Glamour Conjure Practica Overview
I have spent the last several years thinking deeply about glamour, long before I had language precise enough to describe the particular shape it was taking within my spiritual practice.
I knew that beauty was there. Of course it was. I am deeply interested in beauty, adornment, sensuality, aesthetic practice, the erotic, and the ways women make meaning through and with the body. But the deeper I went into my own ancestral practice, the more inadequate the prevailing language around glamour magick began to feel. What I understood glamour to be was much larger than making oneself beautiful, enchanting a beauty routine, dressing a perfume, becoming more magnetic, or performing a ritual for attraction. Those things can certainly be glamour. They are simply not the whole of it.
In my own ancestral history, glamour was very much present.
I could see it in the women themselves, in the stories told about them, in photographs, in adornment, in the cultivation of beauty and presence, and in the ways they navigated what could and could not be made visible. I could see it more broadly within Black American spiritual technologies concerned with attraction & repulsion, favor & protection, influence & concealment, and drawing something toward you & keeping something else away... I could see it within a tradition where the material world—roots, waters, oils, powders, clothing, personal concerns, prayer, objects carried on the body, and things already available within the home—could be worked upon to alter conditions.
And I could see something else that became increasingly important to me: for the Black women who came before us, perception was never inconsequential.
How a Black woman was seen could determine where she could work, what spaces she could enter, whether she was considered respectable or deviant, beautiful or undesirable, feminine or somehow outside of femininity altogether, harmless or threatening, worthy of protection or available for violation... Hair, clothing, posture, complexion, sexuality, speech, comportment, domestic presentation, and bodily visibility accumulated meaning under conditions that were neverof our own making.
As I have written previously, aesthetic practice within that history could become a form of knowledge production and counter-archive: something carried through hair, adornment, fragrance, dress, domestic ritual, and cultivated presence when the formal archive had little interest in preserving Black feminine interiority on its own terms. It was from within that convergence—Hoodoo, Black feminine aesthetic practice, ancestral continuity, embodiment, interiority, and the politics of perception—that I began calling what I practice glamour conjure. The distinction in language matters to me.
I do not practice glamour magick. I practice Hoodoo, and I call my work glamour conjure because conjure quite literally concerns the conjuring and engagement of spirits. Within my practice, that relationship is inseparable from the ancestral dead. I understand Black Americans as a people profoundly shaped by ancestral continuity, and I do not believe something as intimate as perception somehow sits outside of that inheritance. How we understand beauty, visibility, desirability, respectability, danger, softness, concealment, presentation, and even our own reflections has been formed across generations of Black life on this land. We inherit far more than physical features; we inherit ways of seeing ourselves, ways of anticipating how we will be seen, and strategies our people developed in response to what being seen could cost them.
This is why simply adopting the framework of contemporary glamour magick has never been sufficient for me. I cannot approach perception as though I am an individual practitioner standing alone before the gaze, attempting to manipulate how others receive me through will, projection, or aesthetic enchantment. There are people standing behind me. There is history standing behind me. There are relationships with the ancestral dead that shape what I carry, what I am permitted to work with, what requires healing, what deserves preservation, and what I may choose to transform. The women before me lived within conditions in which Black feminine visibility was consequential, and some of the ways they learned to negotiate beauty, presentation, protection, desirability, reputation, and presence remain sedimented within the generations that followed. In my work, glamour therefore cannot be separated from ancestral relationship any more than it can be separated from embodiment.
That is why I call it glamour conjure.
The glamour names the field of perception. The conjure names the spiritual relationship through which I approach it. Together, they allow me to hold what contemporary glamour teachings too often separate: the seen & unseen, the body & the spirit, self-perception & public perception, personal desire & inherited memory, aesthetic practice & ancestral continuity… My work begins from the understanding that before I ever intentionally shape how I am perceived, I am already carrying generations of knowledge about what it has meant for women who look like me to be seen.
There are people standing behind me. There is history standing behind me.
What Happened to Glamour?
As glamour has become increasingly popular within online spiritual spaces, I have watched its meaning become progressively flatter. Scroll long enough and glamour begins to look almost synonymous with beauty magic: enchant your lip gloss, charge your perfume, take a goddess bath, choose an herb for attraction, wear a color associated with Venus, speak affirmations into the mirror. I am not dismissive of these practices. Some have places within my own work, and beauty is an extraordinarily rich site of spiritual practice. My concern is what disappears when these practices become the entirety of what we understand glamour to be. When glamour is flattened into beauty ritual alone, we do not simply lose complexity.
We lose relationship.
We lose the ancestors. We lose the historical conditions under which perception acquired meaning. We lose the land from which materia was gathered, the circumstances under which particular technologies became necessary, and the inherited negotiations with visibility that continue to live within the body. We lose concealment alongside attraction, repulsion alongside magnetism, diminishment alongside amplification, protection alongside desirability. We lose the possibility that glamour can concern what must remain private just as seriously as what we wish to make visible.
Most troubling to me, we lose the archive.
And I want it back. And I never played.
Perhaps that desire feels particularly urgent to me now because of the political moment in which I am opening this Practica. We are living through another Trump administration, amid renewed attempts to restrict how race, gender, history, inequality, bodies, education, and belonging can be discussed within public life. For me, this is not a moment for becoming less historically literate about ourselves. It is a moment for becoming more so.
I find myself increasingly committed to retrieval & survival.
Not nostalgia. Not the romantic invention of ancestral histories that make us feel better about the present. Not assigning mystical meaning to everything an ancestor ever touched simply because we desperately want the archive to give us something magical. I want to be abundantly clear.
I mean the disciplined retrieval of our people.
I want us returning to census records and old newspapers, family photographs and oral histories, regional folklore and ethnobotany, literature and material culture, beauty practices and spiritual histories. I want us asking our elders what they remember while there are still people here to ask. I want us learning which plants grew where our people actually lived rather than allowing an algorithm to hand everyone the same list of ten “magical herbs.” I want us capable of distinguishing what we can document from what our families tell us, what appears in folklore from what we know through spiritual relationship, what belongs to an established tradition from what we are developing within our own practices.
I want us to know enough to make meaning without manufacturing history.
The archive is not dead material to me. It is one of the places through which we recover the conditions that made our present possible, and sometimes, when we know how to look, the technologies our people developed to live, protect themselves, cultivate beauty, maintain interior worlds, influence conditions, and imagine themselves beyond what the world permitted them to be.
This is the intellectual and spiritual ground from which I built The Glamour Conjure Practica, and because of that, I knew exactly where I did not want to begin. I did not want to begin with the spell. Long before we intentionally manipulate perception, we have already been shaped by it.
We have learned what it means to be beautiful, desirable, respectable, threatening, forgettable, conspicuous, seductive, trustworthy, excessive, feminine, masculine, safe, dangerous, worthy of attention, or worthy of being ignored. Some of those lessons are personal. Others are familial, cultural, historical, political, geographic, and spiritual. Some were taught explicitly, while others are so deeply embedded in the environments that produced us that we may have never thought to identify them as teachings at all.
So before I teach you about materia, I want you to know something about your land.
Before I ask you to investigate your land, I want you to know something about your people.
And before I ask you to investigate your people, I want you to know something about yourself.
Who is doing the working? What does she believe she is trying to change? Why does she desire that change? Where did that desire come from? What has shaped her relationship to visibility, desirability, beauty, reputation, concealment, attention, and power? What histories does she carry into the working? What spiritual and material technologies are actually available to her? Is glamour even the appropriate intervention for what she wants?
These are the questions beneath The Glamour Conjure Practica.
So, now that I've told you why I built it, let me answer some of the questions I imagine you may have before deciding whether this is the right space for you.
Before You Enter: A Few Questions I Anticipate
Is this a course?
Nah, I’m not in the business of selling courses.
I chose the word Practica very deliberately because I wanted language that reflected the relationship I expect participants to have with the knowledge they encounter here. I have spent enough of my life within formal education to understand both the usefulness and limitations of the conventional classroom hierarchy, and I did not want to reproduce it within my spiritual work.
I am not interested in positioning myself as a spiritual authority from whom you borrow a practice. I am much more interested in helping you develop the intellectual, ancestral, material, and spiritual literacy necessary to interrogate and construct your own.
My role throughout these months is closer to curator, researcher, facilitator, and architect. I have constructed the pathway. I will introduce frameworks for thinking about glamour, provide original teachings and essays, curate literature and archival materials, demonstrate research methods, introduce resources, offer questions that push beyond obvious answers, and create opportunities for us to collectively examine what we find.
But I cannot undertake your inquiry for you, because eventually the knowledge has to become yours.
Okay, so what are we actually doing for four months?
We move deliberately through:
SELF → PEOPLE → LAND → MATERIA → ARCHIVE → PRAXIS
October begins with Interiority + Inheritance: Know Yourself. Know Your People. We explore shadow, desire, visibility, concealment, beauty, reputation, perception, and inheritance while beginning genealogical research, constructing ancestral records, and engaging living family archives where possible.
November moves into Magical Literacy + Land: Know Your Materials. This is where we study ancestral geography and materia alongside the foundations of magical construction: herbs, correspondences, timing, candles, color, water, oils, scent, smoke, mirrors, adornment, prayer, petition, incantation, divination, spiritual relationship, permission, and discernment.
December brings us to Glamour in the Archive: Learn to See the Work. We turn toward literature, folklore, history, family memory, photographs, material culture, beauty and adornment, performance, and spiritual tradition, learning to recognize glamour as a technology of perception that extends far beyond contemporary beauty magic.
Finally, January is Praxis: Make the Working. Only after we have moved through self, inheritance, land, materia, magical literacy, and the archive do participants begin constructing an original glamour working.
By then, I don’t want you opening Google and searching best herbs for attraction. I want you opening your own archive.
So, am I actually going to learn how to construct glamour workings?
Yes. I am simply unwilling to begin there.
Before I teach you about materia, I want you to know something about your land. Before we investigate land, I want you to know something about your people. Before we investigate your people, I want you to know something about yourself.
The point is to develop enough literacy that when it is finally time to construct a working, you understand what you are doing and can articulate why you are doing it. Every decision should eventually be able to withstand one deceptively simple question:
Why this?
Why this desire? Why this intention? Why this plant? Why this material? Why this timing? Why these words? Why this method? Why glamour at all?
That is infinitely more interesting to me than handing you a spell on the first day.
What will I actually leave the Practica with?
Over the course of our four months together, you will construct what I call your Personal Archive of Glamour Praxis.
That archive will contain:
Shadow Work Workbook
Ancestral Record + Family Tree
Living Archive Oral History
Ancestral Geography Map
Ancestral Materia Table
Personal Correspondence Codex
Glamour Field Study
Glamour Genealogy
Intention + Divination Record
Original Glamour Working Blueprint
These are not ten disconnected assignments. Each one gives you something you will need later. By January, you are not constructing from nowhere; you are returning to months of inquiry into yourself, your people, your land, your materials, the archive, and your developing spiritual discernment.
How much time should I expect to spend on this?
I recommend approximately 2–4 hours each week, although your rhythm may vary depending on what you are researching and how deeply you choose to follow a particular thread.
The Practica is intentionally asynchronous because I want the work to live within your life rather than require you to reorganize your entire life around it. You will have a shared monthly progression, but you will move through the readings, research, reflection, and artifact-building independently.
You do not need to race ahead. I actually don’t want you to. Please don’t! Manage your time. Go to the pumpkin patch. The concert. Live your life. This should live neatly within your existing life.
Depth does not require unnecessary urgency.
What is a Parlor?
Although much of the Practica happens asynchronously, once each month we return to one another in Parlor.
The Parlor is neither lecture nor office hours. It is where independent inquiry becomes collective inquiry. You might bring an archival discovery, a plant you have been researching, a contradiction you cannot resolve, a family story that changed after finding a document, an interpretation you want us to trouble, or a question that became more complicated the longer you sat with it.
No one is expected to arrive as an expert. You are expected to arrive having engaged.
Someone else’s family history may make you ask a better question of your own. Another participant’s cultural knowledge may complicate something you have only encountered abstractly. We may disagree about interpretation and then have to articulate how we each arrived where we did.
This is one of the things that excites me most about the Practica: I know what I have built, but I cannot possibly know what everyone is going to find.
That part belongs to the room.
Do I have to be Black American to participate?
No.
The Glamour Conjure Practica is not limited to Black American participants. I am, however, a Black American woman and Hoodoo practitioner, and I have no desire to pretend my intellectual + spiritual location disappears when I facilitate. Participants will encounter Black American scholarship, history, literature, folklore, material culture, and spiritual technologies because they are part of the ground from which my work emerges.
What I will continually ask you to do is locate our inquiry within your own ancestral and cultural context.
When we study plants, investigate the plants surrounding your people. When we discuss land, find your land. When we encounter a culturally specific spiritual technology, the appropriate response is not necessarily to reproduce it. Sometimes the more useful question is what need that technology answered and whether your own people developed something in response to a similar need.
The question may travel where the practice cannot.
Cultural specificity is not an inconvenience to this work. It is part of the work.
Does that mean you are teaching Hoodoo?
No.
I practice Hoodoo. My glamour conjure praxis emerges from Hoodoo. My thinking about glamour, ancestry, land, spirit, materia, and perception is inevitably informed by that location, and I am not interested in stripping that context away to make my work appear culturally neutral.
But The Glamour Conjure Practica is not a Hoodoo how-to.
I will not distribute protected, private, familial, or culturally bounded knowledge simply because someone has paid to enter the space. Access to me is not access to everything I know, and participation in the Practica does not confer access to a tradition that may not belong to you.
What I can do is show you how I ask questions, how I research, how I think about land and materia, how I distinguish evidence from interpretation, how I approach spiritual discernment, and how I move from those things toward praxis. You can then turn those questions toward the histories, traditions, lands, and relationships that are actually yours.
What if I don’t know very much about my ancestry?
That is completely okay.
You do not need to arrive with a completed genealogy, an encyclopedic knowledge of your ancestors, or generations of neatly documented spiritual practitioners waiting in your family tree. In fact, part of our work is learning how to investigate.
We will work with genealogical records, oral history, family memory, geography, historical context, photographs, newspapers, obituaries, and other available sources. Sometimes you will find an answer. Sometimes you will find a contradiction. Sometimes you will find a gap.
Absence is information, too.
There is no prize here for having the most mystical family. I am asking for curiosity, honesty about what you do and do not know, and a willingness to look.
What if my family wasn’t “spiritual”?
Please do not enter this work expecting to discover that your great-grandmother was secretly a rootworker.
Maybe she was. Maybe she absolutely was not.
The archive I am asking you to investigate is much larger than that. I am interested in where your people lived, how they moved, what they grew, how they dressed, what they believed, how they cared for themselves, what they feared, what they protected, what they considered beautiful, what they carried with them, what they left behind, what sayings survived them, what objects recur in photographs, what family members were remembered for, what women taught other women, and what practices persisted even after the explanation for them disappeared.
We are not doing ancestral fan fiction.
We are learning to distinguish documented history, family testimony, folklore, cultural knowledge, spiritual discernment, interpretation, hypothesis, and personal invention without assuming that only one of those categories can be meaningful.
Do I need to buy a bunch of herbs, candles, oils, crystals, and other supplies before we begin?
Please don’t.
I specifically do not want you shopping your way into a practice before you have had the opportunity to discover what that practice might actually be.
There is no universal Practica shopping list because November is devoted, in part, to learning how to investigate materia for yourself. What grows in the places connected to your people? What materials recur within your cultural history? What physical properties does a plant possess? What uses can be historically documented? What spiritual correspondences have developed around it, and within which traditions? What relationships are you developing through study and practice?
Use what you already have when appropriate. We can acquire other things when and if they become relevant.
Let the research tell you what you need.
Are there required books?
Yes. Our primary literary text for December is Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters.
Throughout the Practica, I will also provide and curate additional materials—original teachings, scholarship, archival resources, historical material, folklore, media, research tools, and other sources relevant to our monthly inquiry.
This is a study space. We are going to read.
What happens if I register now but formal study doesn’t begin until October?
September is the threshold.
I wanted there to be a period of arrival before I asked anyone to begin digging. Participants who enter during September receive immediate access to Before We Enter, our orientation space for understanding the environment, reviewing our agreements, gathering materials, preparing the Practica Archive, locating what you already know about your ancestral and cultural background, and preserving a Record of Arrival before formal study begins.
There is value in knowing what you believed before new knowledge rearranged it.
You do not need to race ahead during September. Arrive. Get situated. Gather what you already have. Begin noticing what you do not know.
And when October arrives, we begin together.
Who did you build this for?
I built The Glamour Conjure Practica for people who suspect there is more to glamour than what the internet has allowed it to become.
There is more beneath the beauty. More within the archive. More in the stories our people tell and the ones the records complicate. More to understand about the land beneath their feet and the materials within their reach. More to investigate within our own desires to be seen, unseen, remembered, desired, protected, softened, amplified, obscured, or transformed.
You do not need to enter already knowing what your glamour praxis is.
I am asking for curiosity.
A willingness to look closely. To research before claiming. To allow the archive to surprise you. To discover that something your family has always done has a history you never knew, or that something you assumed was ancestral is not. To follow a plant back to a landscape. To ask an elder one more question. To recognize the relationship between the body you inhabit now and the people whose lives made yours possible. And eventually, to make something from what you have learned.
We are living in a time that makes me particularly unwilling to surrender our histories to flattening, forgetting, algorithmic spirituality, or political erasure. I want us studying. I want us remembering. I want us asking better questions. I want us preserving what can still be preserved and becoming discerning enough to know the difference between what we inherited and what we are creating for ourselves.
That, to me, is living spiritual practice & that is the work I want to do together.
When do we meet live? Do I need to be available every week?
No. The Glamour Conjure Practica is intentionally designed as an asynchronous, self-paced study experience. You will move through the monthly teachings, readings, reflections, and practices on your own schedule.
We gather live once per month for Parlor, on Friday evenings from 8:30–10:00 PM ET. Our scheduled Parlors are October 23, November 20, December 18, and January 29.
The monthly Parlor is where we bring our independent study back into collective conversation, deepen what we’ve been exploring, and make space for questions, reflection & integration.
Registration for the inaugural Glamour Conjure Practica is now open.
September is for arriving. In October, we begin.
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