The House Witch: Your Complete Guide to Creating a Magical Space with Rituals and Spells for Hearth and Home - Arin Murphy-Hiscock 2018

Keep Records
Magic at the Hearth

Keeping records is important not just in everyday life but for your magical activities as well. Keeping track of what you did and when you did it helps you plan and schedule your activity, as well as offering you the opportunity to review your past activity for insight. At its most basic, a journal can be a collection of ideas and notes about what goes right and wrong, or it can be a place to store the tidbits of home-related information you collect about spirituality or everyday life.

Your journal is the place to copy recipes, rituals, ceremonies, purifications, and any other specific spiritual activity you do. You can be as specific as you like, including notes about the weather, who else was in the house at the time, your impression and emotional state, and so forth. It’s a place to record bits of information about deities or spirits that you research, the meditations you do, the offerings you make and how you feel they were received. You can make diary entries about how you feel, the connections you make, and your thoughts about your practice of home-based spirituality. You can paste in color swatches, clippings from magazines, or paint chips if you’re planning to redecorate, and insert photographs of your house at different stages to record its evolution through the years. You can keep track of the dinner parties you host, writing down the menu, the guests invited, and the culinary successes (or failures!). You can press flowers or leaves from your garden in it. You can record poems or prayers in it. In short, it’s a catchall for anything associated with your spiritual path, for ease of later reference.

You can use a blank notebook with lined or unlined pages or a three-ring binder. The binder allows your inserted pages to expand as necessary, whereas the bound notebook may not close properly after a lot of use. It works best to use something that is at least 8" × 10", to allow yourself room to record and draw and paste things in.