For a couples of hours one day this year, I needed to be beautiful. Of course I did all the usual beauty things like putting on makeup and so forth but that wouldn't get me as far as I needed to go. I needed to be beyond beautiful; I needed to be glamorous.
Glamor is magic. It's not a coincidence that it's both a word for a certain sophisticated sort of beauty and also a word for the innate shape changing magic of the fae.
This day came about as a result of a conversation with a magazine editor about planning an ad for my book in a magazine. Originally I was just going to go with an ad created by my publisher, but it didn't meet the technical specs, and the editor wanted to create a new ad for me, and showed me several examples. The one that appealed to me the most featured the author and her book, and to emulate that I needed a photo of me with my book. One good enough to print in a magazine.
I'm fiftyish, fat, and I have to shave my face. Surely there is no spell that would make me look like I belong in the glossy pages of a magazine. So I didn't cast a spell. Or did I? I might have called this a spell during the time in my life when no one in Asatru really liked the word prayer and avoided it, well, religiously. Spell or prayer, call it whichever you like; invocation works for both, so let's call it an invocation.
I announced, "I'm going to get prettified. This is going to take a LOT of work."
I went to my main house altar. I thought of a plan to create a special display there for Freya for a year, starting with a cat image. I placed the cat image. I would assemble the other parts of the display later (I'll post again when I have it all done.) I found two appropriate perfumes among the perfumes that I keep on the main house altar. One was Bulgarian rose in a traditional wooden container which my mom brought back from a folk dance trip. The other was the Vanr Volva scent dedicated to Freya made by Cherry-Ka's Trunk. I put one perfume on each wrist.
Within, I prayed to Freya. "Please make me beautiful today." The words were simple, but I was picturing the entire course of the glamor in my mind: I would put on makeup, and choose sophisticated, glamorous clothes, going for an editorial look. I would do my hair. I would become beautiful, glamorous. We would go out to the city mural and do a photoshoot. Then I would take off my makeaup and it would be over. The glamor would end and we would all go swimming. And that is how it went.
Only one of the photos would go in the ad, but there were many good photos suitable for the Heathen Visibility Project, and for blogging. One of the photos appears on this blog post. So, you see the results!
Image: Photo of Erin Lale by Cat Lo