REVIEW: Spells for Success / Lauren Parker
Spells for Success
Lauren Parker
Simon Element
Review by Noah Sanders
When Lauren Parker’s deck of spells, Spells for Success (Simon Element, 2025), arrives at my household I have two main thoughts: First, I’m wary. There’s an aspect of modern, social media-driven society, where everything is in service to ease, to smooth living, to the pursuit of a simple, unhindered path to achievement and through it, happiness. It’s galling at best, and at worst, dangerously basic. We are encouraged, and in response seek, to replace the rougher edges of the beautiful struggle of living with a smooth, smiling, blandness. Is Parker’s deck, so upfront about its intent to provide magical means to finding success, another push for easy answers? Is this just false promises of easy fixes in a magical package? My second thought? I know nothing about spell casting or witchcraft.
As it turns out, on either account I have nothing to worry about.
The 40 spells and rituals in Parker’s Spells for Success are a refreshing antidote to the horseshit idea of an easy path to success and good living. Instead Parker understands that achieving goals, finding love, and being a better person is a journey littered with broken hearts, dirtied knees, and well-earned sadness. And we’re better off for it. Spells for Success doesn’t offer quick, magical solves for your day-to-day issues, it provides guidance, magical or otherwise, to shift your perspective from longing, to doing, and maybe even accomplishing the goals you’ve set in your life. “The cure for the stagnation of anxiety is action,” Parker writes in her introduction. “Spellwork is the practice of showing up.”
Divided into four categories–love, jobs, confidence boosting, and bad stuff ditching (to paraphrase)–Spells for Success seeks to give you the tools to do just that. Parker breaks down the process, ingredients, and philosophy of simple spell-casting into bite-sized chunks for the spellcasting newbie.
If you are concerned, like myself, about your ignorance about spell casting, fret not Parker is a gruff, but loving guide to at-home witchcraft. For every line of advice she slips into a recipe for say a “Reflection Meditation” (““The nagging message in the back of your soul is the one you need to hear,”) or a “Get Promoted Yarn Spell” (“The pathway to achievement is rarely pretty and crafting is stressful.”) there’s an equally insightful instruction for the more pragmatic side of spellcasting. Don’t worry about boiling floral oil for certain spells on your stovetop, just do it in your crockpot. Small sections spread throughout the deck focus on organization, proper hydration for throwing spells, and magical hygiene. Where all of this could be boilerplate text, Parker infuses it with an DIY, anarcho-punk spirit that could be right at home in an early-90s Portland commune.
It makes sense, Parker’s work outside of spellcraft has crossed fiction, poetry, and personal essays and this, a practical spell book for those in need of some practical magic, reflects that. On seemingly every card there is at least one line that reminds the reader that Parker is both hedgewitch and writer. “Let the wishes fly off,” she writes, “let [the kite] soar and crash.” “You are the most complicated tool you wield,” she tells us. She is an older sibling, chuffing you on the shoulder and telling you to get your shit together, to do something, hell, to do better.
This deck of spells isn’t just about getting what you want. Parker isn’t telling us to set our intentions, cast a spell, cross our fingers, and wait for our soulmate (or the new job, or the boost in confidence, or whatever) to walk through the front door. That’s movie bullshit. These are spells for a life in the process of being lived; a beautiful life, a difficult life, and the space inbetween where the living actually occurs.
What I pull away from each card, each spell, each series of easy-to-follow ingredients and steps laid out before me is that a new job, or a better perspective isn’t going to drop into my lap. Instead by spending the time to set an intention, to gather ingredients, to follow these steps, we’re actively, if unknowingly, resetting the way we think for the better. Call it magic or energy transferral, but maybe it’s Parker reminding us of the power of saying to ourselves, “I am this person. I want these things in my life. I can have them if I put myself out there.” Spells for Success has all the spells for all the mundane ways to improve your life, but in the end it isn’t saying they’re going to fix your life; it’s providing a set of tools to focus your mental energies on living, and appreciating your life, and giving you the firm kick in the ass well all need to get started.