Janet Sleigh is the founder, owner, and resident shamanka of Huluppu (“A Magical Bookshop,” as its virescent hanging sign proclaims). The name comes from a tree featured in The Epic of Gilgamesh, an ancient Sumerian tale and the world’s oldest piece of literature. The bookshop sits near a restaurant called Pangaea, a Georgian Revival library, and the often-shuttered Hair N Now, on the edge of the square which prompted Shirley Jackson to write “The Lottery.” The village of North Bennington attracts oddities; it is no small wonder Sleigh felt its pull.
Sleigh opened Huluppu in 2022 during the tentative aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, which she saw as a community-corrupting experiment. In a past life (metaphorically speaking), Sleigh lived in England with her husband and studied shamanism via monthly phone calls with a Seneca elder; in her past lives (literally speaking), Sleigh has already been a shaman, a shamanka, and dwelled within “ancient priestess temples.”
The bookshelves of Huluppu are packed with novels on philosophy, poetry, astrology, mythology, spiritual practices, and a genre referred to as “New Science.” The tables bear stack after stack of tarot cards, polished gemstones, string-bound herbal smudge sticks, cottagecore-esque stickers, and did I mention the tarot cards?
Sleigh’s office, where she led me (along with her brown-bag lunch purchased from Powers Market a few doors down), was laden with—you guessed it—more tarot cards, and held a broad desk and a cushy armchair. This is the room where she takes clients for tarot consultations, shamanic journey therapy, and biodynamic craniosacral therapy. It smelled faintly sweet, slightly singed, and there was a cleared spot on the floor where Sleigh told me clients lie down during their sessions.
She unwrapped her sandwich, sat amongst her cards, and with wide eyes and a curious expression allowed me to begin.
Olivia Morrison: Where did your relationship with mysticism and spirituality start?
Janet Sleigh: I was always different. I was always told that I was different. When I asked friends or family members what they meant—because I didn’t feel different from anybody else—they would identify the fact that I was able to have compassion where most people couldn’t, and I could lend an ear, even as a young child, to somebody who was in need of an ear. My mother used to say that. She told me that I was a magnet for people in trouble.
I grew up in a pretty normal way. My family are all Italian. I went to school, I came home. My dad was a doctor. I didn’t know anything about astrology, I didn’t know anything about tarot cards. The only thing that I knew was mystical was in the church. I knew there was this otherworldly thing.
My parents didn’t go to church, but my grandmother did. When we would stay with her, we would go to church down in the Bronx. There was a grotto, right smack there in the Bronx. It was a damp cave that you would walk through, and there were crosses and statues of saints and whatnot. I thought that was really different. I can identify—all the way back then, when I was about eight or nine years old—that there was this other world that was far more compelling to me.
How has your relationship with mysticism changed your life?
Well, that’s an interesting way of putting the question. It is me. I am it. I don’t identify it as being something other than who I am.
Why did you create Huluppu?
I got out of college, and I was living in Virginia. I worked in Washington DC, in Georgetown. I was walking on my own, as usual, and I walked down a street that I’d not walked down before. I saw a little sign that said “bookshop.” I thought, “where the heck is this bookshop?” There was an old carriageway in-between the buildings, and I walked onto this dirt carriageway right there in DC, and off to the right was a little esoteric bookshop. I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I frequented that bookshop weekly, and bought books on every manner of esoterica that you could imagine—including my very first deck of tarot cards. I had no idea what they were. I had to ask.
It was then that I thought: “This is what I want. One day I’m going to have an esoteric bookshop.” And that was it.
Why did you choose North Bennington as the location for Huluppu?
Number one: I didn’t want to be a shopkeeper. That meant not Bennington—Bennington ain’t great. In Manchester, I would have been a shopkeeper. I didn’t want to be a shopkeeper. I wanted to be able to see my own private clients in this room. I didn’t want to be so busy that I couldn’t stand and talk to people. Those were my prerequisites.
Well, we’re in Nowheresville, Vermont, so you haven’t got a whole lot of places to choose from. This building was available, and we liked North Bennington. It’s a wonderful little village full of people who are more community-minded.
Huluppu is self-described as a “magical” bookshop. What does magic mean to you?
I never thought of that. I wouldn’t have used the word “magic” had there not been the language used nowadays of “magic,” “wicca,” “witchcraft,” and so on. I wouldn’t have used “magical” if I thought people could understand what “Huluppu” meant, but most people don’t know what “Huluppu” means. So I put “magical.”
What is magic? I guess magic is when, unexpectedly, things happen because of your intention to make them happen. Magic is something wonderful, you know? Magic happens when you love somebody. When you connect. So I guess magic is connection.
You have a wide range of books on various religions and worldwide spiritual practices. Why do you think such a diverse range of books is important?
Because then we know where we’ve come from. And if we know where we’ve come from, then we know where we’re going. If you think that the world has only traveled one road, like a Christian road—because we live in, by and large, a Christian country—then you’re never going to know where you’ve come from. Having such a diversity of thought and experience with the books here; I think it really broadens your ideas about who we are.
Are there any types of books that you would refuse to supply here?
I won’t do any black magic. Dark magic. Other than that, no.
Where does dark magic come from?
It comes from a self so separated that they cannot find their way back home. Then you couple that with really horrible and negative experiences.
People have written books on that?
On black magic? Oh, my gosh. Oh, yeah. Demon possession and black magic. I think they’re out there to really frighten people. That, to me, is not knowledge. That’s not helping.
Do you consider yourself religious?
No, because religion, to me, is when you follow an organized system of philosophy. And I don’t. I’m not a religious person. I am very spiritual in my approach to life.
Is there a large community of people in Vermont who come here for spiritual or magical needs? What is your customer base like?
We’ve only been open for about a year and a half. But it’s all age groups, mostly within the region of 40, 50, 60-year-olds. Mostly. I have a good number of books for teens, but you have to think about the demographics of Vermont as well. We are an older state, not a younger state. It’s pretty much across the board. We sell a lot of books on philosophy and poetry as well. We sell almost as many of those books as we do the more esoteric books.
Would you say that most of your clients and customers already have a connection with mysticism, or are most people here to browse?
I think it’s half and half. I think people come in specifically for the philosophy and the poetry as much as they do for other things.
Do you host any clubs or groups in the shop?
Not yet. But I want to teach shamanism, so we’re getting the basement ready to do those clubs and groups. I’d like a tarot group, and we have a drumming group that meets in the summertime. I’m hoping in the wintertime we’ll be able to meet here as well. People have asked me if they could do workshops here, too. An astrology workshop, or a tarot workshop.
What happens during a tarot consultation? Is it different from a tarot reading?
Yes. I think so. Because a tarot consultation is not one where you ask me if you’re gonna marry the guy that you’re dating, or what’s in your future, or if I can access dead relatives. In a tarot consultation, we use the cards as archetypes to see what direction would be the best. It’s more like using the cards in the context of psychotherapy, but it’s not a psychotherapy reading either. I can read the cards, and I can read the deeper meaning, and I’m able to access somebody’s energy field a little deeper than somebody who can’t. It’s all about trying to get my client to find their way forward.
Would you describe yourself as a shaman, or a shamanka?
I describe myself as a shamanka because I am a woman. Women have fought for a long time for our place in our society and using the word shamanka honors my feminine position in my world.
How does one become a shamanka?
You can take a course, for sure. You can work with traditional shamans. They’re out there.
I’m intuitive enough to know what multiple of my previous lifetimes have been. The more mystical side of those lifetimes informs me today, big time. In a couple of those lifetimes, I was a shaman and a shamanka. In one lifetime a man, in another lifetime, a female. In the more distant past, I’ve had previous lives in temples. Ancient priestess temples. Those lifetimes, for me today, have been more prevalent. I’m far more aware of those than I am of any other.
I was able to draw on that. There are things that I know how to do, and there’s no reason I should know how to do those things. I was very lucky that I had a shamanic teacher, a wonderful Native American elder female. She didn’t teach me specifically to work as a shaman. She was a philosopher. Her name was Twylah Nitsch.
I was invited by a British friend to meet Twylah, who lived on the Seneca Indian reservation over in Buffalo. I asked Twylah if she would be my private mentor. Back in the 90s, tons of women, tons, and men too, but mostly women, would go and sit at the feet of Twylah. We would learn her philosophy. She took her understanding of her people’s philosophy and disseminated it—taught it—to the rest of us, in a way we would understand. She was very clear that those of us who were not Indian were not Indian. What she taught us was really her interpretation of her people’s philosophy. She was very Mother Earth oriented. I think the foundation of all of my understanding comes from Twylah.
She set up something that she called the Wolf Clan teaching lodge, because she was born into the Wolf Clan of her nation—but that was not Native. She was Native, but that was not Native. It had nothing to do with her Seneca people. It was her own group. I was based in England, so once a month for several hours on the phone, that would be my education. We had a little magazine that we published. She passed away and it kind of fell apart, with one thing and another. But there are lots of us who were mentored by her.
Through working with her, my path opened up. Then I did another course with a well-known contemporary shaman. He’s written books, he’s very well-known. I think, for me, I already knew what to do.
How did you discover your past lives?
There’s a way of shifting your brain from the thinking-side to the mystical-side. I’m able to do that. Through that, and staying very, very quiet, it comes to you.
How does the shifting work?
I don’t know! I’ve always been able to do it. I think we’re all here on the same mission, and that mission is to self-realize. How we do that is different. My dad was a doctor, and he loved his profession. You could tell he loved it; he quit when he was 82, when he decided that he was second-guessing his own memory. That was his mission.
My husband is a lawyer, and the most practical person. To him, you live, you die. There are no past lives, future lives, anything. This is my husband, if you’ll believe. Extremely practical fellow. Spends his whole life learning. Reading. All he really wants to do is read. That’s his mission; that’s what he’s doing. My mission just happens to be what I’m doing.
Can you describe what shamanic journey therapy is?
I didn’t know what it was when I started doing it. Back in my twenties, when friends would have problems, I would take them on a journey. “Oh, I’ll take you on a journey and we’ll see what happens.” Today, I call it shamanic journey therapy.
Do you know your chakra system? We have an energy field. In the energy field, there are centers of consciousness. We work with seven—you don’t work with the upper ones, you do this work with the lower ones—and you’re usually using your first, second, and third chakra. I take my client on a journey into the chakra that I’ve already decided is the one we need to go into. I take you on a journey, into your own chakra, to find out what the imbalances are.
You lie down, you close your eyes, you go into a meditative state, you do a bit of deep breathing, I quiet your system down, and then I take you on a journey. It’s a verbal journey. Some of my clients can imagine what’s happening. They can imagine the landscape. Some clients can’t imagine it. That’s a little bit harder, when they’re not able to see it in their mind’s eye. But we can still get there.
What kind of internal issues do your clients present with? What are they looking for?
Most people come because they’re not happy. Some have had pretty bad relationships that are affecting them. Some people are on a spiritual journey and they get stuck. Some people come because they want to access past lives. Many women come because they have mother issues. One of the most difficult relationships we can have, as a woman, is with our mothers. People come because they have physical ailments, and a lot of times a physical ailment is there because they’ve got some kind of spiritual issue. We go in there to try and figure out what happened in their lifetime that caused the physical problem they’re having.
How many sessions does it take for them to notice an improvement?
Depends upon the person. Some people are really into it, and they’re very open, and once or twice is good. For some people, you can keep going and keep going. Sometimes you have to say, “well, there might be something else that you need to do besides this work.”
What is biodynamic craniosacral therapy? What conditions do you treat with it?
Let me explain craniosacral therapy to you. Craniosacral therapy was developed a hundred years ago by a medical doctor. It was a process, a therapy, that was used within osteopathic medicine. Not chiropractic: osteopathic. And then osteopathic medicine began to change to something called allopathic medicine, which is what everyone practices nowadays. Allopathic medicine is medicine with pills. Medicines.
My father was an osteopathic medical doctor who would palpate your body. He would look at your eyes, he’d look in your nose, your ears, your tongue—he would palpate, he would feel your organ systems and whatnot. I don’t believe he ever used craniosacral therapy, but it was on offer for a doctor to use. Doctors today don’t use it.
That field was resuscitated by a medical doctor who was also a chiropractor. It became popular today within the chiropractic community. Not the medical doctors, but the chiropractors. Branching off of that is biodynamic craniosacral. Craniosacral would be a manipulation of the cranium and the sacrum in a chiropractic session. I do biodynamic. I do the energetic form, where there’s no manipulation of the body. We use the sacrum—so, if a client is lying on their back, you have to scoop your hand underneath the sacrum—and a lot of our work is done by holding the cranium.
In the chiropractic form, your cranium would be manipulated. In the energetic form, we don’t do that. We just hold the head. The work that we do is extremely subtle. We tap into the cerebrospinal fluid that is created in your brain—it bathes your brain—and it moves down your spinal cord, bathes the sacrum, then turns around and comes back up. It’s like a wave; you can feel it like a wave. With the biodynamic work, you’re going directly within the cerebrospinal fluid to feel inconsistencies within the body.
So, what do we work on? Basically, any physical issue that somebody has. Brain traumas. Eye problems. Headaches. Migraines. A lot with anxiety, because we tap into something called the vagus nerve which comes off the brain and branches all the way down into the abdominal area. There’s a lot of anxiety today. I’ve worked with cancer patients. I’ve worked with people with irritable bowels. So basically anything.
Do people typically try these two types of therapy after trying more conventional options? Or is this their first avenue?
Not their first avenue, but certainly an adjunct.
Do you ever get negative reactions from people? Have your practices been called pseudoscience?
No, nobody’s ever said that it’s pseudoscience. People who come for craniosacral have normally done it before. The shamanic work, people are a little more hesitant about, unless they’ve done it before. If it doesn’t work for them, I always put it down to the fact that I couldn’t do it for them. Maybe I just couldn’t get into their system. I accept my own fallibility.
I’ve been in the bookshop a couple times before, and I’ve overheard people talking to you about things that sound, to an outsider, like hauntings. Does Huluppu attract people who have spiritual concerns that other establishments would brush off as fake?
Yeah. There are a lot of old houses around here. People sometimes come in and tell me their house is haunted. You can get leftover spirits and things like that. The unfortunate thing is that our first thought is, “this is a ghost and I don’t understand it, we need to get rid of it, this is a scary situation and it’s going to do something to me.” I think that’s kind of sad, because from my point of view, anybody who’s stuck in this realm just does not know how to move over. You can help them to move over.
But let me tell you this as well. The very first thing I do is find out who, in that house, is having mental or emotional issues. If there’s a problem with somebody in the house, they can energetically throw off an imbalance that causes doors to open, or you hear knocking, and so on.
I had a woman come to me years ago who thought that her dead husband, who’d died a couple of years ago, was haunting the house. Things falling out of cupboards, and there were distractions, and noises. It was freaking out her son. She was going to be married again, shortly, and it was freaking out the chappy she was going to marry. What could be done to settle the husband’s spirit? I said to her: “I doubt it’s your husband. I think it’s your son. How old is your son?” The son was ten years old, twelve years old, something like that. I said to her: “How’s your son doing after his dad’s death?” Well, he was a wreck. I said to her, “I think you’ve got a problem more with your son than with ghosts.”
Do people often ask you to consult with the dead?
Yes. I don’t work as a psychic anymore. Back in my twenties I did, and I did some in my thirties as well. I didn’t really enjoy that kind of work, so I didn’t pursue it. It wasn’t for me. I like shaman work. There are fantastic psychics out there, that is for sure. There are great card readers who also use their deep psychic ability. If I pick up something, then that’s great, but it’s not really the work I’m interested in.
I’m interested in getting somebody to understand their uniqueness and the beauty within them—and that their journey is their journey. They really shouldn’t be going to somebody to find their answers.
In my twenties, I was reading tarot cards. My cousins and all my friends knew that I was reading tarot cards, and they would come to me. I got the whole gamut of questions, but because we were all in our twenties, most of the questions were about jobs. “Should I change my job? Should I quit my job? Is this the right job for me? Is this the right guy for me? Is this the one I’m going to marry?”
I got fed up doing those kinds of readings, and I remember saying to several of my friends: “Look. Do you understand how much power you’re giving me? You’re asking me if you should quit your job and find another. Do you know how much power I’ve got? You’re asking me if this is the guy you’re going to marry, and if I say to you ‘yes,’ you’re going to think that that’s real. And then you might not see the reality of your situation.” So I said, “I’ll teach you how to read cards,” because really, cards are supposed to be read for yourself. They should be a map for you. And all my friends and family said, “nah.” So I had to think about how I can read cards for people where they’re empowered, not me.
I read your Bennington Banner story and noticed that you said one of the goals of Huluppu was to re-establish a community after the pandemic. Could you elaborate on that? Do you feel as though the community was lost during COVID-19?
Looking back at the kind of communities we had when I was younger, we are now smashed to pieces. I think that the pandemic was the single most horrific experience that I have had to live with in my lifetime, because it was a farce.
We do not vaccinate in our house because of vaccine damage issues. That meant, as a mother, I had to study natural ways of healing in order to keep my family safe. But that was after damage had been done. I studied nutritional medicine, herbology, homeopathy—I studied all of it. In our household, we eat organic. My boys grew up with organic food.
So, here comes the pandemic, and my family were all freaking out. People were beginning to stay home. We took my mother from where she was living and she came up and lived with us. I said to my family: “Don’t worry. We have the best medical system, not only in America, but in the world. They will find medicines. We have more medicines than we know what to do with.”
I discovered doctors who were using things like ivermectin, which is supposed to be a horse dewormer. I knew doctors throughout the world who were using ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, prednisone, vitamin C, budesonide. They were all saving people. And suddenly, within a month, all I heard out of [Anthony] Fauci’s mouth was: “A vaccine, a vaccine, a vaccine. That’s the only thing that’s going to save us.” The whole world shut down. Those doctors who were saving people’s lives started to get kicked out of their hospitals if they didn’t stop using those medicines. They were completely restricted from using those medicines.
If you remember, everybody was put on a respirator—everyone in the hospital, I discovered later, knew that if you go on a respirator, you’re a dead man. Yet they pushed that. To me, it was the single most interesting experiment ever done to see how much they could control the world’s population.
I know you’re probably thinking, “this woman believes in a conspiracy theory.” I’m not thinking that at all. The reason is because Pfizer and Moderna and AstraZeneca, over in England, are being sued. Left, right, and center. They’re being sued by private individuals, they’re being sued by doctor conglomerates, scientists who’ve gotten together. The FDA was sued because of their advertising against ivermectin. They’ve just conceded and lost their case.
They shut us down. I couldn’t see my family, who were down in New York. They were all freaking out. My mother was freaking out. My mother, for two years, wouldn’t kiss me or hug me. She was so afraid because I wasn’t vaccinated. If you look at any of the statistics now, it is not the unvaccinated who are dying of turbo cancers and all kinds of blood-illnesses from the vaccine.
I was pretty angry, and I thought: “Great, put your anger in back of something that’s going to do good.” That was the goal of Huluppu: to create, in this little area where we’ve got nothing, a place where people could come and feel safe. And hopefully do a course in shamanism, get together and do drumming—the drumming all went to pot because several of the members refused to go inside once the winter came. How ridiculous is that? We couldn’t continue our group because they didn’t want to come in. And I refused to wear a mask.
So the question is, have I been able to create a community? I can see it growing. I can definitely see it growing.
What does the future of Huluppu look like?
I learned to have a very open framework, because if you have a very open framework, then when opportunities come in, you’re not so focused on that end goal that you can’t open the doorway. I don’t have a determined focus. I like what we’re doing. It suits me. It suits my age. It suits my timing. I would like to have the groups downstairs. I think that would be very magical.
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