The Glamour of Less

I can feel the exact moment I do it. I’m meeting someone new, and before a word has left my mouth, the subtle adjustments start, my face softens, my voice gets friendlier than I feel, and I begin this act of pretending to be harmless. Underneath it runs the belief that if I don’t do this, they’ll think I’m a bitch.

I’ve been told all my life that I’m too intense. It’s in my face, which people read as hard before I’ve said a word. Or it’s my energy, which has never once been subtle. Some of that is simply what I am. I’m a Latina Scorpio, and I’ve never known how to be soft about anything. Some of it is where I’m from, because a woman doesn’t grow up in New York without building a face that tells people not to try her. And some of it is older than that, the demeanor you develop when your body learned early that being soft wasn’t safe. I’ve also been called unapproachable because of my beauty. Because of this, I’ve made adjustments for years, shrinking myself for people who hadn’t even asked me to, trying to come across like everyone else when I have never once been like everyone else.

I did the same thing with my first business. I built it through a version of myself I thought people could handle. I kept my darkness out of it, held back the things that genuinely fascinated me because I thought they’d scare people off, and ran everything I said through a filter of what I thought a feminine embodiment coach was supposed to sound like. I worked harder than I’ve ever worked at anything, and that version of me nearly went broke, because the version of me that built it was diluted, and nobody’s moved by watered-down anything. The money didn’t come until she was gone.

The word comes down from “grammar,” of all things, because in the old world, book learning and magick were the same suspicious craft, and “gramarye” meant occult knowledge, enchantment. In Scots, it slid into “glamour,” and to cast a glamour over someone meant to bewitch their eyes, to change what they saw when they looked at you. Glamour is perception magick. It has never meant being beautiful. It means deciding what the eye that beholds you is permitted to see.

Which means every woman is already casting one. You cast a glamour every time you enter somewhere, with your look, your posture, the register of your voice, the space you occupy or surrender. There is no opting out of it. The only question is which spell you’re casting, and for most of my life, without knowing it, I was casting a spell of less, one that made me softer and smaller than I am, and friendlier than anyone needed me to be. A glamour that said, “Don’t worry, there’s nothing formidable here.” And their eyes believed me. That’s the thing about glamours. They work.

The rest of this is for paid subscribers. Below is the story of Morgan le Fay, the sorceress from whom the word glamour was born, and Morgan’s Mirror, a glamour magick ritual for revoking the spell of less and casting what replaces it. Subscribe for a new ritual every Friday.