Invocations: A Book of Spells

A note from the author:

If we look closely enough, we can see that everything written is a spell. Everything sung is a spell. Every poem, every drawing, every mantra repeated is a spell; the more we declare it, the more it becomes so.

This particular grimoire began as a whisper, with one spell, finely spun and noisily typed on my 1958 Olympia SM4. I initially published that spell as a poem under the title, "This is a Spell," in my fourth book, The Spectrum of Visible Light, and spent the next few years collecting spells as they came through my channel, drawing down the moon and putting pen to paper. I've compiled them here for you as an offering, should you wish to whisper your secret wishes to the stars or scream them loudly into the void. I believe deeply in the power of spells to alter our experience of reality, because what is reality if not a fragile and subjective operating system, contingent upon the narratives we repeat and the words we allow to weave patterns into our minds?

What is reality if not something to be shaped by will and by words, by the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we have the capacity to conjure?

There are many things you may wish to conjure, and it is my hope that this collection of one hundred eleven spells will help you along the way-that my words might reach the parts of you that are awakening, the parts that are becoming, the parts that are asking to be fed. It is my hope that you will take them and make them your own, because spells belong to no one and everyone all at once. Because we are all of us the children of these bright and burning stars, struggling against these corporeal bodies, stretching against the confines of our skin. We are all of us luminous beings, as Yoda said, made of star stuff, as Carl Sagan said, an amalgamation of flesh and bone and cosmic debris.

We are all of us endowed with the capacity for casting spells, with the instinct to wish upon the stars, to hope and pray for a better world.

So be it, and so must it be.

-Neghar Fonooni, June 2024