ESSAY
The novelist Jill Dawson spent her twenties dabbling in spells and spirituality, but it was through studying the tarot that she ultimately discovered deeper, more meaningful truths
MY FIRST SPELLS WERE PRAYERS. ‘PLEASE God, let me win the prize,’ the nine-year-old me would say earnestly, thrilled and vindicated when my wish came true. Today, we might call it manifesting. By the time I’d reached my twenties and shaken off my religious upbringing (or so I thought), I was keen to explore alternative spiritual practices and began reading up on Wicca and paganism.
I borrowed a book of spells from Hackney Library and invited my sister over. ‘What do you long for most?’ I asked. Her reply: a long-term partner to have a child with. ‘What are your requirements of him?’ She wanted an artist or sailor, and if he could have long hair in a ponytail (it was the Eighties, after all), that would be nice.
So we blessed the space in the scuzzy flat with a candle; we prayed, we giggled, we burned incense – Ican’t actually remember the spell we did, though I am ashamed to say I forgot to return that library book and have it still – and then we went to the pub, the Prince George in Dalston. That night, my sister met Melvyn, an artist working in a studio near Bethnal Green, whose family were from Portsmouth (sailors!) and who wore his long, dark hair tied back; she has been with him ever since. Only recently, we told her daughter, my 31-year-old niece Lotte, the story of how we conjured up her father, Witches of Eastwick-style. She found it pretty amusing, and astonishing that ponytails were once desirable.
You’d think that after this early success, I’d be keen to explore more spells, but the experience slightly freaked me out. My church-going childhood was the source of both my interest and my strong disinclination to pursue it. A spell is a ritual or wish that we hope will effect some kind of change. We resort to magic when we feel desperate or powerless. Lighting a candle at the altar, closing our eyes as we melt a wafer on our tongue, burning sage to cleanse a room, wearing a crystal or talisman. Some rituals are respected; others are mocked and demonised.
When I was about 23, the break-up of my first great love affair was the catalyst for me to visit a practising witch, whose name I no longer remember. I do recall that I found her in Time Out, in which she advertised as ‘the Witch of Clapham’ and offered tarot readings. I think perhaps I was having a kind of breakdown. I remember crying me a river, and a great sea, too, and smashing things, and making a little potato doll of the man in question’s new girlfriend and sticking pins in it.
