Every three-ish weeks, like clockwork, I temporarily lose my ever-loving mind and use a pair of long, sharp scissors to snip off my chunks of my hair.
When I come to, shaking the fog of shear psychosis out of my head, I’m always slightly regretful about my ad hoc haircut (some end worse than others… I’ve been growing out psychosis-induced micro bangs since March). The upside of chopping your hair off at home like a 2-year-old with a pair of safety scissors, a distracted parent, and a dream? I have a lot of hair clippings to use in spell work.
Welcome back to our summer of re-enchantment, a series in which we’re saying YES to re-enchanting our lives this season. Today we’re talking about spells.
It can be a little cringe-inducing, I think, to say you’re working a spell. TikTok witches come to mind, and I think there’s something about the perceived desperation of turning to a force outside of you for support that makes people squeamish. (Isn’t that what prayer is?) For the purposes of the next three minutes we have together, try to sandblast your current association with the word “spell” out of your mind.
A spell is the adjustment of attention and intention with the objective of influencing a desired outcome. Even the word “abracadabra,” long associated with magical spells, is derived from Aramaic and translates to “it is created as I speak it.”
[Funny story: I was reminded of this by a piece of parenting advice that I think I saw on TikTok when my son was maybe a year old. In the video, a distinctly non-occult woman said, The words you say to your kids are spells for what they’ll do. Like, if you say, “Don’t yell!”… they’ll yell. But if you say, “Wow, you’re being so patient,” they’ll be patient. I think about this example a lot, both while parenting and while coming up with my own spells and rituals]
You can go full cauldron-and-ritual-sacrifice, if that butters your toast, but you don’t need to dramatically re-enact the first act of Macbeth to perform a spell. In fact, you’re already casting spells all day every day — just, perhaps, not intentionally. I find that really committing to the spell usually makes things happen more quickly and with more ease, and the point of this piece is to encourage you to intentionally practice spell work however it may call to you.
In the spirit of the Summer of Re-Enchantment, I have to mention that to me spell work is really about clarifying my own energy around a situation, and committing to both do all in my power to fulfill my ideal outcome AND trust that I can only do so much and greater intelligences are at play. A true paradox! But that’s re-enchantment, baby.
Depending on the practice and tradition, there are very different approaches and rules to performing spell work. I’m always going to suggest that you pull from your own ancestry and lineage when seeking inspiration on ritual and spiritual practices in lieu of appropriating an Instagrammified version of someone else’s culture. Boo! Don’t do that! There are plenty of books available to double click on your own spiritual heritage, and still many regional practitioners you can learn directly from (even better). Get curious, do a google, have fun.
I like using rituals and traditions from Italian folk magic, but I think there’s a lot of value in performing your own invented spells and rituals.
Part of the delight, and perhaps the power, in inventing your own spell is in the specificity of the representative meaning for you in the spell you’ve crafted. Instead of using ingredients that someone else has prescribed for you, you get to pick elements of the ritual or spell that imbue your practice with even more depth and significance. Really thinking about how you want to put your spell together forces you to reflect on what you want to happen — what is the point of doing all this? What’s your desired outcome? Why do you want it?
My husband and I got married on a full moon eclipse in the desert. These elements felt very auspicious — a huge ritual (mawwiage) with many witnesses, a spiritually significant place for the two of us, and of course, the cosmic weather. In addition to the spell calling in a long life filled with matrimonial bliss that is marriage vows, we wanted to add a little oomph to our ceremony.
We had our first date at a wedding, and felt it would be a lovely karmic return to have two strangers fall in love at our wedding… if it was right, of course. Kind of like a 90s chain letter of finding true love, I guess. The night before our vows, we wrote down a few more outcomes we hoped for from the ceremony, created a sigil that we sewed into our wedding day undergarments, and burned the note we wrote and scattered the ashes into the desert.
Two weeks later each of our best friends — who had met each other for the first time at our wedding — started dating. They got married last December 😇
I don’t think there’s a spell in any magical book that helps two people find true love at your own wedding (if so, that’s strangely specific), but we were so eager to share our joy with the people we loved that we crafted this little spell. The outcome was a million times better than what we could have ever expected or predicted.
I feel so lucky that I’m married to someone who doesn’t think this stuff is stupid. Maybe you’ve stopped yourself from doing this type of ritual before because you think it’s childish. It is childish, but why act like that’s a slur? What’s that saying? “The creative adult is the child who survived.” Wonder and creativity are essential to re-enchanting the world; kids make up rituals and spells all the time. Free yourself from the killjoy in your head, and the memory of how to cast a spell will come rushing back to you.
Cleanse and protect yourself before you do spell work. Logical reasoning: Cleansing yourself and your space is a ritualistic practice that drops you into a type of hypnotic state of consciousness, which in turn makes it easier to identify elements of unconscious knowledge or wisdom. Magical reasoning: Doing a spell moves and shifts energy, and if you enter the state with particularly gunky, non-soverign energy all over you there’s a high likelihood that will impact how “true” the spell can fly toward your desired state. Basically, clean up your side of the street.
It may return to you 100-fold. Whatever you send out there might uno reverse right back to you. (Even more reason to not put a curse on someone else!)
The more you feel connected to the spell or ritual the more likely it will work.
Try imagine what you want, instead of harping on what you don’t want. Instead of “I don’t want our vacation to get ruined,” you might use, “I call for an easeful trip with gorgeous weather and hours of relaxed spaciousness.”
Now this is where we lean into the re-enchantment of it all.
Identify what you want. Get very specific with it. If you want more money, say how much money you want and what you’ll do with it. If you want a job, write down all the attributes of the job you want. If you want clarity on an area of your personal life, keep workshopping what you want clarity on and why until you’ve nailed down your intention.
Once you’re clear on your intention, think of a ritual practice you could do to signify the spell. A typical example might be employing a candle spell to quickly call in money or luck. (Fire burns hot and fast) But maybe you’ve never resonated with candle work — come up with something else.
Another example! This September my son and I both had our first days of school. My husband and I wanted to create some sort of spell to do at the beginning of the school year to call in the most positive experience for the academic season — one that signified taking a leap into learning and growing and expanding into the next version of ourselves. Ethan had the brilliant idea for us to jump over a dictionary (fun, right?) and we did the jump on the threshold of our home in between two blooming yarrow plants (yarrow is a protective herb). Rhodes and I held hands and shouted “Best year ever!” as we leapt over ye olde unabridged dictish.
The dictionary represented learning, humility, institutional knowledge. The threshold for beginnings. The yarrow for power and protection, bravery when things get hard. Holding hands because we’re in it together, jumping into the future with enthusiasm.
Pretty simple, right? Often when you read about spell work you’ll learn about sympathetic magic, which when one uses elements in a spell to represent something in the real world. Like a pink candle can represent love, or a red rose might be sympathetic magic for desire. Using sympathetic magic associations is a great way to start writing your own spells.
Like… there’s so much you can do! You can do anything! One time I had a spell engraved on my Apple Pencil, so every time I wrote on my iPad it activated the spell.
A few other elements I like to include in my spells:
sewing or embroidering a word or sigil into a piece of special clothing or a pillowcase
planting significant herbs or seeds with a specific intention, and tending to them (sometimes I add my hair to the soil)
ritual cleansing a space with infused water, windows open, casting out any negative energy
making little totems or icons out of clay, carving sigils into ceramic pieces
writing intentions on wish paper
walking around a significant place, like a library or important gravesite, seven times while repeating an intention in my head
ritualistically cooking and enjoying a meal, a specially crafted herbal drink, or a glass of wine
Then, perform your ritual. Treat it with intentionality, with reverence. You can’t multi-task and do magic, so devote your attention to the spell.
All of this — the hair sigils, the desert ceremonies, the engraved Apple Pencils — it’s all spell work. And all of it works because I took the time to show up and clarify what I wanted and then actually do the work to make it happen. The magic is real. But the magic isn’t the candle or the sigil or the ritual itself. The magic is the attention. It’s the intention. It’s you deciding that something matters enough to mark it, honor it, make it intentional.
Like I said: you’re probably already casting spells. You’re definitely speaking spells into your kids, your partner, your own nervous system every single day. The question is: are you doing it on purpose?
The re-enchantment isn’t in following someone else’s recipe — it’s in sitting down and thinking my life, my desires, my particular alchemy and then building a ritual that speaks to that specificity. It’s in giving yourself permission to be weird and intentional at the same time. It’s in deciding that your invented spell is just as legitimate as one found in a library of witch craft books (probably more so, actually, because it’s yours).
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