making magic in the sacred arts: briana saussy in conversation with jeanna kadlec
making magic in the sacred arts: briana saussy in conversation with jeanna kadlec
on leaving the church, inner healing, & making the table bigger
When it comes to professional witches, Briana Saussy is the real fucking deal.
The author of Making Magic: Weaving Together the Everyday and the Extraordinary and the brand new Star Child: Joyful Parenting through Astrology, Saussy is a long-time occult practitioner and teacher who believes in the mystical of the mundane.
My first encounter with Bri happened in that most simple, magical of ways: through a mutual friend. I walked into dinner at a nice restaurant here in New York, full of tarot readers in town for a big conference. Bri was already at the table, a few minutes early, all aglow with magic and moonlight. That night, she was generous and warm, with the most infectious laugh, but what has kept me intrigued in her work over the years is the way it is continually, always, both heart-led and pragmatic — grounded in time-tested research and ritual.
In a field that increasingly values a pretty Instagram post or pithy TikTok over actual results, Bri’s rigor remains a rarity, and her work an enormous gift to the rest of us.
This interview has been edited for length
Jeanna Kadlec: It's just such a pleasure to have you with the newsletter today, Bri. If you could introduce yourself to the newsletter readers, to folks who may not be familiar with your absolutely magical work?
Briana Saussy: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me; you know I love talking with you.
I'm Briana Sassy, also known quite commonly as Bri, and I’m many things. I'm an author, a teacher, a tarot reader, an astrologer, a spiritual counselor. Mostly, I'm dedicated to fostering a love and appreciation and deepening of knowledge within the field of sacred arts. I work on behalf of soulful seekers all over the world. What that means practically is that I spend a great deal of my time teaching. I do one-on-one sessions with clients — always have, always will — and I write, as well. I've written a couple of books, and I have three publishing projects in the hopper at the moment that I can't really talk about yet.
It all postulates around the idea of sacred arts, which is the term that I use to describe the things that we love, like magic and divination and astrology and dream work and psychic development and devotion to holy helpers. I call them the sacred arts, much like we would call math and science and literature the liberal arts.
JK: I love that definition. When you spell it out, it’s so holistic and it makes so much sense for what so many of us do.
A related question, that might dovetail with your practices within the sacred arts, is, what is spirituality to you in this moment? I would also ask, what your history or journey within that has been?
BS: So I was raised, as I say, in a family that was half-Baptist and half-Catholic and all magical. South Central Texas, San Antonio, multigenerational Texas family. Coming up, even though I’m a blonde-haired, pretty pale skinned girl, I was never told I was white. I was always given my specific ancestry, so I was told I was Scottish, I was Irish, I had German ancestry, I had Native American ancestry, African-American ancestry, Jewish ancestry and Mexican ancestry — and all of those lines are really well represented in my family in different ways.
My mother’s side of the family is from East Texas. Very rural, very poor. My grandparents got out of East Texas kind of by hook or by crook. Very Baptist. So [that side] was brought up in the Baptist church with all of its difficulties and all of its magic, right? There’s a lot there, which I know you know.
The other half of my family is from West Texas, which is where the Mexican Catholic and the Jewish ancestry comes in. My closest Jewish ancestor married a Mexican woman, and the girls were raised Catholic, and the boys were raised as Jews, and so the female line is the line I descend from — so, Catholic over there. And again, all of the challenges and all of the difficulties and all of the magic that goes hand in hand with that.
So that was the fulcrum around which spirituality turned for me. I would say the added element to that that was very spiritually formative was I was born with a severe cleft palate, and I was born with failure to thrive. So my mom was told I wouldn't make it past the [first] week [of life], and I had two major surgeries to repair my cleft palate before I was three years old and underwent speech therapy for several years.
So during that time, the power and the medicine of stories and storytelling became really central in my life, because there were times where I had to stay still or my head had to be in a certain position for everything to heal. My grandparents would tell me stories, and my mom would tell me stories, and so that also was an early thread that really spoke to me. I hope that I carry the best of all of those with me forward, and let go of the pieces that don't apply or aren't relevant or are terribly out of date.
For me, spirituality right now is being present, being really present. Walking in both worlds. Being firmly rooted in the here and the now, and firmly rooted in the otherworld, in the numinous. Cultivating wholeness, health, and holiness. And most of all, remembering that the greatest blessings often come from the broken places, from the places and the people and the parts of society and the parts of ourselves and our stories that just seem to be beyond help and beyond hope — that those are where often the biggest blessings come from.
JK: Just hearing you express it that way, Bri, is such a blessing to hear — about being firmly rooted in both worlds, and about the practical magic of how grounded a practice can actually be, how it’s not about just floating off like so much information out there would have folks believe.
BS: I mean, I have two kids and two cats and a dog and a husband. Like, the cat has to be fed. And you know, as the boys are growing up, being present has become so important to me, because they change so fast. It just goes so quickly.
JK: Can I ask how you find presence in your specific practices? I’m thinking especially of astrology, but any that speak to you.
BS: I love that question. So astrology really speaks to my Venus in Virgo. I find that for me, I'm able to be present when I have a general sense of the big picture. I don't need to know the details, and I'm really adaptable with change. Like if something comes up and one of the kids is sick and the workday has been thwarted, I can roll with that.
But I like having a big picture, and to me, that's one of the best gifts of astrology. Seeing those big patterns allows me to ground myself and to say, okay, here's the cosmic room that I'm in right now.
JK: I love that image for the month’s astrology — being like, this month, what room are we in? What does it look like? What resources do we have, and what do we need a little more of?
BS: How messy is it like? *both laughing*
JK: What visitors might be coming and how welcome are they? To build on that, too, how does astrology or your other practices connect to or inform your writing, and what does your writing practice look like?
BS: My last two books both feature story really heavily. When I know that I'm going to write a book, the very first thing I do is I start inviting the stories that I'm going to be working with in, and I actually make a space for them on my altar. I make an offering to them, and I start to talk with them.
I see stories as Holy Helpers. I'm very animist in my approach to things, so it comes as no surprise that I also talk to stories. So that's where I begin, in making a space and saying, okay, we're going to be working together. I want to do right by you. Help me know what needs to be brought forward, what needs to be kept back.
And because I have a ten-year-old and a three-year-old, when I’m working on a book, I get up at 4am.
JK: Whew.
BS: That’s the time! I have a full time job on top of my writing. So I write from four to six, and I handwrite everything first. When I did that with Making Magic, I [judged myself] — and then my computer was destroyed, and the manuscript on it was destroyed, but I had it all handwritten, so it was fine.
Then, I go to typing. My husband is a former English teacher, and he's always my first editor. He was very helpful with Star Child, because I'm a Libra. I was like, Oh, writing the Libra chapter was so hard! And he was like, Yeah, I think you were a little hard on the Libra. Let's make it a little more balanced.
JK: Being a little hard on yourself!
BS: Exactly. After he's gone through it, then it goes off to the publisher.
Before I write every morning, I light a candle, some incense, and I just say a little prayer that what needs to come through is able to come through, that the road is open and the way is clear. My first book, Making Magic, I really wrote for my ancestors, because many of them were marginalized and their voices weren't heard, and I had done a lot of work with them. And I was like, This is how I'm making your voice heard. You know this is now happening, and your descendant is able to do this.
Star Child was written for my descendants, for my children and for all of the generations that come after I'm gone. So that one was trickier, because it was very much like, what do you need us to know right now? How can we set this up to really support y'all so that you are able to thrive and flourish and we do not totally screw things up for you guys?
JK: I love that.
You’re a mother, and you have some children of your own, but in talking with you about the book previously, you've said that the book is in no way exclusive to parents, or to people who have given birth, to people who have children, or even to people who want children. I'd love to hear more about the way that you conceptualized and framed a book about children, and that has so much to do with children and parenthood, in a way that includes others.
BS: So I have a lot of people, mostly women, in my community who don't have children, either by choice or by circumstance. And I didn't know that, but one of my blessings is blessed are they who choose not to have children, for they are essential to our world. And people resonate so strongly with that blessing.
Before I had children, I didn't really understand how much shaming, especially women, get if they choose not to have children or they can't, which is just nonsense and ridiculous. So as I wrote Star Child, I was like: when I teach about descendants, one of the things I have to get out of the way really early on is, this is not about whether you have biological children or not. Your life, regardless of biological offspring, present or not present, touches so many other people's lives. It ripples out into the generations that come after we’re gone, and that happens in a lot of ways. That happens through the words we say. Through our body of work. Through our friendships. Our relationships. The people that we love, and the people that we hate. All of those things.
So when I sat down to write Star Child, I wanted to write something that would help parents, but also teachers and guardians and aunties and uncles learn how to really see their children as beings in and of themselves and not an extension of us, right?
JK: *exhales* *praise hands*
BS: Like, right? I mean, that was the first challenge, and it was very, very difficult because it’s deep and it’s old. To see your child as they are, not as you would have them be. Not as you want them to be, not this living vicariously thing.
Then — and it just became very clear, as I was writing this, that there are a lot of adults who are wounded. I work with them every day, from exactly this, from exactly being shamed for being who you are, how you look, how you talk, how you sound, how educated or not you are, how much money you have or don't, who you love.
And so I thought, okay, let’s bring in the inner child component. We all have this inner child within us that's been wounded by other people's hatefulness and ignorance and cruelty or neglect. Sometimes it's like, I didn't set out to hurt you. I just ignored you. And that hurt.
The introductory chapters of the book take you on a quick crash course through astrology, and then they are divvied up by sign, so we start with Aries and end with Pisces. And so for each of those [sign] chapters, I have a section on the inner child of that sign, including a ritual that you can do to honor that part of yourself.
What’s really interesting is that a couple of things have come out of this. One is that people are choosing to honor aspects of their inner child that are not their sun sign. So as a Libra, I might go through it and read the inner Pisces child and be like, Man, that part of me, like, I really resonate with that. I'm going to honor this part of me. So I like that because we're getting out of the “I am my sun sign and only my sun sign” mentality.
The other thing that's happened is, I have had almost as many adults who do not have children write to me and tell me how much this affected them and how grateful they are for this book as I have had parents — which makes me really, really happy because I'm very much about inclusion. If there's not room, we make the table bigger. I wanted this book that's ostensibly about parenting and childrearing to speak to people, no matter what their relationship is to children, because we all were children at one point.
JK: Bri, I'm like, crying over here. This conversation is also hitting me at a particular moment in time.
I'm really excited by these inner child rituals and by the prospect of going through each one. You’re an astrology teacher, but for folks who are reading the newsletter who may be like, Well, why would I do that? Why would I go beyond my sun sign? It’s like, we all have every sign in our chart, every sign that's ruled by a planet actually rules a different part of your life, that we call a house. So the idea that you'd go house by house [through your chart], considering the topics of those houses as they relate to your inner child. I use a Whole Sign house system.
BS: Me too!
JK: That's a really intriguing concept to me, to do that and see how those rituals that you're talking about might relate to [a chart] in that way. I love that.
So my question, too, is since Making Magic is so grounded in that ancestral work around lineage, and since Star Child is so grounded in the work for descendants and for the conceptualizing of legacy, what is inspiring you now? Not that working in that particular paradigm [of ancestors/descendants] is done, but what are you working on creatively right now that you can talk about that’s really exciting to you?
BS: I would say, there's two things that I'm really into.
[First], blessing work. I said years ago, I think we need, collectively, less advice and more blessing. And I come out of a tradition, I'm sure that you've heard this before, where people will say, Well, I'll pray for you. When I was younger, it made me so mad. I was like, I didn't need you to! Hello! I can pray for myself!
JK: You're like, I'm a powerful witch already! I've got it.
BS: But like: praying for and blessing ourselves and one another? Not a bad idea. Especially right now, not a bad idea. And at the same time, [I’m interested in] really, really expanding our understanding of what prayer and blessing look like.
I teach a lot of people who are pagan or they're witches or they identify as anything but coming out of the Judeo-Christian tradition, which I totally understand. But the problem with that is that we lose some of the arts, I would say, that were way before the Judeo-Christian tradition, by the way, like prayer and blessing.
So I want to carry that out and remind people that we have many different ways of praying. We find prayer and blessing work all over the world, all different cultures, languages and spiritual traditions. It’s not a one size fits all. It’s a super custom job. So I'm very taken with that right now.
And then, [secondly], I'm also feeling the need to kind of teach very nitty gritty, magical practices. There’s a lot of big picture, big vision stuff. But I'm also very much like, let me show you how to make a sugar jar. Let’s talk about why, and why we’re working with the ingredients we’re working with.
Very practical magic on the one hand and then, on the other hand, blessing work.
JK: Both of those are so profoundly exciting to hear about, and also so desperately needed.
What you're saying, too, that really strongly resonated, and you know this, but as someone who also grew up in the church, and specifically the evangelical church, I’ve been thinking so much about the really powerful ritual and ceremony that is in the church and the really powerful grief I still have for having lost access to that.
BS: Yeah.
JK: No matter whether or not I agree necessarily with what is being specifically prayed to or whatnot, but in the walking away from the church there is so often that wholesale rejection of the specific practices and ritual techniques that we’ve learned and incidentally got really good at.
BS: Got really good at — and they've been refined.
I'll never forget, I don't know if you remember, but it was all over. It was a viral video. It was like on the eve of the presidential election and there was that woman pastor that loves Donald Trump. And you remember she was summoning the angels?
JK: Yes.
BS: Lots of people were making fun of her. And I looked at that video and I was like, she is doing hardcore angelic magic. And I was like, I think it's going to work, but I do not think it's going to work the way she thinks it's going to work, because angelic magic — angels show up the way that they need to. They come, and then they do what they need to do.
That was just a moment where a lot of my magical friends were making fun of her, and I was like, Dude, this is more like real magic than I've seen — love y’all! — but that I’ve seen from many of y’all! You know, like, your cauldron on Instagram is not doing it. Like, this woman is summoning angels. For real.
JK: Oh my god, Bri, I could agree with you more. This is something I talk to folks in my own witchy community about a lot, and it’s also something I talk about in my book, and honestly that I’m a little concerned might be over a line — but also, I don’t care — for a certain kind of “intellectual” reader.
Because I obviously have left the church, but I still believe in Spirit, and I still absolutely think that what’s happening in the evangelical church is very intense, very powerful energy work. And I absolutely believe that part of the success of the Republican Party over the last few decades, like in addition to all of the money —
BS: The gerrymandering —
JK: In addition to all of that, is the really potent spiritual ritual work that evangelicals have been doing for fifty years.
BS: One hundred percent.
JK: And we know because we were in it, the two of us were raised in it. We were part of that. And the wholesale dismissal of the church by, like you're saying, also like by pagans, by folks of other faiths and other traditions. It's not helpful.
BS: No, no. And some of those traditions we see in the church then got co-opted back into pagan traditions and back into traditional witchcraft traditions, and it's like — you need to know your roots. You don't have to like it. And I'm not saying you need to go be at church on Sunday! But you need to know where this is coming from and why.
Looking at the Old Testament or the Tanakh and being like, okay, we’re making pictures in the sand, and then destroying them, and the picture we made of the city then correlates to the city being destroyed — it is magic. It is steeped in magic.
I’m with you. I think we need to look at it. I think we need to learn from it. I think we need to look at what works and why it works. And some of the stuff that works needs to be brought back into a serious magic-making person's repertoire.
JK: Absolutely.
I have one more question for you — if you've had any particularly magical creative moments this year?
BS: This year has been full of magical, creative moments. I have been working the Shem HaMephorash, which is this kind of operation where you're working with the angels, all of the 72 angels. I've been working with them, and it's tied to astrology. Each one of the angels represents a five degree quadrant of a sign. So you know, you start with Aries and then you'll end with Pisces, of course.
That has brought more magical synchronicity into my life! Like just last week — I had a bunch of stuff I wanted to teach, and so I needed to move my marketing out, I needed to not be responsible for it. I asked my assistant who I love to take over marketing, so I made that decision. The very next day, I got a call from a group that I love very much asking me to teach on this really big platform. So that was awesome. Then, I turned to do my angel work, and the angel that I was working with just happened to be an angel that helps you organize your internal structures and the internal structures of your business.
That is one example of what all of 2021 has been like working with angels, which has also been very healing coming out of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Coming into contact and congress with these energies that are way older, but that I first learned about within the confines of that tradition.
JK: I'm really, really happy to hear that, spiritually speaking, it's been a very generative and healing and protected year. That sounds really special.
BS: Really special. It's been sweet, especially coming off of the tail of last year.
Be sure to follow Briana Saussy on Instagram and Twitter, and find out more about her many magical offerings at her website, brianasaussy.com.
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