Glamourie

What sex and magic have in common

An Olden Worde

Glamour is an old word, and glamourie is its Scottish version. I use glamourie here to set apart what I mean from the common, modern usages of glamour. Instead I mean the ancient meaning of glamour that has more to do with witchcraft than fashion and cosmetics. And yet there is an overlap between, which is telling.

Spell-Wrought

Glamourie involves hexing, spell-casting, and indeed the effect of such upon their victims. When you’ve been hexed, you do things you wouldn’t normally do, and you don’t really understand why. A sort of compulsion seizes upon you and you find yourself acting as though under an outside force. Sometimes you don’t even know you’re doing it.

By ‘glamourie’ I mean the triple parts of the magic: the caster, the casting, and the effect upon the victim. You could call it another way of saying ‘magic’ except that it is specific in that it is a compulsion set upon a person.

As of today, the hexing sense of ‘glamour’ is obsolete, because we don’t believe (officially and publicly) in magic. The word has remained, and now means sex appeal, particularly the sex appeal of women. ‘Glamour photography’ includes that class of photography where the model herself (the model is almost always a woman) is the object of desire rather than the shoes, dress, hairstyle, or other piece of fashion. There is a fashion magazine, calls itself Glamour.

This kind of glamour is always skin-deep, and yet there is more to it than that.

Allure of Mystery

The glamour of today is a mysterious quality. The word holds onto its sense of compulsion: glamour girls cause men’s heads to turn, and muster up an invisible, unquantifiable and undefinable attraction upon all those who fall within their orbit. Though fashion exists to sell makeup, hats, dresses, and other accessories and styles that appear wholly on the surface, the promise in the word *glamour’ involves some inner quality, something that goes beyond the mere smearing-on of paint and oils, beyond the scents, beyond the cuts and flips of tresses.

And so it is with the original glamourie. It is, in the end, unknown and unknowable. We can trace where it has been, through its effects. Those who can cast the spells of glamourie are as much artists as workers in crafts.

I stress the mystery, because it is common in today’s Romance works of Fantasy, to bind magic with rules, to define its limits, to corral it within systems. Each magical world must be founded upon a theory of magic, a system; these theories and systems are known and can be stated in a few words. They are logical and, dare I say it, even rational.

But reason is the antithesis of magic.

Glamourie lurks in the half-shadow, in dusk and twilight gloaming, in the half-smile, the wink, the sideways glance. Like glamour today, glamourie is beyond defining, beyond capture, and has no limits, no rules, no system.

All art works as much by breaking its ‘rules’ as by obeying them. The masters were ever iconoclasts.

So it is with magic and glamourie.

Cast a shadow in hazy sun; trace an outline in the fog; glimpse an eye through the net of a stray lock of hair. The limits of glamourie can be sensed and felt but they are never clear-cut, there is always a faint stretch where their power falls away and yet persists, and the heart of them is pierced by light and undone.

The Beauty in her glamour will often wear a veil.

So it is with glamourie — and all magic.

(Composed on keyboard Sunday, May 18, 2008)