Sallie Ann Glassman is a Haitian Vodou priestess, artist, and author who has called New Orleans home since 1976. Initiated as a Manbo Asogwe in Port-au-Prince in November 1995 by Houngan Asogwe Edgard Jean-Louis and Houngan Asogwe Silva Joseph, she is one of few white Americans ordained through traditional Haitian initiation. She is the artist of The New Orleans Voodoo Tarot (with Louis Martinié), illustrator of the Enochian Tarot, and the author of Vodou Visions: An Encounter with Divine Mystery. She owns the Island of Salvation Botanica inside the New Orleans Healing Center — the 55,000-square-foot community hub she and her husband, developer Pres Kabacoff, opened on the sixth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina — and leads La Source Ancienne Ounfò, where she has presided for three decades 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.
A co-founder and director of the New Orleans Sacred Music Festival and a co-founder of New Orleans International Vodou Day — the annual procession-and-symposium consciously modeled on Benin's January 10 Fête du Vodoun in Ouidah — Sallie is one of the most visible advocates for Vodou as a living, life-affirming religion devoted to healing rather than the dark spectacle of Hollywood. A vegan who declines animal sacrifice and a passionate proponent of Vodou as "the technology for opening the doors between the invisible and visible worlds," she has spent nearly fifty years in service to the lwa, the ounfò, and the city she loves.
