Halloween, or All Hallow’s Eve: this night, the wall between the earth and the Otherworld opens. Samhain: the Witches’ New Year, the first of the greater sabbats of Wicca. Día de Muertos: Mexico’s colourful celebration of the cycle of life and death. In all traditions, tonight is a time to honour ancestors, to commune with those who have left this world. Tonight is a hinge, a magical in-between place where time changes meaning, and past, present and future are one.
Join the spirits at a party to celebrate the beginning of the darker half of the year and the publication of Spells: 21st-Century Occult Poetry. The evening features: readings from Daisy Lafarge, Amy Key, Rebecca Perry and Bhanu Kapil’s spectre and music from TTB and Lia Mice — and 'Nigredo', a ritual using ceremony, trance, sound and symbolic divisions of space to harness the potent energy of this night. Magical thinking is the point at which all things intersect. In the ritual space everything has meaning. Ritual is a technology to transform consciousness, taking us from the visible, rational and material to that which is only felt: to the source. Here inner and outer worlds can exist simultaneously without contradiction, catalysing a dissolution of the individual self. 'Nigredo' is devised by Nicole Bettencourt Coelho with Lani Rocillo, Martina Saorin, Mario Benedetti, Sim Gray, Kati Flo, Mary Grace, Caitlin McNamara and Annabelle Stapleton-Crittenden.
Spells is the debut from Ignota Books, a new publishing project and experiment in the techniques of awakening, founded in the Peruvian mountains in the last days of 2017 by Sarah Shin and Ben Vickers. During this turbulent passage from the collective hallucination of one epoch to the next, Ignota seeks to open a space for the unknown: that which is "nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt" (Audre Lorde). Ignota is an invitation to awaken, and at the same time, dream.
Spells is edited by Sarah Shin and Rebecca Tamás and has contributions from: Kaveh Akbar, Rachael Allen, Nuar Alsadir, Khairani Barokka, Emily Berry, A.K. Blakemore, Jen Calleja, Vahni Capildeo, Kayo Chingonyi, Elinor Cleghorn, CAConrad, Nia Davies, Kate Duckney, Livia Franchini, Will Harris, Caspar Heinemann, Lucy Ives, Rebecca May Johnson, Bhanu Kapil, Amy Key, Daisy Lafarge, Dorothea Lasky, Ursula K. Le Guin, Francesca Lisette, Canisia Lubrin, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Lucy Mercer, Hoa Nguyen, Rebecca Perry, Nat Raha, Nisha Ramayya, Ariana Reines, Sophie Robinson, Erica Scourti, Dolly Turing, Jane Yeh. Published by Ignota Books ignota.org.