Spell, the magic word, is Old English spell, a story or saying: gospel is literally god-spell, good story. Spell, the school word, arrived from Old French espeller, to read letter by letter, from a Germanic root. Two separate words drifted into one shape, and the shape stuck. Yet the overlap is historically true: in the medieval world, literacy and clergy were nearly one profession, the boundary between scholar and magician was genuinely porous, and grammar and grimoire, the magic book, descend from the same Greek root, gramma, a letter.
Decoder broadcasters, Gaiters and Maxwell among them, teach that to spell is to cast: words bind, curses curse, and the educated unknowingly work magic with every sentence. English is presented as a grimoire disguised as a dictionary.
Scots and medieval tradition called occult learning gramarye, from the same root as grammar. To know letters was to know glamour, enchantment, the art of making people see what you wrote. Walter Scott still used the word for magic in the 19th century.
Gospel once meant "good story." If our words for magic and for letters come from an age when the same people did both, does the pun expose a spell, or a memory?