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The Book of Shadows

Every witch keeps a book. Some are leather-bound and lettered; most are a biro-scrawled notebook with a tea ring on the cover and pressed leaves falling out of the back. The second kind is better, because it is the one that gets used.

What it is

The Book of Shadows is the witch's own record: the rituals you do, the spells you cast and what came of them, the herbs you learned, the correspondences that work for you, the dreams, the omens, the readings, the recipes, the half-formed theories, the poems. In traditional Wicca it is also the coven's book of core rituals, copied by hand by each initiate from their initiator's copy, so that the words are passed from hand to hand down the line. For a solitary, it is yours alone, and grows with you.

The name is Gardner's and the romance is his too; the idea is as old as the first person who wrote down which plant cured the fever. A grimoire is a book of magic; a Book of Shadows is a book of your magic, and the difference matters.

What goes in it

• Rituals: your circle casting, your Sabbat observances, your Esbat, with the words you actually use and notes on what you changed and why.
• Spells: the full working, the date and moon phase, the ingredients, and, most importantly, the results, recorded weeks or months later. A spell book without results is a wish list.
• Correspondences: colours, herbs, stones, days, hours, planets. Begin with ours, then overwrite them with what you find to be true.
• Divination: every reading, however trivial. Patterns show up over years.
• Dreams, especially around the Sabbats and the full moon.
• The land: what is flowering, what birds have arrived, when the first frost came. This is the oldest Book of Shadows of all.
• Reading notes, arguments with authors, questions you cannot yet answer.
• The Charge of the Goddess, copied in your own hand. Everyone does this. Nobody regrets it.

How to organise it

Two schools. The chronological book is a diary: you write what happens as it happens and index it later. It is honest, it is easy to keep, and it shows you your own development. The sectioned book has tabs or chapters, so that all the herbs are together and all the Sabbats are together, and is far easier to use in ritual. Most of us end up with both: a rough working journal and a fair copy into which the things that have proven themselves are transferred. The fair copy is the one that gets the leather cover.

A ring binder is the unglamorous best answer for the fair copy, because things can be moved. The working journal should be whatever you will actually carry.

Paper or screen

Paper has weight, smell and permanence; writing by hand slows you down in a way that is itself part of the magic; and no one can read it off a server. Screens are searchable, backed up, and always with you. Several of us keep both and feel guilty about neither. If you keep a digital book, keep it offline and encrypted, print the important parts, and remember that the thing you are making is meant to outlive your phone.

Beginning

Tonight. Any notebook. Write the date, the moon phase, and one true sentence about where you are on the path. Then copy out one thing you have read that struck you, and write underneath it why. That is a Book of Shadows. Everything else is accumulation.