Witchcraft for Spoonies

"Lazy Witchcraft For Crazy, Sh*tty Days" in review

I have always harboured a soft spot - vestigial, unkillable and very faintly embarrassing - for the secondary witchcraft publishing industry that sprang up in the long tail of The Craft, a thoroughly entertaining mid-Nineties film which taught a generation of chubby suburban Goths the ancient and immutable principles of the Acausal Realm. Something along those lines, anyway. It may be a generational artefact, but I can report that every woman with whom I have conducted a long-term relationship has, at some point and invariably shamefacedly, disinterred from a box in their parents’ loft a copy of A Simple Grimoire for Teenage Witches or one of its interchangeable cousins (the titles blur, as do the covers) and confessed to it with the very particular guilt more usually reserved for a childhood diary or a unusually regrettable tattoo. I have come to regard these excavations as a rite of intimacy. You do not truly know a woman until you have seen her Book of Shadows.

Popular Witchery has since gone multiplatform, as all things must in the Digital Age, and now keeps a considerable presence on WitchTok, which I know essentially nothing about beyond the fact that its membership spent much of 2024 attempting to hex Donald Trump with absolutely no visible success. I raise the matter because I have lately been introduced to the work of one Andrea Samayoa, Etsy shopkeeper turned WitchTok salonnière, and to her slim devotional volume Lazy Witchcraft for Crazy, Sh*tty [sic] Days: Easy Spells and Rituals for When You’re Stressed Out, Wiped Out, or Just Have No More Spoons to Give. The title is irresistibly, almost aggressively of its moment (the spoons! the bashful asterisk!) and I have felt, since the very hour I learned of its existence, a morbid and quite unshakeable compulsion to review it.

I have managed, after some effort, to track down a copy, and the book is magnificently, gloriously of its time, which is to say the great 2010s heyday of the airport-bookshop self-help genre in which "Fuck" is daintily Bowdlerised behind an asterisk on the cover, as though the profanity, once so demurely veiled, might not be noticed by the very people it is calculated to attract. That it appeared in 2024 alters absolutely nothing; most of us inhabit an interior world roughly a decade out of date, and Samayoa is no exception. Throughout, she deploys that peculiar and unlovely High Millennial compound - Whedonesque snark cut with a rather aggressive profanity, the whole apparatus engineered to defuse any flicker of the Numinous before it can embarrass anyone in the room - so that the aspirant seeking to expel some unwanted presence from her life is directed to a distillation styled "BITCH BE GONE OIL", and, should this prove insufficiently potent, to the heavier ordnance of "FUCK OFF JUICE". The finest specimen, though, and the one I shall carry with me to the grave, is an anti-anxiety working that requires nothing more elaborate than a candle, a lighter, and the recitation of a single affirmation: "I do not give a shit. You cannot make me give a shit. My last fuck has flown." You could build a religion on less. Several people have.

It’s possible to conduct a fairly exact sociology of any society simply by cataloguing what its members are prepared to risk damnation for, and the aspirations of those who turn to the Dark Arts are as good a core sample as any. Robert Eggers understood this: the great seduction that closes The VVitch (in which the Devil, incarnate as a black goat, murmurs his enticements: “Wouldst thou like the taste of butter? A pretty dress? Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?”) is lifted more or less verbatim from a seventeenth-century trial record, and much may be inferred about a civilisation in which a woman will gamble her immortal soul for butter and a frock. Much, too, may be inferred from the target audience of Lazy Witchcraft. The workings on offer address, in bulk, free-floating anxiety and depression; there is a “Break Up Shower Ritual”, a glamour for the dispelling of social unease, an “Emotional Healing Charm”. The composite portrait that emerges is of a readership materially more secure than very nearly everyone who has ever resorted to magic in the whole squalid history of the practice (no famine here, no plague, no failing harvest) and yet held together, emotionally, with the psychological equivalent of duct tape and a hot-glue gun.

More telling still is what is absent: not one working in the entire volume is designed to operate upon another person. This is a rupture from historical magical practice remarkable enough to merit comment. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that an inquisitor of the old school spent the bulk of his working week explaining to teenage girls that the love-philtre they had somehow procured would almost certainly not function, but that the belief it might was very mildly heretical all the same, the compulsion of another’s affections being the whole grubby point of folk magic since Theocritus. Here, nothing of the kind. To the degree that other people appear at all, they intrude as hostile presences to be repelled (with “FUCK OFF JUICE” if necessary). Whether this is to be laid at the door of a post-#MeToo discomfort with the very idea of compelling another soul to love you, or at that of a more general millennial solipsism, or simply at the plain fact that the sort of woman who requires a positive-affirmation spell to get out of bed in the morning is unlikely to be labouring under a Messalina-grade sex drive¹, I cannot say; possibly it is all three in confederation. The author has, meanwhile, most considerately graded each working with a “spoon rating” from zero to five, though even the five-spoon efforts demand no more than ninety minutes of the aspirant’s time. In the opening chapter on equipment she counsels that charcoal be procured online rather than at a smoke shop, on the grounds that “not all of us are comfortable going into certain places”, a scruple I record without comment, noting only, in passing, that one of the grades of the Order of Nine Angles requires the initiate to pass six months alone in a lightless cave beneath the earth.

This is the juncture at which, were I a very different sort of writer, I would press on with the sneering, and perhaps crown the assault by hawking some self-consciously BASED grimoire of my own, a volume that would have aged every bit as conspicuously within months of publication. I simply can’t bring myself to do this. Whether I am mellowing with age or the heatwave has simply blunted the edge I bring to these occasions I could not tell you, but the knife stays in the drawer. So: the positives. The author cares, genuinely and without affectation, about her readers and their fragile cargo of wellbeing, and once you’ve scraped away the accumulated irritant of the prose there is nothing in the book that is directionally wrong. The aimless Zillennial woman who takes up a copy will, by the close of the first chapter, have been introduced to the table of correspondences (the worked examples are here and there questionable, the mapping of individual Tarot cards especially so, but the principle itself is set out clearly and without error), and by the close of the second to the whole province of sigil magick, complete with a generative schema against which Austin Osman Spare himself would have struggled to lodge an objection. The elemental furniture of ritual, which in grander and more forbidding works is arranged so as to intimidate, is here all present and each piece set in its proper place. The abiding impression of the author that I carry away isof a kind, conscientious woman possessed of a wry and gently forgiving view of human frailty and a deep working knowledge of effective magick, who had the sheer misfortune to be born a Millennial.

And can it truly be maintained that the insistence running through a book self-consciously pitched at “lazy witches” - that substitutions will serve, that the cheap household implement may stand in for the athame and the alembic, that solemnity is a thing to be punctured the instant it threatens to congeal - differs so wildly from the great project of Chaos Magick, that austere and liberationary endeavour to strip ritual of everything merely ceremonial and pare it down to its few effective elements? I raise the comparison for a reason. Among the disciplines indispensable to Chaos Magick, and to the Art more broadly, is the capacity to part without sentiment from those elements you had fondly imagined central to yourself as you ascend toward the Empyrean: swapping a belief system for its polar opposite; undertaking practices you would once have thought aberrant; remoulding the whole apparatus of the self in order to demonstrate that the ragbag of tics and prejudices we each dignify with the name of “personality” can be mastered rather than left to master us.

I assume that YOU, THE READER share virtually none of your sensibility with the intended audience for Lazy Witchcraft; and yet you may, for the length of an afternoon, rise clear above your own circumstances by the simple expedient of seeing the world briefly through the eyes of a woman who styles herself a “brujx” at one point and mediates the ancient demands of Magick through the calculus of spoon theory. Read it. You might learn something.

1. Massive carveout here, as always, for YOU, THE HIGHLY-SEXED FEMALE MUTUAL WITH PERVASIVE EXECUTIVE DYSFUNCTION ISSUES READING THIS. Shine on, you crazy diamond.