted by the time they got home. It has always had a very strong female influence. There is no hierarchy in Vodou society. The women have exactly the same power as the men and the same or similar roles as the men. The Haitian revolution was ignited through a ceremony to a female spirit of love, a very powerful spirit.
I think that there is still plenty of judgment against women. I think women are having to get healthier, allow themselves to get angry, allow themselves to feel some supposedly unfeminine feelings. In general, there is, in the world, a real mistrust of emotion. There is judgment placed on emotions‹that they are idiotic, dangerous, troublesome. I'm at the point that I'm so sick of those attitudes. I have decided I'm not putting up with it.
VM: In the introduction to your book you described how you offered yourself in service to the Lwa who are the guiding spirits of Vodou. How do you offer yourself spiritually in service and at the same time maintain your own sense of self?
SG: There is a phrase in Vodou: ³Serving the community is serving the spirit and vice versa.² [In my initiation], I could have sat there the entire time berating myself that I had nothing to offer, I wasn't good enough, smart enough, spiritual or strong enough. Finally a moment came when I said to myself, 'This is what I am. This is all I've got, so here I am giving it over to something other than this eternal tape loop about 'Am I good enough, am I getting what I want and on and on.' ³
VM: In other words, you were taking it out of neurosis?
SG: Yes, that is really what happens. You get beyond yourself and you do it for the common good, which is the essential building block in Vodou. If you do that then you become a part of this incredible positive flow. The gift back to yourself is so enormous you couldn't possibly pay enough money for it.
There is a big fear when people approach Vodou that there is something almost psychotic about letting your identity slip away for a minute and letting a spiritual principle come through you. People say, 'Oh, that is creepy, weird and dangerous.' Then I think about how our limited identities have such a lock on usŠWhat a relief it would be to not have to be exactly this set of identifiersŠPeople use these identifiers to limit where Spirit can be. Meanwhile, Spirit is flowing all over the place.
What I thought was so incredible about Katrina and the results of Katrina was that so many people in New Orleans got stripped of everything that they identified with. Everyone had to step up into the arms of Spirit. It didn't matter who you were, what you had been doing, what class you were. It was a very magical state for people to beŠ[in the sense] of being alert, awake and alive.
VM: You and I met due to our mutual interest in creating a healing center. Obviously New Orleans requires a great deal of healing. In your book, you say the essential nature of Vodou is for healing. From your perspective, what is the healing process of Vodou?
SG: That's a whole book in itself! I think it heals on every level. It's essentially organically healing. You don't judge, don't try to reject, or say that this is an unacceptable way to beŠ It is healing for communities to come together and serve a common good and a higher principle together, to actually receive the attention of that higher principle. It's one thing to talk theoretically about gods and spirits. It is another thing when they come and dance with you, do healing on you, talk to you, give you guidance and let you understand their perspective. Aysha's commentif you can endure the truth, it is a beautiful thing. Well, that's what we find over and over again. Until you are honest enough and strong enough within yourself to bear the truth, you are not going to heal.
Michael Love is an artist, business owner and writer who lives, loves and plays in New Orleans, LA. He can be reached at lovesights@yahoo.com You can reach Sallie Ann Glassman at the Island of Salvation Botanica, New Orleans. www.feyvodou.com.