The Witch's Athame: The Craft, Lore & Magick of Ritual Blades - Mankey Jason 2016
introduction
My first Witch tool was a Book of Shadows. It was a tiny little Nepalese journal that I picked up at a local head shop/hippie store. Instead of being black, it was a virtual rainbow of colors on a soft cloth cover. Its pages were handmade (at least according to the stamp inside of it), with none alike. Some of them felt like tissue paper, while others were far more sturdy.
It was a rather appropriate BoS (60S—that’s how many Witches abbreviate “Book of Shadows") for me at the time. I was kind of a tree-hugging free spirit and loved the idea of a resurgent 1960s type of counterculture. With its emphasis on the earth and the seasons, Witchcraft felt like a natural extension of what I had already come to believe as a young adult. My book was pocketsized too, and I envisioned myself scribbling in it at jam-band concerts, jotting down the sort of secrets that can only be revealed during an eight-minute guitar solo.
Though I still own that first Book of Shadows, I never did that much with it. Dreaming about its contents was far easier than creating content for it. There are a few ritual sketches inside of it, and I did transcribe a chant I learned at my first Pagan festival (a chant that is now so commonplace to me, I nearly giggled when I came across it before writing today). There's also a Christo-Pagan ritual in it, written when my first footfalls on the Pagan path were more tentative than sure-footed. On the last page of that early BoS is a call to the Inuit goddess Pinga written for a long-ago Samhain ritual.
That first BoS is a curious little snapshot of my early life as a Pagan and a Witch. There is a lot of confusion in its pages, and it contains several ideas that ended up being spiritual dead ends in my life. I like to flip through it sometimes to remind myself of how far I’ve come, but it’s not all that representative of where I am today. On the plus side, it does take me back to a simpler time in my life, which is sort of fun.
My second attempt at a Book of Shadows yielded much more fruit. That book was originally a blue leather-bound journal with a sun on the cover that I purchased at a local Barnes and Noble. Its pages were lined and uniform, and I filled much of it up over the next few years with rituals, poems, and even some handcrafted mythology. It's still my favorite BoS, and I’ve used it at handfastings (marriage ceremonies) and an assortment of rituals around the country. It contains some of my earliest coherent thoughts as a Witch and still occupies a place of honor in my ritual room.
Also important to me is my wife’s BoS (don’t worry, she doesn't mind when I flip through its pages). Her first BoS was a rather generic brown journal—there were no suns or moons on the cover of her book. When I have a question I don't know the answer to, I sometimes page through her writings in hopes of finding the information I need. Her BoS has not weathered the years particularly well and is literally falling apart at the seams.
If you were to ask my wife and me about the two most important tools we use in Witchcraft, we'd both say our athames and our books. We often refer to her first BoS and my second as "our books.” They’ve been such an important part of our journey that we feel as if they deserve a little extra recognition in our lives, even if the way we refer to them is a bit mundane.
Over the last eight years, the number of BoS’s in our house has risen dramatically. After being initiated into the Gardnerian tradition of Witchcraft (named after its founder, Gerald Gardner), my wife and I were given the first third of the Gardnerian Book of Shadows. Because Gardnerian Witchcraft is an initiatory tradition with three different "degrees,” or levels, a complete Gardnerian BoS is assembled over the course of several years as individual Witches learn new things and progress through the system.
Shortly after being initiated, my wife and I left our home of fifteen years for America’s West Coast. There we found ourselves starting a new coven not connected to any particular Witch tradition. As that particular coven grew, we built a Book of Shadows around it, composed mostly by me but also with a lot of input from other members of the coven.
Eventually I started building new BoS’s for myself, utilizing the ritual structure of our California coven (which we eventually dubbed the "Oak Court,” after the name of the street we live on). The Oak Court also does a fair number of public rituals, and both my wife and I eventually put together additional books for such occasions. As our coven continues to grow and innovate, our BoS grows along with it, with more rituals, spells, and poems becoming a part of our written legacy.
My wife and I continued our studies in the Gardnerian Craft and were initiated into the third degree of that tradition a few years after starting the Oak Court. This resulted in us receiving not only the rest of the Gardnerian BoS but also several other Gardnerian Books of Shadows from covens around the world. As covens are generally autonomous (there is no King or Queen of the Witches), each group is free to add whatever they wish to their BoS’s. This results in very different-looking books, even among Witches of the same tradition.
As of this writing, I have over fifteen different BoS's on my bookshelf, and that’s not counting the ones that are a part of traditionally published books! Each and every one of them is special and represents a different point on my ongoing journey as a Witch. Some of them I share freely with other people, while others are for my eyes only. Many of them are drastically different from their companions on my bookshelf, but all of them are Books of Shadows.
I've had a love affair with books for as long as I can remember. I find that few activities are as pleasurable and informative as reading, and this love for the printed word has extended to the Book of Shadows. I fancy myself a BoS collector these days and enjoy building new books at what's starting to feel like an annual pace. I don’t expect everyone to share my love of the BoS, but if I can capture a bit of why they are so special to me, I'll feel as if I’ve succeeded with this book.
If you are experienced at keeping a BoS, I think you’ll still find some useful information in these pages. To those of you relatively new to the Craft, I hope this book helps in the crafting of your own BoS (or BoS's!). It’s my hope that this book will shine a little bit of light on your path.
WHAT IS A BOOK OF SHADOWS?
In many ways a Book of Shadows is whatever a Witch wants it to be. Some BoS’s represent a specific tradition, while others represent a very narrow segment of a particular Witch’s beliefs, practices, or interests. If a piece of writing has meaning to a Witch (or group of Witches), it can go into a Book of Shadows.
A BoS is not a bible or an absolute. It simply documents the spiritual life of a particular Witch or Witch tradition (and everything in between). It can be public or private and doesn't even have to be a book in the traditional sense. A BoS that exists only on a hard drive or “in the cloud" is still a BoS. If someone says, "That's my Book of Shadows," then it is! It’s the most personal and varied of all Witch tools.
A BoS can be extremely organized or rather chaotic. Its contents can be decades old or fresh off the Internet. There is no right or wrong with a BoS; there is only what’s right for you. More than any other tool on my altar, my Book of Shadows represents me. It contains my rituals, my words, the poems of others that I treasure, and even my blood.
If I were going to bare my soul as a Witch to an outsider, I would pick up my most beloved Book of Shadows and hand it to them. I might use my athame more often in ritual than my BoS, but I’ve spent far more time with my book in and out of ritual than with any other tool.
While the term Book of Shadows sounds like some centuries-old magical secret, it’s of relatively recent vintage. It wasn't used to designate a “Witch book" until the early 1950s and most likely evolved outside of an established Witch tradition. It’s a lovely turn of phrase but not a particularly old one.
Even though the term Book of Shadows is less than a hundred years old, people have been writing, keeping, and producing magical texts for millennia. The history of the BoS travels from tablets to scrolls to books, and while the words we use to describe those things are different, the idea behind them is the same. An ancient Greek scroll from 2,300 years ago might not be a proper Book of Shadows, but it is most definitely related to what we do today with our BoS's.
The first BoS shared by Gerald Gardner (there's that name again—he's a pretty important figure, being the first modern public Witch) contained the rites and rituals of his Witch cult, a tradition that’s known today as Gardnerian Wicca. The actual writings in that BoS were (and are) oathbound, meaning individual Witches who receive that BoS have promised to keep its contents secret.
For several decades the only way to gain access to the rituals and rites of modern Witchcraft was to be an initiate of a Witch tradition. During that period of time (from the early 1950s to the early 1970s), a Book of Shadows served as a how-to guide for many Witches and was handed down from initiator to initiate. There were no printed Witch rituals in general circulation and no how-to books yet in print.
Initiates were free to add things to those early BoS's, and many did. BoS’s were not written in stone, and while many of the rituals and ideas passed along have stayed the same, Witchcraft has always been a dynamic and evolving faith. As a result, the original writings of Gerald Gardner have been expanded upon and added to over the last seventy years.
One of the biggest fundamental changes in Wiccan Witchcraft occurred in the 1970s, with the printing of the first Witch rituals. Now people had access to rituals without being an initiate, but this didn't remove the mystery that lies at the heart of a good Book of Shadows; instead it added additional layers and made it even easier to embrace Witchcraft. Now solitaries and eclectic groups could keep and create their own BoS's, and many initiated individuals began keeping a second (and even third) BoS to highlight the material that was now available to them in books.
YOUR BOS IS ABOUT YOU.1
I can’t stress enough how personal the BoS is. The only things that should ever go into your book are the things that resonate with you. The BoS is the one tool that we completely shape and mold around us as Witches. An athame always has to at least vaguely resemble a knife, but your BoS doesn’t have to look at all like mine or anyone else’s (and doesn't even have to be a book). It can be written in any language or not have any language at all (a book of pictures works just fine tool).
In this book I provide suggestions, along with a bit of practical advice. I'm sharing things that have worked for me and are a part of my BoS (and those of my friends), but they may not apply to everybody. Use what you want and discard the rest. Make your BoS about you and it will be just perfect!
[contents]
chapter
1
SOME DIFFERENT TYPES OF BOOKS OF SHADOWS
While there is no right or wrong when it comes to a BoS, there are a few book styles that are more common than others. But that doesn't mean every BoS will fit neatly into one of the categories outlined here. In fact, most BoS's are a combination of styles, just as most Witches are multifaceted people, so are their BoS’s.
I've arranged the following styles according to when they were first documented in modern Witch history, but just because a particular format was the first to be used doesn’t mean it’s necessarily better. A lot of Witches today start out with their own Book of Shadows before encountering one from a coven or tradition. Just as the BoS has continued to develop over the last few decades, so do individual Witches grow and change at their own pace.
The Coven Book of Shadows
The BoS I use most often in circle is my coven Book of Shadows. It contains the rites and rituals of my coven, along with a little bit of information about our beliefs and practices. I put it together myself from several different sources, and when someone is initiated into our circle, they are given a copy of the BoS.
The first tome in Witch history referred to as a Book of Shadows functioned much like my coven’s own BoS. It contained the rites and rituals of one specific group, and people were allowed to copy its rites and rituals upon being initiated. A coven Book of Shadows is a shared liturgy among Witches and represents what those Witches do when gathered together for sabbats and es-bats. The material in a coven BoS can come from a variety of sources but is generally assembled by those in the working group.
As my own coven has grown over the years, we've added some details to our coven books, such as information on where our rituals originated. We've also added some Witch material separate from rituals, some advice (such as the Wiccan Rede: An it harm none, do what you will), and some magical operations that have been particularly successful for us. A coven BoS is generally always being added to as the coven members create more things together.
A coven BoS represents the beliefs and practices of a specific Witch group. While I put my coven’s book together, it has material from many different members of our group. It’s a document for us and not any one particular person. The individual Witches in our group are free to add its contents to any other books they are keeping and to add material to their own copy of our BoS. Our particular BoS is printed in such a way that it resembles a traditional book, and we include blank pages near the end because we assume every individual Witch in our circle will want to add to their particular copy of the book.
My wife and I have begun keeping a second book for our circle, although it is not officially a part of our coven's BoS. Inside we include the names of the Witches who were at each ritual, what magical operations were performed, and any other information we think might be of importance. If our ritual includes any direct interaction with the Lord or Lady or divinatory operations, we include those too. I often think of it as our coven diary.
A coven diary is a useful little document to keep, especially if your coven engages in drawing down the moon (or sun). Drawing down involves the Goddess coming into circle through the body and voice of the high priestess and often speaking to the coven. When a goddess talks, it’s best to listen, and if you can write down what she says, all the better. The advice she offers might prepare you or the coven for future events. When the words of the Goddess come true for us, we often end up putting them in our coven’s regular BoS.
When covens are successful, they often hive off from one another, meaning that some of the Witches within it leave the mother coven and go off to start their own group, keeping the original coven’s rites and rituals. If the teachings of a coven survive over a generation and end up being transmitted far and wide, a new Witchcraft tradition is born. The BoS of a tradition is a bit different from that of a coven.
A Tradition's Book of Shadows
When a person is initiated into a tradition, they are usually given (or allowed to copy) an already existing Book of Shadows. Flipping through the pages of an initiatory line’s BoS is like going backward in time. The BoS of my tradition stretches back several decades and includes the wisdom of dozens of other Witches who have contributed to it over the years. It’s an extraordinary document and one of my most cherished Witchcraft items.
Unlike my coven's BoS, my tradition's BoS contains a wide variety of material. Since it was originally put together in an age before the “Wicca 101 book,” it contains all sorts of practical information on how to work magick and build an effective Witchcraft practice. It’s far more complete than the BoS I created for my own coven and covers many topics with a depth and breadth of understanding I’m incapable of.
In the tradition I'm a part of, our BoS can only be added to and never subtracted from. This has resulted in a book that is much larger than what it was originally when it began its life as a document for one particular coven. There's a misconception in many Pagan circles that a specific tradition’s Book of Shadows tends to be static, but nothing could be further from the truth. High priestesses are always adding to their tradition's BoS, sharing the lessons they've learned walking between the worlds while running an earthbound coven.
While tradition BoS's often contain a wide range of material that’s different from coven to coven, most groups generally preserve a group of teachings that they recognize as being core to the tradition. Core material can differ from tradition to tradition but is often made up of rituals and the tradition's earliest writings. All of the Books of Shadows dedicated to our tradition contain at least this universally recognized core material.
Traditional material is often oathbound, meaning that initiates are not allowed to share the goings-on and writings of their tradition with non-initiates (sometimes known as cowans, which is a word originally used by Freemasons to refer to the uninitiated). Sharing oathbound secrets can result in being kicked out of a traditional coven, and in some groups there are magical penalties as well. Being given a tradition’s BoS is a very sacred and serious thing and is a sign of trust and respect.
The Book of Shadows shared in a tradition is often shared in stages, especially when that tradition engages in rituals of initiation and elevation. The most common initiatory system involves three degrees. At first degree, the initiate is made a Witch of that particular tradition and generally is given a BoS full of practical material and magical advice. The BoS I was given at first degree contained none of my tradition's group rituals but did include some material advising me on how to practice as a solitary Witch.
At second degree, I was given more material to put in my BoS, most notably many of our tradition’s rituals. My high priestess and high priest believed I was ready, as a second-degree Witch, to actively assist in our coven's rituals and even lead them on occasion (with some supervision). At second degree, I wasn't ready for all the material they had to give me, because much of it applies only to Witches running their own coven.
Upon receiving our tradition's third-degree elevation, I was given the rest of our Book of Shadows. Much of that material was about how to initiate new Witches and properly run a coven. The BoS dedicated to my tradition is now in three parts, and only certain Witches who have been properly elevated can look at the second and third parts of my book.
The BoS dedicated to my tradition is currently over three hundred pages long, and that’s just the first-degree part of the book! Since it's so long, we don’t require our initiates to hand-copy our BoS; instead, we hand them what we jokingly call our forklift BoS in a three-ring binder. We are also always sure to include a few blank pages at the end in case we need to add a few more things to our BoS.
The Individual Witch ’$
Personal Book of Shadows
The most common type of BoS today is probably that of the individual Witch. A book of this type can (and probably will) contain a little bit of everything. Most Witches begin collecting information and writing down ideas long before even meeting another Witch, let alone becoming part of a tradition. My first BoS’s were of this type and contained a little bit of everything I found useful in my personal practice.
Describing an individual BoS is nearly impossible because they are all so variable, but they all tend to be less ritual-centric than the BoS’s found in covens and traditions (at least in my experience). When I put together my first few BoS’s, I tended to simply add any bit of information I found valuable or useful. Successful spells and bits of ritual went into my BoS, and I also included personal reflections post-ritual. If it felt magical, I felt comfortable putting it in my book.
One of the most liberating things about having a personal BoS is that you don’t have to answer to anybody when you put something in it. It’s possible that you might want to share the contents of your book with someone, but there’s nothing requiring you to do so. When I’m adding stuff to my coven’s BoS, I know that the people I practice with are going to end up seeing it, so I make sure that the material is clearly articulated and easy for everyone else to pick up on. In my personal BoS I can do whatever I want and be as obtuse as I desire! No one else is looking, and this can be quite liberating.
A personal BoS represents the individual Witch in a way no other tool can. Its contents are curated by you and only you! Writers like me can suggest what to put in a BoS, but they're only suggestions. The ultimate decisions are yours to make.
Even after writing a great coven BoS and picking up the BoS of my tradition. I’m still drawn to my personal Book of Shadows. There are bits that belong only in that particular book, things that only I think of as essential to the practice of a Witch.
In my days as a Witchling, I used to enjoy reading the BoS's I found included in easily available books, such as Scott Cunningham's Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner. Those BoS’s make Witchcraft look so easy and organized, but they are nothing like the ones most individual Witches have. The ones from books are often too structured, too organized, and feel too much like an established tradition rather than an evolving practice. My personal BoS varies wildly from page to page. It moves from nineteenth-century English poetry to instructions on knot magick.
We Witches are always growing and finding better ways to practice our Craft and increase our knowledge. As a result, most individual BoS's become a hodgepodge of ideas, spells, and rituals. A little bit of disorganization isn't an indication of a cluttered mind; it's proof of a constantly growing mind.
As a Witch, I’m a multifaceted practitioner. I love my covens and I love my tradition, but there will always be a part of me that wants to do my own thing and have a space for my own thoughts and ideas. That’s where my personal BoS really comes into play. It is an extension of everything else I do and yet is something completely different. I’m grateful that Witchcraft offers so many possibilities.
Over the years I’ve put together many BoS's for personal use, and they vary a great deal. Some of them are just for the rituals I do in public. Often these books include my rituals in the order they were performed. Some of these books are especially decorative and impressive-looking, so I use them when performing a handfasting, a wedding, or a funeral rite. Those sorts of public rituals aren't linked to any one tradition and were generally written by me (though they often were constructed with input from happy couples and sometimes mournful family members).
I have a personal BoS that contains the things I find most important to me in my initiatory tradition. Since my Cardnerian BoS is hundreds of pages long, I have a smaller version in my own handwriting containing the elements that I think are most important to that tradition. I put it together explicitly for me, and I don’t care if anyone else can follow along with it (or read my handwriting). I think it contains the essence of a tradition I love, but what I think of as essential may not be an opinion shared by everyone in that tradition, so I keep it to myself.
Even though I wrote my eclectic coven’s Book of Shadows, I still have a separate personal BoS specifically for that circle. It contains our rituals, along with some ideas and reflections about our rituals that I don't want to share with anyone. It also looks more impressive than the version of our coven's BoS that I give to our members.
A personal BoS can and should be whatever you want or need it to be. Every Witch is different, and we all are going to cherish different things as individuals. Later in this book I'll suggest several things to put in your BoS, but in the end you should include only the material that you find valuable.
The Journal Book of Shadows
I know several Witches who keep a daily journal documenting all of their spiritual and magical pursuits that they refer to as a Book of Shadows. The majority of Witches I know do not keep a daily BoS, but I think the practice has some value. Witchcraft is a serious magical path that requires a great deal of discipline, and writing every day is a way to develop that discipline. Attempting to find something magical or spiritual on a day-to-day basis can also serve as a reminder that the wondrous often exists just outside our front door.
While most Witches don’t keep a daily magical journal, entries in a BoS about particularly meaningful and important milestones are rather important. Upon reaching the rank of third degree in my tradition, I wrote a long piece in my BoS about the experience. I wanted to capture what the ritual meant to me as a Witch and to document the symbolism of the ritual as I interpreted it at the time. Documenting the most important steps on my journey as a Witch has helped me see what I’ve accomplished over the years and just how much I still have to learn.
Many Witches like to record their sabbat experiences from year to year, and in some covens such books are mandatory. Having several years of sabbat rituals laid out beside one another is a great way to chronicle one’s progress in Witchcraft. Over the years I’ve been surprised at just how much my perceptions about certain sabbats have changed (and in some cases stayed the same).
In addition to writings about sacred rites, words about sacred spaces fit nicely into a BoS as well. I’ve never performed ritual at the Grand Canyon or Stonehenge, but being at both places helped me to feel the Witch blood pumping through my veins.
Dream journals are very popular in some Witch circles and are another version of a journal BoS. For many Witches their dreams are doorways into the subconscious and sometimes a window into the future. Scientists say we don’t remember most of our dreams, which makes writing down the ones we do remember even more important. Reviewing dreams is much like reviewing past rituals: they can tell us where we’ve been and where we might be headed.
The journal BoS is the most personal of all BoS's and, because of that, is the most difficult to write about, just remember, if something is magical to you, it’s worth jotting down. BoS journal entries don't have to go in their own book either; many of mine are positioned between rituals and spells. Most BoS’s end up being a hodgepodge of personal, coven, and group material, unless, of course, a Witch wants to create a BoS for a specific subject.
"One Specific Thing" Book of Shadows
I have a Witch friend who is an avid herbalist and gardener. She’s at her best as a Witch when she’s outside in her backyard, surrounded by the plants of her garden. Because herbology is such an important part of her life, she has a Book of Shadows dedicated to that particular practice. For most of us, a few pages in our BoS about our favorite plants is usually more than enough, but what if you want to document hundreds? That’s when a sub-ject-spe-cific BoS can be especially useful.
The most common type of “one subject only" Book of Shadows is dedicated to spellwork. Magick doesn’t just help us manifest change in our own lives; it's also how we connect with our deities and the natural world. Witchcraft is a magical religion, and to ignore magick is to miss out on all that the Craft has to offer. Keeping a book dedicated solely to spells, with a few remarks here and there on their effectiveness, makes for an especially powerful and useful type of BoS.
While magick-only books are probably the most popular type of BoS, there are all sorts of other things that might go into a sin-gle-sub-ject BoS. I keep a book full of historical Witchcraft documents that I treat very much like a BoS. The writings in it are sacred and, in most cases, oathbound, so I can share them only with a small group of people. Before writing this book, it never would have occurred to me to think of that collection as a Book of Shadows, but it most definitely is.
We all have our favorite things and our own particular areas of expertise. Keeping track of such things benefits not only ourselves but also other Witches down the road. My herbalist friend let me borrow her book once while I was constructing my own magical garden, and her advice and expertise helped make my garden that much better.
The Operative and Active Book of Shadows
A Book of Shadows should be practical, first and foremost, and while it’s nice to have a 500-page forklift BoS, it's not much fun to use in ritual. To get around this, I like to take the most useful bits of a very large BoS and turn them into what I think of as an operative Book of Shadows. An operative BoS is one that can be used easily in circle and contains all the information I need when presenting a ritual.
My operative BoS during ritual is often the CliffsNotes version of my tradition’s or coven's BoS. When performing Cardnerian ritual, for example, I take the most essential bits I need for what we are doing out of my forklift book and place them in a three-ring binder. The important part of the operative BoS in such instances are the pages I'm using to conduct the ritual, and when I’m done with whatever we’re doing that night, I take those pages out of the binder and put them back in their original home. Oftentimes the actual binder that I’m using is unimportant to me and not adorned in any particular way.
I also have a few books designed simply to be used as an operative BoS during ritual. They tend to contain the basic ritual structure for whatever coven I’m working with and omit all of the explanations and history found in my other books. Since I designed them all for me, they are also all personal BoS’s, but they are personal books with a very specific ritual purpose. It’s certainly possible to fit everything into one book, and it's great when that happens, but a BoS should be practical above all else. If yours starts growing too unwieldy, there’s nothing wrong with dividing it up or creating a supplemental book just for the things you use most often.
Recently a friend of mine sent me a copy of Doreen Valiente's original Cardnerian Book of Shadows. Valiente was one of the most important Witches who ever lived, and I love having a copy of her book on my shelf, but it's different from the books I’ve actively had a hand in creating. I will always be adding to my own books and those of my covens and traditions, but I would never add to Doreen's. It was her book, and it’s a valuable BoS that will be cherished for generations to come, but its story is complete.
Doreen’s book is what I think of as an inactive Book of Shadows: it’s a book that’s still being used but no longer being added to. The Book of Shadows that came with Scott Cunningham’s Wicca: >4 Guide for the Solitary Practitioner is another inactive book.
Cunningham designed it to be a particular way, and since he's no longer here with us, he can't change what's there or add to it. We can certainly take the words he wrote and put them in our own books and use them, but when we do so, they become something else. They become a part of our work and our traditions, and they sit next to our own BoS scribblings. And when an author makes the contents of their BoS public, that’s exactly what they hope will happen!
The BoS’s I currently write in and use during ritual are examples of what I think of as an active Book of Shadows. They are a part of my current practice and are being added to on a regular basis. That’s not true of all the BoS’s I’ve put together. My very first BoS still sits near my magical tools, but I don't plan to ever add to it again or use it during ritual.
How we categorize our books is of little consequence as long as the end result is something that speaks to the individual Witch. A good BoS is one that is used and helps the Witch better understand the broomstick they ride. Ultimately, when it comes to our personal books, we are all our own final authority.
Every Trick in the Book:
You Are Writing Your Own History
a lot of us keep Books of Shadows with the future in mind. Those of us in established traditions often pass our books to our downlines. Parents may wish to pass their books to their children. Even if you don’t intend for anyone to inherit your books, you yourself are likely to return to them again and again to measure your progress, to see how you’ve changed, or just to visit with your past.
Looking back over almost twenty years’ worth of my own Books of Shadows (and having been the beneficiary of more than one from other Witches within my tradition), I offer you this:
In twenty years, you won’t care about the text you copied word for word from that bestselling Wicca book. You won't care about the things you printed from the Internet, unaltered. Those things will serve as tiny indications of what you found interesting at the time, but they won't say much about your internal questions, your hang-ups, your beliefs, or what you were actually doing in your practice. They won’t reveal anything about you. Those words already belong to somebody else, and they’ve been copied and printed by thousands of people. They’ve already been preserved.
What the future needs is your voice, your words.
Learn to journal, whatever that may look like for you. When you perform a spell, don't just include instructions; write about your process and the results. Write about whatever book you just finished reading. Write about the people you meet. Write about what you’d like to try or what you’d like to research next. Clue in photographs of your altars, your covenmates, your ritual space, and yourself. Use paint and ink and stamps and anything else you can think of, even if you’re not much of an artist. (You might surprise yourself by becoming one!) Write notes in the margins. Collect quotes that matter to you, but then include your own commentary. Ask questions. Confess doubts. Complain. Brag. Congratulate yourself. Swear.
Copy and hoard to your heart’s content (I still do!), but don't neglect to include yourself in your Book of Shadows. That’s what’s going to matter to you in twenty years. Even if those entries are embarrassing to read later on, they’re the ones that will reveal your growth and provide the most insight into who you are and what’s important to you. And that is how you track your own progress and grow in your Craft. That is what your children will want to inherit. That is what your coven will benefit from the most. That is the history of your Craft, whatever Craft you practice.
No one ever has to read any of it, of course. But unless you destroy it, there’s always the chance that your book will end up being passed to another Witch. You are writing history—your tradition's history, your family’s history, your personal history. Don’t leave yourself out.
THORN MOONEY
Thorn Mooney is a Gardnerian high priestess, tarot card reader, teacher, and blogger who currently lives in North Carolina.
[contents]
chapter
2
Putting Together a Book of Shadows and Making It Your Own
When I began my first Book of Shadows twenty-odd years ago, I believed that everything in it had to be handwritten by me. While I continue to believe that physically writing a BoS offers some advantages, it’s not the only way to put together a Book of Shadows. I've seen all sorts of books the last few years, and every method of BoS creation has its own merits.
Finding a Book of Shadows
Finding a BoS is easier today than it’s ever been. Visit a local stationery or bookstore and you’ll be surrounded by perhaps literally hundreds of choices. People may not write with a pen and paper as often as they once did, but journals are still extremely popular (though how many of those journals are actually written in is up for debate). The downside to searching for a journal in a local book or stationery store is that their wares may not be especially "Pagan.”
There are lots of journals being produced today that look like antique books or perhaps have a moon or sun on them. For many of us that would be more than witchy enough, but if you are in the market for a BoS with a big old pentacle on it, you'll have to either shop online or visit your local metaphysical/New Age retailer. Most of my BoS’s are rather mundane-looking. More important than a giant pentagram is finding what speaks to you personally.
In addition to finding the right style for your BoS, you may want to take a second look at the circumstances in which it was manufactured. If you are fine with a mass-produced book from China, there’s no shame in that. There are BoS's like that in my ritual room. However, if you are worried about whatever residual energies might be lingering on your book, finding one made closer to home won’t get you into any trouble. (For information about cleansing, consecrating, and dedicating your Book of Shadows, see chapter o.)
In addition, there are many Witches who avoid synthetic, petroleum-based products, so check to see what your prospective BoS is made of. There are many affordable journals made today with organic ink, a nice touch for the environmentally conscious Witch. Some people swear by leather covers, while others avoid products made from animal skin. I think leather gives a BoS a nice traditional sort of look, but I understand the concerns of those who avoid animal products.
If you are a fan of leather, there are many amazing handmade journal covers out there, available at specialty shops, art shows, and online. Such covers can make the most mundane-looking BoS appear truly magical. Often these run a pretty penny, but it can be worth it if you’re planning on your BoS being with you for a lifetime.
I've met a lot of Witches over the years whose first BoS was a simple spiral notebook, the kind you find in high schools from coast to coast. There’s no shame in a one-dollar spiral notebook for a BoS, especially for the novice Witch. Its nondescript look will most likely keep wandering eyes away, and it can be taken
anywhere without raising an eyebrow. One of my first books of magical poetry was written in a spiral-bound notebook, and it still sits near my other BoS's in my ritual room today.
I think one of the most important things to think about when buying a journal or notebook to use as a BoS is whether or not the paper inside of it is lined. This may sound like a trivial thing, but if you aren’t an art major or a calligraphy expert, it can have a serious impact on the effectiveness of your BoS. My first book was unlined, which resulted in its every line looking like the text was on a major downhill run.
If you are going to put together a BoS the old-fashioned way, with pen and ink, you'll want to get a book with lines in it. Sometimes, though, the perfect book is not as perfect as we want it to be. If your perfect BoS is unlined and you need help writing in a straight line, there are some ways around the problem. Writing with a ruler is a common trick, as is lightly penciling in some lines that can be easily erased later. Of course, not all BoS's need to be handwritten ...
A Book of Shadows in a Three-Ring Binder
Some of my most cherished BoS's sit in some rather nonde-script-look-ing plastic three-ring binders. I’m not going to say they are ugly, but they look more like business manuals than collections of magical advice. Many of these books are hundreds of pages long and are full of decades of wisdom. In my initiatory tradition, some of our most carefully guarded secrets are passed via the copy machine.
While not all that aesthetically pleasing, my binder BoS is surprisingly effective. The pages are big, and most everything in it is typed out and easy to read. It's also easy to add and subtract from that particular BoS. Don't need to carry around all eight sabbat rituals at Yule? The other seven can be effortlessly removed and stored somewhere else for safekeeping.
THREE TYPES OF BOOKS OF SHADOWS:
A SUN BOOK OF SHADOWS, A THREE-RING-BINDER BOOK OF SHADOWS, AND A DECORATIVE BOOK OF SHADOWS
The pages I use the most in my binder BoS are kept in page protectors. This prevents the holes punched in the paper from growing and keeps all of the pages where they belong—in my book. It's also useful if you use your BoS a lot in ritual and want to avoid getting candle wax on the pages.
Many of the things in these particular sorts of BoS’s have been handed down for decades now, often copied (and then recopied and recopied and recopied) from the sheets they were originally written/typed on. This is an amazing way to connect to history, especially when looking at fonts that really only existed in the era of the typewriter. Some of these sheets have small errors, which makes their writers more human. Flipping through a BoS that has remained mostly intact since the 1970s is a great experience.
BoS's of this style aren't reserved for covens passing down their secrets; they can be used by anyone. Since most of us today write on computers or tablets and print out those documents on standard-size paper, this is an easy way to create a BoS for those of us who enjoy typing. In addition, you can copy pictures and place them directly in your BoS this way. This is an amazingly easy way to create the perfect BoS in a relatively short amount of time.
While most of the material in my three-ring binder is generally photocopied, it doesn't have to be that way. One of the great strengths of the binder is just how adaptable it is. You can put together a binder BoS by hand-copying if that's the route you choose to go; even better is that you can use copies and handwritten material at the same time. And because page protectors are sized to fit the binder, the size of paper you use for any handwritten parts is inconsequential. If you scribble down something on a piece of notebook paper, all you have to do is drop it in a paper protector and it’ll be good to go.
The only downside to this method of BoS construction is that most binders are rather ugly, but there are some ways around that.
Making a Three-Ring Binder Look Great
There are some options out there if you want to use a three-ring binder for your BoS but don't want it to look like a corporate training manual. The first is to buy a binder with a pocket on the front that you can slip a piece of paper into. I have a few books like this with big pentagrams on them, along with the book’s title, usually the name of the coven that provided that particular BoS. There are also some nice “executive" binders out there designed to be a bit more stylish than the classic five-dollar plastic binder, but they often come in strange sizes.
An option that is a bit more elaborate is to buy a fully adorned binder from an Internet site. There are a lot of print-on-demand sites that sell binders with witchy artwork on the cover. I think a lot of these look a bit cheap, but many of them will include whatever text you want on the front—a nice option if you are trying to create a coven book in a binder and want your group’s name on it.
The Witch community has never suffered from a lack of artisans, and many of them offer homemade and elaborately adorned binder books at websites such as Etsy. Many of the artists offering such services also do custom work. Custom-made binders can range from books made using elaborate materials such as silk and semiprecious stones to books decorated with leftover Halloween kitsch.
The most personal option is to decorate a binder yourself through the use of papier-mache (or, in this case, tissue-papier-macbw). This will create an antique-looking book cover, complete with whatever symbols you might want to add, plus lots of texture. (See the last section in this chapter for tips on how to use this method.)
The Advantages and Disadvantages of Using a Three-Ring Binder Pluses
· • This is the fastest way to create a complete Book of Shadows.
“ The contents can be easily shuffled, rearranged, and added to.
“ Pages can be easily removed and put in another binder, which is especially convenient when your book grows too big for ritual.
· • Notes can be easily added in the margins.
· • Copies and handwritten pages can be used interchangeably.
Minuses
· • Three-ring binders are generally ugly and generic-looking, though there are ways around that.
“ Binders are always very big and a bit unwieldy. They don’t fit easily on bookshelves or in one’s hands during ritual.
“ In my coven we generally keep everything to the right in a binder book; we don’t use both sides of the paper. This makes the book easier to use sometimes, but it’s also wasteful.
“ Pages tear easily if they aren’t in a page protector.
Despite its disadvantages, the binder book is really appealing because it’s so easy to use. It takes the least amount of work to add to and update, which is especially convenient if your coven is just beginning or you’re just starting your practice.
HOW TO MAKE YOUR THREE-RING-BINDER BOOK
OF SHADOWS LOOK GREAT
The Cut-and-Paste Book of Shadows
Some friends of mine asked me to officiate their handfasting (wedding), and I just didn't have time to write it all out by hand and stick in my BoS. Not wanting to simply read a few printed sheets of paper, I ran off a copy of their ceremony and then cut around the edges and stuck it in one of my prettiest books. No one at the service had any idea I was reading a generic Times New Roman font and had skimped a bit on my ritual preparation.
That ritual changed how I put things in my BoS’s, because from that point on I began using the cut-and-paste method about 95 percent of the time. I now have entire BoS’s filled with printed-out rituals lovingly chopped up and stuck on elegant pieces of paper. This way I get to combine the practical with the pretty.
Nearly every ritual I write these days is done on my computer. Taking all of that text and laboriously hand-copying it into a BoS does not appeal to me at all. Like many people today, I write by hand on only a limited number of occasions. To be honest, it hurts my hand to even hold a pencil or pen these days. But I can type, and I can type quickly, generally fixing any typos or grammar issues along the way. I wrote ritual by hand for a few years before the advent of the computer, so I know what it’s like, but this is much better.
If you're going to cut and paste your way to a great BoS, you'll want to reset the margins in whatever word processing program you use. Most of the books that I use with the cut and paste method are a lot smaller than a standard-width piece of paper, so resetting the margins will save you a lot of time and a lot of scissor work.
When I cut and paste, I'm almost always gluing a printed sheet of paper to an existing piece of paper in a journal. I say “gluing,” but you don’t want to use standard glue if you create a BoS this way. Glue will soak through the pages and make a mess, and tape sounds like a disaster. The best substance to use is actually rubber cement. It binds extremely well and won't leak through either piece of paper.
There are a few downsides to the cut-and-paste BoS, the biggest one being that your book will fill up rather quickly. Sure, most of the pages inside of it will be blank, but cementing all of those extra sheets inside of it will cause it to eventually puff out and it won’t want to close. This problem can be remedied by removing pages. The most precise method of page removal is to use an X-Acto knife and cut out every third page. Alternatively, you can just remove a large chunk of the book if that’s easier. A cut-and-paste BoS is one of the few instances in which a book with thin paper is preferable. There are also no second chances with this sort of BoS. If you glue in the wrong page at the wrong spot, it will probably be there forever unless you remove the entire page.
HOW TO MAKE A CUT-AND-PASTE BOOK OF
SHADOWS
My biggest problem is that I often get lost in the tedium of cutting and pasting and end up skipping a page or two. There’s nothing like thumbing through a ritual and finding pages four and five blank and wondering where the rest of your ritual is, then turning the page to find that the ritual continues on pages six and seven! These are small quibbles though, as I've found this method to be a great middle-of-the-road approach between using a binder and writing everything out by hand.
Cut-and-paste BoS creation also makes adding pictures to a Witch book much easier. I’d never use markers in a handwritten BoS due to page bleed-through, but in a copy-and-paste book that’s not really an issue. Just like with a three-ring binder, it's also possible to add a few handwritten pages to a cut-and-paste BoS if you feel the need.
The Advantages and Disadvantages of a Cut-and-Paste Book of Shadows
Pluses
· • This method combines the appealing look of a handwritten BoS with the practicality of a binder BoS.
· • This is a great book for use in ritual, compact and yet easy to read.
“ This method requires the Witch to be subjective; you won't want to put everything in a book like this.
Minuses
· • Mistakes are generally permanent unless you rip out a page.
“ Pasting pages onto pages will make your book puff out. The only remedy for this generally involves tearing out blank pages.
· • Books like this fill up quickly and are often a lot shorter than most Witches want.
Most of my public rituals go into cut-and-paste books these days. These books have some definite limitations but look nice during ritual and create the illusion that l1m using a handwritten book. Since a cut-and-paste book is fairly labor-intensive to put together, I get in a lot of good "bonding time" with my BoS while I’m filling up its pages.
1
Core ritual (quarter calls, circle casting, elemental blessings,
The Handwritten Book of Shadows
Despite my complete lack of penmanship, there is something to be said for the handwritten BoS. Taking the time to copy everything down by hand speaks to the meaning behind the words you are committing to your book. It also shows the dedication of the individual Witch. In today’s world it's easy to take shortcuts, but there aren’t a whole lot of shortcuts that can be taken with a handwritten Book of Shadows.
I'm of the opinion that while not everything in a BoS needs to be written out, it’s important to try to put at least a few rituals down in ink. I don’t think it’s necessary to write down elaborate histories or include a whole lot of exposition. In my own practice I feel that the things I really need to write down are the rituals and rites that I use the most. I also make space for a select few poems that I feel are seasonally appropriate.
My most often-used handwritten BoS contains the following items:
cakes and ale ceremony)
“ Ritual bits used frequently (Charge of the Goddess/God, drawing down the moon, chants)
· • Seasonal rituals (Yule, Samhain, Beltane, etc.)
· • Initiation and consecration rituals (includes tool blessings)
What my handwritten BoS does not contain are explanations as to the whys and the history behind those rituals. That’s all kept somewhere else. Besides, my handwritten BoS is the one I’m most likely to use in ritual, and if it were to contain five hundred pages, it would be a bit unwieldy in circle (though I'd be in much better shape if I were constantly lugging around a ten-pound BoS).
If you are going to create a handwritten BoS, I suggest making everything about the production of that book special. When my wife and I first decided to keep a handwritten book, we went out and bought some special pens dedicated to just our BoS. This sounds like overkill, but I find that using a pen (or pens) reserved for just my BoS helps separate me a bit more from the mundane world. For example, I don’t have to worry about remembering that I used one of my special pens to write a check to the electric company. And if you think using a special pen in a BoS is a bit much, I know some Witches who write their BoS’s with quill pens, the kind you have to keep dipping in ink.
In my handwritten BoS, I use three different colors of ink. Most things are written in black, but I include anything being spoken by my high priestess in blue, and any words that have to be spoken simultaneously with my high priestess are written in red. It's a pretty good system for keeping track of things in ritual, and it adds a bit more uniqueness to my handwritten BoS since all of my printed books are only in black and white.
My handwritten BoS is not particularly big (about the size of the average paperback book), and it can be a challenge to write in. Because of that, I only write on every other page, keeping the pages on the left-hand side of the book empty or reserved for pictures that are easily sketched in. I have written instructions for invoking and banishing pentagrams on the left-hand pages, located conveniently next to the written-out quarter calls and dismissals. I also use that space for drawings of altar layouts and anything else that I think might come in useful. With this system, not every page has writing on it, but most do. It also leaves me with a bit of room in case I need to go back and add something later on.
A Handwritten BoS
Presents a Few Extra Challenges
I love having a handwritten BoS, but it is a bit more difficult to put together and keep than a BoS in a three-ring binder. When I screw up something with the binder BoS, I simply take out the page with the typo on it and replace it with the corrected version. But when I make a mistake in my handwritten books, it’s forever; even using correction fluid (such as Wite-Out) will leave a scar on the page.
Some Witches try to mistake-proof their handwritten books by writing down everything in pencil first and then going over it in ink. This is a pretty good way to ensure you get everything written down correctly, but it will double the amount of time you spend working on your book. I'd like to be able to say that I recommend the "pencil first” method based on experience, but it’s something I’ve always been too lazy to do. As a result, my BoS contains a whole lot of scribbled-over words.
I wanted to end a particular handwritten BoS with one of my favorite contemporary Pagan poems. Because it was a poem I absolutely treasured, I used two different colors of ink and a very imaginative layout for it in my book. Halfway through my transcription, I realized I had forgotten an entire verse. It was all way too much to simply scribble over, so I ended up removing the entire messed-up page from my BoS. This is not a perfect solution if you make a mistake, but it does work.
The Advantages and Disadvantages of a Handwritten Book of Shadows
Pluses
· • A handwritten BoS is often the most impressive-looking option.
“ Writing everything in ink makes it highly personalized.
“ Writing words down helps with memorization.
“ The first BoS’s were nearly all hand-copied.
Minuses
· • Mistakes are generally forever or can only be corrected by tearing out a page.
“ A handwritten BoS is especially labor-intensive and may take years to finish.
· • If your penmanship is bad, it will be hard to read during ritual.
· “ A handwritten book is difficult to arrange since everything is permanent.
I reserve my use of the handwritten BoS for the most intense and personal of things. I have a handwritten copy of the most common Cardnerian rituals in one book, for example, and my most prized BoS is also handwritten. (It also has a lot of blank pages eighteen years after I started it, because I chose to write it by hand.) I love the idea of a handwritten BoS, but I don't always have the time and energy to give my handwritten books the attention they deserve.
Arranging a Book of Shadows
Arranging a Book of Shadows using a word processor is simple enough. Everything that you type can quickly be added to, deleted if you make a mistake, and moved around in dozens of ways. A handwritten BoS is completely different, and my handwritten books are full of crossed-out words and smudges that I wish were not there.
Even more importantly, a written book is generally added to over long periods of time. I’m still adding things to my second BoS, and it's been in my possession for over fifteen years now. Keeping track of that book's contents over the years has become an increasingly difficult task. For an active Book of Shadows to be useful during ritual you have to be able to find what you need in it.
It’s easy enough to mark a page with a bookmark (or, more likely, an old receipt or some other random piece of paper), but even a reasonably sized BoS might contain a few hundred pages. And besides, you have to be able to find what you are looking for just to bookmark it, and that can be a challenge if your favorite Midsummer rite is between a Goddess chant and a healing spell. How each individual Witch arranges their BoS is a very personal thing and most likely represents what they find most important in the Craft.
The focus of my books over the years has always been Witch ritual. I’m at my witchiest when I’m in a magick circle calling upon the Goddess and God as the moon rises in the sky, but that’s just me. I have friends who arrive at peak Witch by making magick and food in their kitchen. For them, it’s the practical skills of a Witch (healing, creating, and doing) that resonate most strongly. As a result, those things are given the most prominent space in their Witch books.
Over the years I’ve peeked through enough BoS’s to know a little bit about how various Witches have organized their books. The following suggestions may or may not work for you simply because the BoS is such a personal thing. Several of these methods I use myself, and what method I choose to use often depends on the context. A coven book will always differ from a personal one, and if you do end up keeping several BoS’s dedicated to specific topics, the need for organization diminishes a bit, though not completely.
Don't Arrange Anything
The easiest way to arrange a BoS (or not arrange it, as the case may be) is to not do it at all. I can’t imagine living in such a world myself (my mind generally doesn't work that way), but many Witches do so effectively. When this technique is used, a Witch simply adds whatever they want to their BoS, whenever they want, on whatever page they want. I did this with my first book, which is why it quickly became useless to me, but many Witches have much better recall than I do.
In grade school I had a teacher whose desk was always messy. Buried under piles of books and papers was a little plaque that said “Clutter is a sign of genius” (at least I think that's what it said; it was often hard to see). A cluttered book isn't necessarily a sign of a cluttered mind; it’s just a different way of doing things. And sometimes, no matter how hard you try to arrange things in a handwritten book, it’s easy to lose whatever organizational structure you are using.
It’s easy to misjudge the length of something and suddenly find that you have to split up the Yule ritual you're recording because there’s a recipe for rose water on pages you thought were blank. That sounds ridiculous, but it does happen (it happened to me). As a lover of BoS's, some of my favorite ones to read are the disorganized ones—because you never know what you’re going to find.
Similar to disorganization is just general messiness, and if you’re writing in your BoS, don't worry about it. There are no penalties for having to make an emergency notation in the margins or having to draw a long arrow from one piece of text to another because you transcribed things incorrectly. I often skip pages by accident when putting things in my BoS, leaving huge blank spaces in my books. Maybe I'll draw some pictures in those spots some day.
Chronologically
With the exception of not arranging anything at all, the easiest way to organize a BoS is chronologically. This sounds rather haphazard, but it's not as random as you might think. Our first lessons in the Craft are often some of the strongest ones, and the things put into a book in the order we learned them will reflect that. Our first invocations and magical experiments will inevitably be a bit embarrassing twelve years down the road, but they’ll also contain a passion and a fire that many Witches lose along the way.
Most of us don’t remember where we were on any given day of the year, but most of us generally remember the time of year when we first performed a specific spell or ritual. Even just "numbering" the pages of a BoS with dates of entry provides a reasonably efficient organizational structure for looking things up. As a bonus, all of your sabbat rituals will generally be in order and/or surrounded by other magical tidbits that are seasonably appropriate.
Perhaps even more so than a diary, a BoS kept in chronological order presents a complete picture of both your past and your future as a Witch. Generally, as you progress as a Witch, your spells and rituals improve and become more confident. Tracking your progress from year to year, and even decade to decade, can be a truly magical experience.
I've been lucky enough to review the rituals of several covens, and seeing how their work has changed and grown from year to year is extraordinary. Oftentimes I can tell when a new person joined the coven or a new book was purchased just by how the rituals have changed. When looking at my own work over the years, I've seen my rites become more poetic and archaic-sounding. But sometimes I need to connect with the Witch I was fifteen years ago, and looking at things as they have evolved over time is a way to do that.
In many Witch traditions the contents of the BoS are kept in the order in which they were written or created. The first few pages contain the writings of the coven’s or tradition’s founder, followed by the writings of later initiates. Oftentimes the oldest material in a book is seen as being the most important just because of its age, even if it's not very insightful in the twenty-first century. There's just something cool about coming across a fiftyyear-old piece of writing that’s never been shared outside of a particular coven or tradition!
Level of the Material
The earliest BoS’s were made up of three parts for the three degrees that were then a part of most Craft traditions. First-degree initiates were given general rudimentary information about Witchcraft. At second degree, initiates were given seasonal rites and additional material; oftentimes this marked the first time they were entrusted with Witch ritual. Finally, at third degree, the now high priestess and high priest were given all the rest of the Witch material, making their BoS complete.
Arranging a BoS by the level of its contents is generally done only in Witch traditions or covens that perform initiations, and it’s done for good reason. It’s not done this way to keep secrets from people, but to make sure each individual Witch is prepared for what lies down the road. Deity is not to be trifled or played with; it’s best to know how to talk to a goddess before performing a drawing down the moon ceremony. Books that move from basic to complex ideas do so because it's a good way to learn. (Before solving an algebraic equation, I had to learn to add and subtract.)
For Ease of Use During Ritual
Many of my ritual-only books contain complete rituals that include every word and action that I plan to say and do during a particular rite. Such books are pretty easy to use in ritual: I start at point A and proceed all the way to point Z. But most of the rituals I’m a part of with my coven aren’t set up that smoothly. I generally end up consulting several pages throughout my BoS during the course of a ritual, skipping from the beginning of my book to bits near the end. It all sounds like a lot of work, but it isn’t all that difficult as long as you know a few tricks.
Many Witches choose to set up their rituals around what I like to think of as an opening frame. They’ll reuse the same quarter calls, circle casting, and various other ritual odds and ends time and again. Having a dedicated opening/closing ritual saves a lot of space in the long run. Instead of writing down the same quarter calls for every sabbat ritual in your BoS, you only have to do it once. Our opening rites are generally longer than our workings, so this saves a lot of space in our books.
Most importantly, using the same ritual format time and again not only creates familiarity with the material but can also induce a trancelike state in the individual Witch. My coven nearly always uses the same opening frame, and when I hear it I become incredibly aware that I’m at a Witch ritual. For lack of a better term, it tunes me in to what’s going on in the circle.
The parts of ritual we use over and over again are also known and trusted to work in our circle. We don’t have to worry if they are going to be transformative or create a certain mood because we already know that we do. It also frees us up to write the working (generally the middle of the rite that celebrates the seasons, raises energy, or involves a magical operation) without having to worry about the rest of it. The only problem with this scenario is that it means I sometimes have to jump around in my BoS during ritual, which is never all that easy, especially when the only light in the room is candlelight.
My coven-ritual books are usually divided up in the following manner:
· • Opening and closing frames (including quarter calls, elemental blessings, circle castings, cakes and ale, the Great Rite, quarter dismissals, taking down the circle, and the final greeting)
· • Charge of the Goddess/God, calls to deity
· • Sabbat rituals
· • Esbat rituals
· • Chants and poems for energy raising/magick
The books we use during ritual are either operative BoS's or coven-specific ones. This means they sometimes lack a lot of the explanatory material that makes up a lot of some BoS's. Generally they have enough information to get me through the average ritual, mostly because I don't want to be holding a 400-page monster during a sabbat ritual.
The easiest (and laziest) way to mark a BoS if you are going to be jumping around in it during ritual is to use either a couple of bookmarks or a few little pieces of paper. I’ve used little bits of paper in my primary BoS for over a decade now and have only been called out on it when they have escaped from my book onto the floor. (“Littering” during ritual will usually result in a few chuckles or a couple of scowls, depending on the participants.) When I find myself going from page 12 to page 37 to page 93 to page 104 to page 199 over the course of one ritual, I'll sometimes number my little cheats or bookmarks. If you work with one book frequently, you’ll probably remember the general area where most of the ritual bits are located, but it never hurts to take a few extra precautions.
There are more imaginative and effective ways to mark things. If you use a three-ring binder as a BoS, it's easy to add tabs indicating where the different sections of your book are. Our Card-nerian BoS has tabs in it so I can easily flip from our ritual's opening parts to initiation or sabbat rites. Not only are tabs easier to use than bookmarks but you can even label them with specifics, such as "Lammas Rite” or whatever else you need to specify.
A friend of mine has a BoS divided into sections like I've outlined here, and she keeps up with the contents of her book by coloring the outside edges of the pages. The fore edge of her book looks like a rainbow. There are blue pages for chants and dances, yellow pages for sabbat rituals, and so on. It doesn't indicate exactly where everything is, but it’s a pretty unique book adornment.
Decorating and Personalizing a Book of Shadows
My first outline for this book included a section on making your own Book of Shadows. My original intention was to share how to make and bind an actual book. After reading a few books on the subject, I realized it was something I wasn’t really capable of doing, let alone writing about. So while constructing a book from scratch probably lies beyond the ability of a lot of us, there are many little things you can do to personalize your BoS.
My handwritten traditional BoS was originally just a journal purchased from Barnes and Noble but was turned into something extraordinary by a coven member who gifted it to me. He wrapped a thin sheet of leather around the cover and glued that into place. He covered up the area where he’d attached the leather to the book by placing gold leaf paper on the inside front and back covers. He did such a fantastic job that I didn’t even realize the gold paper was just meant to cover up where the leather had been glued to the book. It's that seamless.
He then decorated the cover with some iron-on grapes. The result is something that looks as if he painted directly onto the leather. Ironing decals onto leather doesn't sound like something that should work, but it is surprisingly easy to do, and the iron-ons are pretty durable. If this is something you’d like to do, just make sure you buy iron-on transfers designed for dark shirts, even if the leather you are transferring them onto is lightly colored.
On the center of the book’s cover he glued a large plastic charm depicting a satyr drinking from a large goblet. The satyr is surrounded by grape and oak leaves and is nestled directly between the iron-on transfer grapes. He tells me this was all rather simple to do, and his efforts transformed this particular BoS into a near work of art.
Sometimes all that’s necessary to turn a rather ordinary BoS into something great is a little bit of elbow grease and a few easily acquired items at a craft store. So if you find yourself feeling dismayed that your BoS is rather ordinary-looking, that can easily be changed, and you can even do it years after initially purchasing your BoS.
If you’re going to use a three-ring binder as your BoS, decorating it will present a few extra challenges. A binder is probably not something you will want to cover with leather or even high-quality paper. When the editor of this book suggested I look into papier-mache as a way to spruce up a binder BoS, I was rather skeptical, but it’s surprisingly easy to do.] I was also able to create mine with materials purchased exclusively from a local discount store.
Decorating a Binder BoS with Papier-Mache
For this project you will need the following:
· “ Regular white glue (such as Elmer's) watered down
· • Symbol printed out on paper (optional)
· • Clue gun (optional)
“ Tissue paper
“ Acrylic paints (at least two colors)
“ Spray-on acrylic sealer
• At least one paintbrush, and perhaps a fine brush if you want to add small details to your book
Your first step will be to decide how elaborate you want the cover of your book to be. If you want a raised (3-D) symbol on the front of your binder, start by printing out a copy of that symbol from your computer. Make sure it’s the size you want for your cover. Now trace the outline of your symbol with the glue gun (you can also simply use a bottle of glue here, though it’s a bit harder to control) and set it aside to dry. After it's dry, cut out the symbol from the sheet of paper and glue it to the front of your binder. (It will most likely take several hours for the glue to dry completely.)
Step two involves applying the papier-mache to your book. This can be a very messy process, so I suggest doing it outside or covering up your workspace with newspaper. There’s also a pretty good chance that you’ll get glue and/or paint on your clothes, so I suggest wearing items that can handle a stain or two.
Start by applying a thin layer of watered-down glue to the outside of your book (three parts regular glue to one part water). If you are scared of getting glue on your hands, you can use a brush or a rag here, but the easiest way to do this is with your hand. Using your fingers like a squeegee, remove any excess glue from your binder.
While the glue is still wet, apply a few pieces of tissue paper to your binder. You don’t have to cut out your pieces; just rip some off and put them down. The pieces of tissue paper will attach to the binder with lots of creases and crinkles and will resemble old, cracked leather. If the pieces of tissue paper overlap a little bit, don’t worry; that just adds to the effect. Take some extra time to "push down" on the tissue paper around any 3-D design you may have added. You should be able to see your design clearly even though it’s covered up by the tissue.
While the tissue paper is still wet, paint over it with an acrylic paint. Acrylic paint contains plastic, so not only will it cover the tissue paper but it will also act as glue—holding everything together. Once your book is covered in acrylic paint, leave it to dry. If you are in a hurry, you can speed up the drying process by putting your book out in the sun or placing it near a fan.
If you added a 3-D symbol to your cover, you can paint over it to make it really pop. If you didn't add the raised symbol suggested at the start, you can paint a symbol onto your binder now if you choose to. This is also a good time for any touchups, if you missed a spot or two in your initial painting. You can also paint a title on the spine of your book at this time, though that can be more difficult than it sounds.
After any touch-ups you made have had time to dry, you'll want to seal your book with a spray-on acrylic sealer. This will preserve your book and prevent the paint from peeling off at a later date. I suggest two coats of sealer just in case.
I like to make sure my BoS’s are easy to identify when they are on my bookshelf, so I generally add a few pieces of decorative tape to the binder’s spine once the sealer has dried. You can also add other adornments here, such as lace or ribbon, but tape works best, especially if you want to write out the name of your book on the binder's spine (“Jason’s Oak Court Book of Shadows,’’ for example).
I will readily admit to not being artistic at all, and I was able to make a really cool-looking book cover using this method in just a few hours (and most of those hours were spent waiting for things to dry). This technique is surprisingly effective and durable and makes my binder BoS’s feel a lot less clinical.
The most important part of any BoS is functionality, and it really doesn’t matter just how “pretty" your book is. Many of my most useful BoS's sit in rather undistinguished binders, their mundane appearance hiding their magical secrets from all but the sharpest Witches. If you like to hold on to your secrets, sometimes “plain” has its advantages.
Every Trick in the Book:
No-Fear Grimoire Grafling
the book of Shadows—the Witch’s grimoire. These names conjure up the image of a massive tome of a book, elaborately decorated, bound in tooled leather, finely illustrated and inscribed with calligraphy, dating back centuries. It's easy to get sucked into the romance and allure of the grimoire as it’s pictured in movies and described in stories. Just the thought of it is enough to excite any practitioner! Yet at the same time, the prospect of filling a blank book of your own could fill you with dread that you could mess it up. Instead of aiming to create a timeless treasure, an illuminated work of art, I want you to picture something a tad more practical: the family cookbook.
In my own family, this book is a mass-produced, ubiquitous red-and-white book published sometime in the 1970s by Betty Crocker, Better Homes and Gardens, or some other popular homemaker’s magazine. It's stuffed with index cards, clippings, and bad photocopies, with pages marked, full of notes, cross-outs, and changes. The spine is worn, and there’s clear evidence of past mishaps in the kitchen. It tells the tales of favorite recipes, experiments, and wishes. This seemingly ordinary book is sacred in that it holds the cooking experiences of my family— my mom, grandmom, and myself. It’s a work in progress, a growing, changing hodgepodge of stuff—which is exactly how you should view your Book of Shadows!
Your BoS should be an active, working collection of your thoughts, a place to gather your ideas and collage your favorite images and inspirations, a book that gets wax spilled on it during this candle spell and wine spilled on it during that esbat. It’s not the physical beauty of the book that makes it special or sacred, but the collection of experiences you gather upon its pages. There will be evidence of things that worked as well as things that failed. Your BoS is a record of your favorite chants, songs, and quotes (and do write or note the source, because as much as you’re sure you will remember, you won't), as well as the dates, occasions, and names of the folks you’ve practiced with.
While you can certainly craft a beautiful book from scratch or purchase an elaborate specialty book, there’s nothing wrong with starting with an ordinary blank book, sketchbook, or notebook. They’re inexpensive, and you can create a library of them as you fill them up. You may also find it more freeing to work with a binder, to which you can add pages as you go. No matter how you go about crafting your book, what’s most important is that you make your mark on it—and document your journey as you go. In the end, it will be just as magical as that fantastical book of fiction, if not more so!
Laura Tempest Zakroff
Laura Tempest Zakroff is a professional belly dancer, artist, and writer.
[contents]
1 This project was inspired by Lexa Click's 2013 book Witchy Crafts: 60 Enchanted Projects for the Creative Witch. I found Click’s book and ideas inspiring but often a bit too intense for my unartful self. If you want a more elaborate BoS cover than what I’ve suggested here, pick up her book!
chapter з
A Brief History of Magical Books, Words, and Symbols
The evolution of human expression—from pictures, to symbols, to alphabets, to words, and eventually to books and beyond—is a long and complicated one. What's presented in this chapter only scratches the surface of a very rich history. The following are just some of the highlights, and ones that might especially be of interest to modern Witches.
Some of the material in this chapter includes linear history (we go from point A to point В a few times), but many of the sections here simply highlight especially interesting and influential moments in the history of the written word. The power of words and symbols to express complex ideas makes them magickal, even when they are being used for mundane purposes. Simply looking at a piece of art or even just a written (or typed) word can awaken all sorts of feelings and emotions, and has for tens of thousands of years.
THE CAVE PAINTERS
Human beings have communicated through images for nearly 40,000 years. The first definitive examples of human art come from Western Europe (in what is now Northern Spain and Southern France) and the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.* Both locations are home to highly detailed animal images, along with artistic human handprints painted onto cave walls.
Out of the two locations, it’s the European one that's the most famous—and prodigious. To date, there have been about 350 painted caves found in Europe, and I say about because every year or two another one is discovered.’ Originally Europe's caves were "only" thought to be between 25,000 and 30,000 years old, but new discoveries continually push that date further back in time. Now it’s possible that some of the art contained within them is perhaps 40,000 years old.
Europe's painted caves have been the subject of much debate over the last 130 years, and no one is exactly sure just what went on in them. All we can say for sure is that the 350 or so locations discovered so far feature incredible artwork, generally of large mammals, along with a few anthropomorphic figures that might be the first "gods" ever sketched by human hands. It seems probable to me that the caves served some sort of spiritual purpose, but that's impossible to prove definitively.
If the caves did serve some sort of spiritual purpose, then they represent the first long-lasting spiritual tradition ever practiced by human beings. People prayed or did whatever they did in Europe’s painted caves for thousands of years, from 38,000 to 12,000 BCE, and perhaps longer than that. In 1458 Pope Callixtus III condemned a group of Spaniards for performing rituals in one of the painted caves/ Now that’s a religious practice that can be traced to the literal Stone Age! (Sadly, the rituals that were condemned were not specified.) The kind of spiritual longevity in evidence at the caves is unprecedented. By way of comparison, people have only been worshiping recognizable pagan gods for the last 5,000 years!
I've always believed that the caves served some spiritual purpose, and I believe that for a variety of reasons. The first is just the level of sophistication found in many of the paintings and etchings (while commonly thought of as “painted caves," many of the images in them were carved into cave walls); serious work went into their creation. Images were often painted on ceilings and hard-to-access areas, which means they weren't just random images. Someone (or a group of someones) did some actual planning.
The painted caves were also created in large underground cave systems, which means one "cave" might have dozens and dozens of rooms, with the last “room" thousands of yards away from the surface entrance. Isolated, large, dark spaces are also especially disorienting. Going into a dark cave separated from other humans by long distances would have resulted in a completely altered state of consciousness. What better place for a spiritual rite?
The most well known of Europe’s painted caves is probably Lascaux in Southwestern France, which has a little something for everyone. There’s a large room sixty feet long and twenty-one feet high that is full of bulls, and another very narrow room that features mostly images of cats. Lascaux is also home to a few rather mysterious images. The first of those is a unicorn, located near the cave's entrance (and we know it’s a unicorn and not a mistake because every other horned or antlered animal in the cave is clearly shown with two protrusions on their heads). A remote part of the cave features a painting of a birdlike man with a bison; it’s the only representation of a human on Lascaux's cave walls. Some speculate that the figure might represent a shaman walking between the worlds.5
While the images at Lascaux are the most well known, my favorite painted cave is the Grotte des Trois-Freres, the “Cave of the Three Brothers," also in present-day France. Trois-Freres is relatively modern by painted cave standards, at only 15,000 years old, but what it lacks in age it makes up for in mystery. Trois-Freres cave is home to what might be the first ever image of the Horned Cod.
In a small room deep inside Trois-Freres, an odd mix of stag, owl, and man stands watch. Nicknamed the “Sorcerer" by archeologist (and monk) Henri Breuil, this cave painting was later linked to the Horned Cod of the Witches by English Egyptologist and historian Margaret Murray. It’s impossible to say whether the Sorcerer at the Cave of the Three Brothers is directly related to the male deity honored by many Witches today, but it’s an impressive figure.
Measuring about thirty inches tall and eighteen inches wide, the Sorcerer is positioned at Trois-Freres to be instantly visible when people walk into his room. Mentioning the specific positioning is important because it seems to indicate that whoever created the figure did so rather deliberately. In addition to his specific placement in the room he occupies, the Sorcerer is a combination of both engraving and paint. Everything else at Trois-Freres is one or the other, but never both.
The Sorcerer is the most famous image from Trois-Freres, but he might not even be the most interesting one. Closer to the cave's entrance there’s another animal/man hybrid figure, this one featuring the head and torso of a bison and the legs and feet of a human. In addition, a small erect phallus can be made out in the engraving. Bison-Man seems to be carrying either a bow and arrow (which would be really incredible since the engraving predates such sophisticated technology) or a nose flute; no one is exactly sure. Gazing directly at Bison-Man is a panicky-looking cow that seems to realize its end is near.
The images at Trois-Freres cave are worth commenting on because they could represent a significant step in religious development. They could also just be depictions of hunters dressed in animal skins, or perhaps a shaman in the middle of a spirit journey. It’s unlikely that we'll ever know for sure. While Europe’s painted caves represent a significant step forward in human communication, there’s not enough there to figure out the specifics.
One other thing we do know about the caves is that the majority of the images in them were painted by women. Many of the paintings across France and Spain were “signed” by the artists themselves, who left their handprints behind. Close examination of those handprints reveal that they were overwhelmingly female.®
Why write about 30,000-year-old art in a book about magical books? Perhaps because the ancient cave painters treated the walls of Mother Earth much like we do a modern-day Book of Shadows. The walls of places like Lascaux might be some of the first BoS’s in existence, sketching out a religious and spiritual practice that today we can only speculate about.
FROM SYMBOLS TO WRITING TO BOOKS
Modern alphabets evolved from pictographs in ancient Sumer (southern Mesopotamia) and Egypt in the middle of the fourth millennium BCE (350 BCE). Pictographs are small drawings that represent things or ideas. Eventually the pictographs began to represent not just objects and thoughts but also sounds. This
represented a major development, but pictographic alphabets were generally cumbersome. Mesopotamia’s early writing system used 2,800 different characters. That’s a lot of symbols to memorize!’
After its invention in Sumer, pictographic writing eventually traveled to the Indus River Valley in 2500 BCE and later the Greek island of Crete in 1750 BCE and China in 1200 BCE. Because of the vast amounts of time involved, many scholars believe that writing didn't diffuse throughout the world so much as emerge independently in a variety of cultures. The establishment of pictographic writing in the Olmec Empire (located in modern-day Mexico) in the year 900 BCE lends a lot of credence to that argument.^
I'd like to tell you that writing emerged so people could pay tribute to the gods, but it most likely evolved simply so they could keep track of goods and services in ancient Sumer. A pictograph of a fish was used to keep track of how many fish were received in a financial transaction, for example. Eventually the symbol of the fish came to represent a sound and, as time progressed, became more and more abstract before resembling something we'd think of as a letter today. Pictographic alphabets were so successful in the economic realm that they were then adopted by local governments to more effectively administer goods and services. The early reasons for writing were economic and not spiritual (though for some people the pursuit of money is close to a religious endeavor).
While the majority of early writing was for economic and administrative purposes (90 percent), the people of ancient Mesopotamia did use it for other things as well. The people of
Sumer produced The Epic of Gilgamesh, the world’s first major literary work, and they also wrote down spells and other magical ideas. They also produced the world’s first pseudo-books by joining large clay tablets together.?
The Egyptians took the first big step toward the modern book with the invention of papyrus scrolls. Papyrus was an early form of paper, and sheets of it could be pasted together to form scrolls. Many of us today are familiar with The Egyptian Book of Coming Forth by Day, better known as The Egyptian Book of the Dead. This book was designed to be a guidebook for souls entering the afterlife. (Though it is often referred to in the singular, there was no "one” book of Coming Forth; the contents contained within these Books of the Dead varied from individual to individual.)
The most famous visual image from The Book of Coming Forth shows the weighing of the deceased's heart by the jackal-headed god Anubis. Balancing out the scale is a feather representing Ma’at, the goddess of truth. Recording the results of the weighing is the ibis-headed god Thoth, who acted as a scribe in the Egyptian pantheon.]? Most Coming Forth books included a few magical spells to help with getting by such obstacles.
The funerary scrolls of the Egyptians were visually stunning, but it’s the Creeks who took the use of the scroll to the next level. Creek scrolls were generally twenty feet in length but could be as long as a hundred feet! ]] In addition to long scrolls, the Creeks also invented the first modern alphabet in the 700s BCE. The invention of the Creek alphabet didn't occur in isolation (the Creeks based their system on a Phoenician one), but what makes the Creek version unique is that it was the first one to include vowels. Use of the Creek alphabet isn’t all that common today, but the Latin alphabet (which you are currently using to read this book) is based on the Creek one, meaning its influence is still being felt today on a daily basis in much of the Western world.
Scrolls served the Greeks and later the Romans extremely well for several centuries but eventually gave way to the codex, the first real book, beginning at the start of the modern era.
The codex evolved out of the wooden tablet notebooks used by many in the Roman Empire for note taking and grew in popularity because it was less cumbersome than a scroll. The adoption of the codex was assisted by the rise of Christianity beginning in the year 300 CE. Being a people “of the book," Christians preferred the codex to a scroll because it was easier to look up passages in a codex.
Most codices have pages made of parchment (made from animal skin), because it was more durable than papyrus though much more expensive. In the twelfth century, Europe eventually moved to modern paper, a second-century Chinese invention that slowly moved through the Middle East before arriving in Europe. The introduction of paper led to a large increase in the number of codices being produced.
In the year 1450, the codex would give way to the book thanks to the invention of movable type by Johannes Gutenberg in Germany. Gutenberg is generally credited with inventing the printing press, but people had been printing on large wooden blocks for a couple of centuries. The invention of movable type made the enterprise cheaper and more efficient. Most early books were written in Latin and Hebrew, but starting in the 1550s books began to be printed in languages that more people actually spoke and read. It was at this point that magical books began to explode in popularity, even if they weren't particularly beloved by churches and governments.
A FEW LEGENDARY MAGICAL WRITERS
The history of magical books and grimoires is littered with legendary writers, both historical and mythical. In order to give their works an air of legitimacy, many medieval and Renaissance writers attributed their books to figures from history and myth. Forgeries of this sort are nearly as old as the written word and can be found in religious texts such as the Bible. (No one really thinks Matthew, Luke, Mark, and John wrote the books that contain their names.)
There are dozens of influential magical writers, but the following are a few of the more important ones not written about anywhere else in this book.
Moses
Most of us today know Moses for leading the ancient Israelites out of Egypt and sharing the Ten Commandments, but beginning in the fourth century CE he began a second career as a writer of magical books. Most of the books from that era have been lost, but the Eighth Book of Moses survived and, in addition to including a few magical spells, instructs users on how to meet the gods (and that's gods plural—fans of Moses the magick writer weren’t necessarily Jewish or Christian).
“Moses" went on to write lots of other books in the centuries following his death. Works attributed to him magically appeared throughout the Renaissance and even into the modern era. Before his sojourn into magical texts, Moses was already well known as the writer of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament, sometimes called The Five Books of Moses), so his literary pedigree appealed to forgers. In addition, he was a mortal with a direct pipeline to the God of the Old Testament, and who knows what else might have been whispered to him on Mount Sinai when he received the Ten Commandments?
The popularity of Moses has continued unabated into the modern era. He is still a popular figure in the magical tradition of Hoodoo and is especially beloved by many in the African-American community due to his links to ancient Egypt-23
King Solomon
The most well-known name in magical forgeries is that of King Solomon. He is the alleged author of the most famous grimoire ever written, The Key of Solomon (more on that later), and several other magical books. Solomon's popularity as a magical author can be attributed to many factors. Legend credits him with writing several books in the Old Testament (Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, and Song of Songs) and overseeing construction of the first Jewish temple in Jerusalem. (Architecture on such a large scale was often seen as magical.) Solomon was also well known for his wisdom—wisdom that many thought also pertained to the magical arts.
Despite his legendary wisdom, Solomon is portrayed as a rather flawed person in the Old Testament. His worship of Yahweh was impure, and Solomon was said to have built temples for several gods other than his own. He was also said to have had over seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines, most notably the Queen of Sheba. His spiritual philandering made him a popular figure in magical circles outside of monotheistic ones, a popularity that continues to the present day.
Hermes Trismegistus
The figure of Hermes Trismegistus is a complicated one. He is sometimes written about as a mortal man and other times as Hermes the Greek god (or Mercury in the Roman pantheon). Most scholars see the figure as a blending of the Greek Hermes with the Egyptian Thoth, god of wisdom. Hermes was such a popular figure during the classical era that some writers claimed he was the grandson of Moses, so desperate were some Christians to include him in their magical formulations!
Hermes Trismegistus was credited with writing several ancient magical texts, and his name was attached to several texts in the later medieval period. The most famous of those was The Emerald Tablet (which we will discuss shortly), which came to the Western world via the Middle East. Hermes was a popular figure in Muslim areas as well, and for centuries his name was nearly synonymous with magical practices.]^
Henry Cornelius Agrippa (14&6-1535)
Agrippa is most famous for writing what are commonly known today as the Three Books of Occult Philosophy. Born to minor nobility in Cologne, Germany, in the age of the Holy Roman Empire, Agrippa became interested in magick at a young age. He traveled widely during his lifetime and worked as a physician, soldier, lawyer, and theologian. It was his work as a theologian that gave his magical books an air of legitimacy among Christians.
Curiously, Agrippa wrote his most famous occult books as a young man but didn’t release them to the general public until a few years before his death. By that time he had grown uncomfortable with some forms of magick, which makes his decision to publish his Books of Occult Philosophy all the more curious. Agrippa became such an important figure in the magical world that a later Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy was written under his name several decades after his death.]^
Faust/Faustus
Most readers are probably familiar with the legend of Faust, and how the famed magician sold his soul to the Christian Devil for wisdom and material wealth. But in addition to being a figure in German folklore, Faust may have been based on a flesh-and-blood individual, Dr. Johann Georg Faust. The real-life Faust is also said to have gone by the name Georgius Sabellicus and was once referred to as “a vagrant, a charlatan, a rascal.’’]£ A contemporary of the Protestant reformer Martin Luther, the real-life Faust is said to have died around 1540.
After his death, the legend of Faust as a diabolical magician began to take on a life of its own. Faust entered the Englishspeaking world through Christopher Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus, which was first published in 1604. Several German texts attributed to Faust himself began to appear in the eighteenth century.
EHphas Levi (1810-1875)
Eliphas Levi is one of the founders of the modern occult movement, weaving the tarot, Kabbalah, and ceremonial magick together into one tradition. He also introduced a whole host of figures and symbols into Western occultism, including the winged-goat-god Baphomet and the pentagram.
Ьё7|'5 most famous book was Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual, published in the 1850s in two volumes in his native France and later translated by Arthur Edward Waite and published in one volume in English in 1896. Levi was a towering figure in nineteenth-century occultism, and his work is still cited today.
Aleister Crowley (1875-1947)
Aleister Crowley is probably the most famous occultist of the last two hundred years and certainly one of the most influential. He was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and after he was kicked out of that organization, he went on to found other magical groups before eventually rewriting the rituals of Ordo Templi Orientis (more commonly known as the O.T.O.) and becoming the head of that order.
Crowley wrote dozens of books over the course of his life (both fiction and nonfiction), but the two most influential were perhaps 777 and Other Qabalistic Writings and The Book of the Law. 777 is mostly a list of correspondences pertaining to the Kabbalah, and the current version of the book was assembled after Crowley’s death by occultist and writer Israel Regardie. The Book of the Law allegedly contains revelations from the Egyptian deities Nuit, Hadit, and Ra-Hoor-Khuit and became the central text of Thelema, a religious and magical system based on the writings of Crowley. The phrase “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" first shows up in The Book of the Law.
Every Trick in the Book:
The Emerald Tablet
the emerald tablet of Hermes Trismegistus is one of the foundational texts of Hermeticism. Some readers may be familiar with the Hermetic tradition, a religious and philosophical tradition based on the writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. It is an influential strand of the Western esoteric tradition.
Hermeticism was strongly shaped by Neoplatonism and went on to heavily influence Western occultism from the Renaissance forward. It could be argued that much of the magick practiced in Wicca today is Hermetic in origin; this philosophy is inscribed in the practices of the Golden Dawn and through that source found its way into Wicca.
Occultists have long believed that The Emerald Tablet is powerful and meaningful. Some have argued that it is part of The Corpus Hermeticum (the writings attributed to the mythological Hermetic founder, Hermes Trismegistus), while others have argued that it is older than most or all of the other writings.
Either way, the text is relatively old. It has been treated as one of the foundational texts of Hermetic tradition and Western alchemy since at least the twelfth century. Commonly known as The Emerald Tablet or sometimes Tabula Smaragdina, it is a poem or incantation of somewhere between a dozen and twenty lines, depending on the translation.
The earliest Western sources of this document are Latin translations from around the twelfth century. Older sources are from the Arabic. The Emerald Tablet was included in a book of wisdom titled Kitab Sirr al-Asrar (translated into Latin as Secretum Secretorum), which was supposed to be a translation of a letter from Aristotle to Alexander the Great.
There are a number of translations of The Emerald Tablet, and there is no one original from which they all have come. While people have long considered The Emerald Tablet to be of truly ancient origin, the earliest provable source comes from around 800 CE, in Arabic.2
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The Emerald Tablet
When it comes to magick, the most famous line from The Emerald Tablet is "As above, so below." What is less well known is that this is part of a longer line: "That which is above is from that which is below, and that which is below is from that which is above, working the miracles of one.”
From an occult perspective, perhaps the two most important things to know about The Emerald Tablet are that it is powerful and of great age and that it can be turned to any end. This short text can be read in many ways. Needham's translation posits a Chinese origin for the original, while others have read it as a summation of Christian spirituality. Like many things that are powerful, it seems to reflect the soul of whoever looks into it.
Christopher Drysdale
Christopher Drysdale is an animist, martial artist, shamanic practitioner, healer, and meditation instructor.
He’s been Pagan for more than
twenty-five years and has a master’s degree in anthropology.
A FEW FAMOUS MAGICAL BOOKS
History is littered with dozens and dozens of magical books worth noting, but sadly we don’t have the time and space in this volume to profile all of them. What follows are a few of the most influential and notorious magical books ever published.
The Greek Magical Papyri
Written in Creek but generally found in and associated with Egypt, The Greek Magical Papyri are a series of texts dating from between 1OO BCE and 400 CE, generally involving the invocation and summoning of various gods and goddesses. Much of the material in the Papyri vaguely resembles the ritual structure of modern Witchcraft. The language used is often rather garbled and hard to understand, making the intent of some rituals difficult to figure out. The Papyri are not one cohesive body of work but represent a popular magical tradition, one that included both ancient pagan and Jewish ideas.™
The Book of Kells
The Book of Kells is one of the most beautiful codices ever put together but is not a grimoire or spellbook. It's actually a Latin version of the New Testament gospels, put together sometime around the year 800 CE. What makes it magical are the illustrations, which are considered to be some of the finest surviving examples of ancient Celtic-British art. I've seen numerous Witches with BoS’s featuring reproductions of the artwork in Kells. The 2009 movie The Secret of Kells imagined the creation of the book as a coming together of Celtic-Pagan and Christian elements (and it comes highly recommended!).
Three Books of Occult Philosophy by Henry Cornelius Agrippa
Agrippa published volume one of his magnum opus in 1531, with the other two volumes appearing two years later (though all three were written decades earlier). Agrippa's books are not just treatises on the Kabbalah; they also contain a lot of natural magick and are still seen as some of the best books on the subject centuries later.
The Voynich Manuscript
The Voynich manuscript is not really a grimoire (as far as we can tell), but it is a fascinating and baffling little book. Consisting of striking pictures and an unknown alphabet, the Voynich manuscript was probably composed in fifteenth-century Italy (at least according to carbon dating) but has never been fully translated. The manuscript is probably most famous for containing pictures that resemble North American plants, created decades before Columbus arrived in North America.
It may not remain a mystery much longer. In 2015 a linguistic professor in the United Kingdom claimed to have translated a few words in the book. And in 2014 botanists from Delaware State University claimed to see similarities between illustrations in the Voynich manuscript and those in a sixteenth-century herbal manual from Mexico.]^ Even if the manuscript is translated, more mysteries remain. The Hungarian Rohonc Codex is almost as old and also has never been translated.
The Discoverie of Witchcraft by Reginald Scot
One of history’s most important and influential magical texts was meant to be a repudiation of Witchcraft and not an endorsement, but it’s funny how things work out sometimes. Published in 1584, Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft contained so much information that it could probably be labeled as the first magical grimoire in the English language. Scot’s intention was to discredit magick, superstition, and Catholicism, but instead, he published a magical reference book that would be treasured and utilized right up until the end of the nineteenth century.^
Scot's book was full of magical spells and formulations, and by including them, he hoped to prove that magick was silly and the province of the uneducated. What Scot didn't count on was the appetite for magical books in Britain at the end of the sixteenth century. Most of his readers simply skipped the pages debunking magick and went right for the spellwork. Scot did such a tremendous job of documenting magical practices that the last third of his book truly reads like a grimoire.
The Magus by Francis Barrett
The Magus is not particularly original, mostly being a synthesis of other existing texts (most notably Agrippa’s Books of Occult Philosophy), but it would go on to influence a whole host of occultists after its publication in 1801. Barrett’s book simply looks magical; there are formulas and sigils on nearly every other page. It was one of the few occult manuals to be published in English at the start of the nineteenth century.
The Long Lost Friend by John George Hohman
The Long Lost Friend is one of the most influential American gri-moires ever. Originally published in 1820, it’s been in print pretty much ever since and, because of its availability, has influenced a large number of magical traditions. Spells from The Friend can be found in Santeria and Conjure and have appeared in some modern Pagan books and blogs. Nearly two hundred years old, the tradition of The Long Lost Friend is still going strong.
The Friend was written and/or assembled by a Pennsylvania Dutch immigrant named John George Hohman, who arrived in the United States from Germany in 1802. Like most of the Pennsylvania Dutch, Hohman spoke and wrote in German, and his book was not translated into English until 1842.I! Hohman collected the spells in his book from a variety of sources, though most of them were lifted from previously published German magical books. Interestingly, one of Hohman’s spells comes from the “Senate of Pennsylvania." 22
Hohman’s book is an example of “House Father Literature" (the literal translation of Hausvaterliteratur), a genre of German writing designed to appeal to those of limited means who owned property.^ House Father Literature was mostly a collection of useful advice, things like herbal remedies and simple home remedies. Sometimes these books included things we would recognize as spellwork, but more often than not they didn't. A House Father Book might be assembled by the home owner (very much like we might put together a Book of Shadows!), and those who used preprinted books often added their own spells and charms in the margins. House Father Books were often handed down to sons and daughters, and some were even written in code.
Sator Square
If this sounds all rather magical and witchy, it mostly is, but authors of books like The Long Lost Friend took pains to establish their Christian bona fides. Hohman began his book with a note asking "the Lord’’ to bless his work, and many of the spells in The Friend rely on Christian and Jewish figures from the Bible. Those figures are a bit garbled though, and one spell includes the baby Jesus, the Apostle Paul, and the Prophet Daniel. Many of the spells in The Friend are legitimately old, and spellcraft such as the Sator Square (and its variants) can be traced back to pagan antiquity.
Aradia by Charles Godfrey Leland
Originally published in 1899, Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches is alleged to contain some of the rites and magical workings of a group of Italian Witches. It's a fascinating peak into a Witchcraft that’s much more aggressive than what most Witches practice today. Aradia is a goddess of liberation and the daughter of the Roman Diana and Lucifer, god of the Morning Star. Some of the text within Aradia was later adapted and included in the BoS’s of many modern Witches.
Every Trick in the Book:
A Modern Witch
&The Egyptian Book of the Dead
as a witch who is also a reconstructionist, naturally my little book of ritual work includes spells and procedures that are drawn from ancient records (in my case, Egyptian). When constructing a spell or ritual based on an ancient text, a Witch first needs to be familiar with the assumptions embedded in the original magical culture of the text. Not only will the words refer to mythology and lore, but they may also draw upon color symbolism, numerology, and unfamiliar magical tools and supplies, and it will be difficult to make a good adaptation of them without at least knowing what those things are and how they work.
The more knowledge one brings to the table about how ancient people constructed their spells and rituals, the more potent an adaptation can be. This knowledge will also help one find resources for various types of spells; it will be easier to figure out where to go to start building a cleansing or a blessing or a curse or a prayer if one knows where to look for them.
Suppose I wanted to construct a countercurse for someone stealing my magick. This is a concern that is expressed in spell 31 of The Egyptian Book of the Dead as well, since spirits traveling in the otherworld are very dependent on their magical prowess for their health and safety. In spell 31, the forces that attempt to steal magick are described as crocodiles; while the crocodile has many possible interpretations, in this case the primordial predator with the power to drag something down into the unreachable depths of the water is most relevant. The illustration shows a man striking a crocodile with its head turned away with a magical scepter; "turning the head” not only prevents a spiritual bite but also redirects the menace back toward its origin. The heads of the beasts are turned with the power of their names.
The heart of this ancient spell contains three circles. As in many other cultures, in Egypt a circle is both protective and eternal, as its loop offers no vulnerabilities and neither a beginning nor an end. The circle of the heavens is mentioned, with magick laid in the encircling foundations of the cosmos; these circles are equivalent, with magick giving rise to the structure and order of the stars. Then, the mouth itself, with the circle of lips, contains magick. As these circles are all linked, they guarantee that magick must remain in the possession of the speaker, not only for their own security but also to sustain the hours themselves.
After the protective circles are invoked, the magician then concludes with aggressive declarations, claiming the ability to threaten the crocodile itself. As the crocodile's weapon is its toothy mouth, the Witch's counterweapon, also, is a toothy mouth.
Once an ancient spell becomes familiar, with its symbols and relationships known, it can be adapted for a modern grimoire. Further, the skills used to breathe life into old texts can be used to create new spells that draw upon those same mythic resonances, lending a particular flavor to the Craft.
Kiya Nicoll
Kiya Nicoll is a Witch and Egyptian reconstructionist from New England, where she lives with her family.
She is the author of The Traveller’s Guide to the Duat, a lighthearted riff on The Egyptian Book of the Dead, as well as a variety of poetry and essays.
THE KEY OF SOLOMON THE KING (CLAVICULA SALOMONIS)
Some grimoires are just more important than others, and that’s certainly true in the case of The Key of Solomon (sometimes known by its Latin name, Clavicula Salomonis). I’m of the opinion that it's the most influential grimoire in the history of Witchcraft, and its influence has endured all the way to the present day. Many of the spells, consecrations, and conjurations contained within it are similar to the rites found in many modern Witchcraft traditions. It even calls for the use of a black-handled knife, centuries before the word athame came into vogue.
Allegedly written by the Old Testament King Solomon, the Clavicula was probably composed in the fifteenth century and originally written in Greek. In its earliest form it was titled Little Key of the Whole Art of Hygromancy, Found by Several Craftsman and by the Holy Prophet Solomon. (It’s no wonder the abbreviation The Key of Solomon became more popular.) By the sixteenth century the treatise had been translated into Latin and Italian,^ and in the late nineteenth century it was finally translated into English.
Solomon has been credited with composing various grimoires over the centuries, and the Clavicula is often confused with a similarly titled work generally known as The Lesser Key of Solomon. None of those other works by Solomon is as notorious, though, as the Clavicula, probably because the rest of them don't contain as much detailed information on summoning demons (usually referred to as "spirits” in the text). The Clavicula also contains rituals and spellwork advocating the use of animal sacrifice. With contents like that, it's easy to understand why a lot of Christian crusaders really disliked The Key of Solomon.
Seals of Solomon
Despite the references to blood sacrifice in the text (which are rare), most of The Key is rather benign. Much of the book consists of prayers to the various names of the Christian Cod and invocations to various angels. The first few chapters of the book are generally concerned with the proper days and hours for spellwork. According to the author of the Clavicu/a, every day is ruled by a particular planet (Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury, and the Moon), with each hour of the day also ruled by a specific planet.
In chapter 2 of The Key, the author assures us that the “Days and Hours of Venus are good for forming friendships; for kindness and love; for joyous and pleasant undertakings, and for travelling.” Using the tables in The Key, the aspiring magician would be advised to perform a spell for love on a Friday (ruled by Venus) at 1:00 AM, 8:oo AM, 3:00 PM, or 10:00 PM, as these hours are also all ruled by Venus on Fridays. Many present-day Witches continue to follow such advice, though I don't know very many who break it down to the exact hour.
In addition to the prayers and correspondences, much of The Key is dedicated to forty-four different “pentacles," or talismans, with various attributes. Each of these sigils is consecrated to a different planet (and yes, I know that the moon and sun are not really planets, something "Solomon" in all of his wisdom was unaware of). The pentacles themselves are generally made up of various astrological symbols and letters of the Hebrew alphabet. These “seals of Solomon" remain so popular that even today one can still find them as necklace medallions with relative ease. (I’ve seen almost all of them at Renaissance fairs and Steampunk conventions.)
FROM GRIMOIRES TO THE BOOK OF SHADOWS
While magical books and grimoires have been around for centuries, the term Book of Shadows is of relatively recent vintage. Before starting this book, I would have guessed that the term first showed up in Gerald Gardner’s novel High Magic's Aid (1949), a book that contains a great deal of Witchcraft-like ritual. Gardner was the first modern, public Witch and is a pivotal figure in the modern Witchcraft revival. While I don't think he “invented" Witchcraft, he did help refine it, and many of the terms and rituals we use today come from his influence.
Though Gardner doesn’t use the term Book of Shadows in High Magic’s Aid, he does write about the importance of Witch books. At the beginning of chapter 9, the book's heroine, the Witch Morven, reveals a bit of information about the book she and her mother shared: “We [Morven and her mother] talked much of herbs and cures, of the means to overcome sickness, and there was a great book in which we recorded all our experiments."
Gardner's novel mentions a lot of other magical books too, but this is the only passage that articulates something similar to our modern BoS's.
Gardner later wrote two nonfiction books about his Craft, Witchcraft Today (1954) and The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959). Out of those two offerings, it’s the first that mentions the Book of Shadows, though again, not by name. In chapter 4 of Witchcraft Today, Gardner writes about a warning placed on the first page of most Witch books and offers some information on how such a book is kept (“Keep a book in your own hand of write"), but he doesn't give a specific name for such a book:
It was probably about this time that the practice of witches keeping records became common as the regular priesthood no longer existed and the rites were only occasionally performed.
In all the witch writings there is this warning, usually on the first page:
Keep a book in your own hand of write. Let brothers and sisters copy what they will but never let this book out of your hand, and never keep the writings of another, for if it be found in their hand of write they will be taken and tortured. Each should guard his own writings and destroy them whenever danger threatens. Learn os much as you may by heart and when danger is past rewrite your book. For this reason if any die, destroy their book if they have not been able to do so, for if it be found, 'tis clear proof against them. ’Ye may not be a witch alone,’ so all their friends be in danger of the torture, so destroy everything unnecessary. If your book be found on you, it is clear proof against you; you may be tortured.^.
A later passage in Witchcraft Today reveals additional details about the Witch’s book. In this instance the book serves as a document of a Witch’s spiritual beliefs:
The faith of the cult is summed up in a witch's book I possess which states that they believed in gods who were not allpowerful. They wished men well, they desired fertility for man and beast and crops, but to attain this end they needed man's help. Dances and other rites gave this help.^
Though Gardner states in chapter 3 of his text that “Witches have no books on theology,” M Witchcraft Today is peppered with smatterings of Witch ritual—ritual that’s most likely familiar to many contemporary Witches.
Later in Witchcraft Today, Gardner does provide a name for the Witch’s book in a section on the Witch's garter, but instead of calling it a BoS, he uses the term Black Book. Other Witches would use this term in the years to come, most notably high priestess Patricia Crowther, one of Gardner’s initiates. Unlike the term Book of Shadows, there’s a bit of historical precedent for the use of Black Book. The Grimoire of Honorius (dating from the Middle Ages), which contains information on how to cast a circle, along with several magical spells, is sometimes called “The Black Book." Gardner was known to own a copy of this grimoire.^
There’s a Scandinavian tradition of Black Books, which were generally handwritten books full of various folk magicks, including charms, spells, herb lore, and incantations. The Black Books of Scandinavia were popular for nearly four hundred years (1480-1920), which is not surprising.^ Magick was especially popular throughout Europe during that period, though that magick was rarely called Witchcraft and the majority of practitioners (if not all of them) generally thought of themselves as pious Christians. Whether or not Gardner and other English Witches were aware of the Scandinavian phrase Black Book is a question that may never be answered.
A reference to a “black book" also shows up in the works of Margaret Murray, one of history’s most influential Witchcraft scholars. In her books The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) and The God of the Witches (1931), Murray argues that Witchcraft existed as a religion side by side with Christianity for several centuries before eventually being persecuted. While Murray’s arguments have been dismissed by the vast majority of scholars, she’s had a tremendous impact on modern Witchcraft.
In Murray's work, Witchcraft books act much like contracts. Initiates into the Witch-cult were required to sign a book pledging service to their fellow Witches. This signatory book was generally controlled by the “Black Man" or sometimes the "Man in Black," who served as a representative of the Horned God, a deity who was later equated with the Christian Devil. Quoting the records of a Scottish Witch trial, Murray’s book makes reference to a “Black Man" in a “[tattered] gown and ane ewill favoured scull bonnet on his heid; hauing and one black book in his hand.” 22
While Gardner did not use the term Book of Shadows in his published writings, initiates recall him using the term. In the book Fifty Years of Wicca (2005), Gardnerian initiate Frederic Lamond recalls Gardner telling him that the Book of Shadows “is not a Bible or Quran. It is a personal cookbook of spells that have worked for the owner." 31 So at some point in the 1950s Gardner began using the phrase, and it’s been with us ever since; however, it’s doubtful the phrase originated with him.
Gardner may have adopted the term after reading an article on Sanskrit divination in a 1949 edition of The Occult Observer titled “The Book of Shadows." The article told of an ancient book that taught how to "measure one's shadow”—information that could foretell a person’s destiny.
Coincidently that particular issue of The Occult Observer contained an advertisement for Gardner’s High Magic's Aid next to the article in question. In addition, both the magazine and Gardner’s book shared a publisher, Michael Houghton, who was the owner at that time of the Atlantis Bookshop, one of London’s premier occult bookstores both then and now.32
This is the most likely origin of the title Book of Shadows, but as we have seen, books like a Witch's BoS have existed for centuries. As long as people have been working magick and worshiping the Old Gods, there have been magical books. Even if the term Book of Shadows isn’t exactly ancient, it’s a wonderful phrase and masterfully sums up the records and rituals of the Witch!
MAGICAL BOOKS IN POP CULTURE TODAY Before writing this book, I had always assumed that mythology and popular fiction were littered with magical books and gri-moires. But that’s just not the case, probably because a hero carrying a book into a fight with a vicious dragon just doesn't work in film or in literature. I’d love to see Merlin pause to look up a spell before assisting King Arthur, but apparently no one in Hollywood agrees with me.
Even though magical books are rare in pop culture, they do exist, and some of them have even had a long-lasting and significant influence on modern Witchcraft. My wife assures me that Books of Shadows and other magical texts have turned up in The Vampire Diaries and The Secret Circle (both originally young adult books and later television shows). A little more my speed is the Grimorum Arcanorum, the most powerful spell-book ever assembled, at least according to the Disney cartoon Gargoyles.
The 1980s were an especially good time for magical books in film and literature. The original Evil Dead film from 1981 features a version of the fictional Necronomicon (see the following section). That book’s power in the Evil Dead was so strong that it spawned three sequels and a television series. One of my biggest disappointments as a child was that The Neverending Story actually ends. Both the movie (1984) and the book (1979 in German, 1983 in English) of the same name feature a magical tome that literally takes its readers into a magical realm. The lesson of the tale, lost on me as a child, is that the adventures found in books can continue in our minds as long as we wish.
The Harry Potter franchise has featured two noteworthy magical books, the diary of Tom Riddle and later Tom’s Potions textbook. Of course Tom Riddle is Lord Voldemort, so the books ended up being bad, but at least author j. K. Rowling understood the power of the written word. The 1993 movie Hocus Pocus also features a rather sinister and sentient book. Clearly Hollywood films are not out to help the reputation of magical books.
The long-running television series Charmed featured not just Witches but also a book of spells explicitly labeled as a Book of Shadows. The outside of that BoS, and the show’s opening credits, featured a symbol akin to a triskelion set inside a circle. Since being featured in Charmed, that symbol is sometimes now thought of as a Wiccan symbol and marketed and used as such.
The spellbook from 1998 s Practical Magic is nearly as famous in some circles as the movie’s actual stars (Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman). The book used for the film is what every Witch most likely wants their BoS to look like. It contains exquisitely drawn symbols and perfect lettering. The love for this particular movie prop has become so widespread in the Witch community that replicas of it are easily available today in Witch shops and online.
Magical books are still popular today, though they often don't look like something we would call a grimoire. Rhonda Byrne’s 2006 The Secret looks like a self-help book but is actually a new spin on the grimoire. Using the old idea that "like attracts like” (something that every Witch worth their salt knows!), Byrne has become a millionaire and has sold millions of books. Maybe in a hundred years, when someone is writing a new version of this book, they'll talk about Byrne's book or one of the hundreds of Witchcraft books that have been printed in the last fifty years.
THE NECRONOMICON
The bestselling grimoire of the past forty years 33 and the most notorious in pop culture is a rather slim volume of dubious origin allegedly written translated by a guy known only as “Simon." Simon’s book is a hodgepodge of Babylonian and Sumerian myth, with a dash of Aleister Crowley, Western ceremonial magick, and horror writer H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) thrown in. The book gets its name from The Necronomicon by Lovecraft, who made the whole thing up.
The Necronomicon makes its first appearance in the H. P. Lovecraft horror story The Hound (1924) and subsequently appears in many of his other works. Lovecraft thought enough of his fictional book to write an entire short story (History of the Necronomicon} on its origins in 1927 (which was not printed until 1938, after Lovecraft's death), with none of those details adding up to the tale spun by “Simon." In the works of Lovecraft, The Necronomicon is both a mythology of his "Old Ones" (godlike characters such as the well-known Cthulhu) and a means of summoning them to Earth. It also serves as a common thread, providing some continuity between Lovecraft’s various works.
I find it interesting what Lovecraft’s History of the Necronomicon story is not. It contains no real details of what’s inside The Necronomicon. Instead, it’s a history of the book’s translations and origins, probably written to aid Lovecraft in keeping his book’s history straight. Lovecraft never composed a version of his Necronomicon to use as a writing reference. If he had, it might serve as a "real" version of his fictitious book.
Lovecraft had no real magical training and only a superficial interest in the subject. As a New Englander, he was influenced by the Salem Witch Trials, and that interest eventually led him to Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, published in 1921. He was also familiar with the works of French occultist Eliphas Levi and Englishman Arthur Edward Waite.^j The works of Levi and Waite were readily available in the 1920s, and both leaned toward a magical-Christian cosmology. In other words, Lovecraft’s involvement in magick and the occult was practically nonexistent.
So the bestselling grimoire in my lifetime is a fiction, and yet at the same time it’s not. Simon's book contains some real magical theory, and if someone chooses to perform the rituals in his book, it’s likely that things will happen. But it's also a farce at the same time. Simon claims that his book is a translation of a ninth-century magical text written by a man calling himself “the Mad Arab.” 35 Of course no one has ever been allowed to see the original text, and it seems rather unlikely that an important ninthcentury magical text would be completely unknown to scholars (and that it would be released to the world as a mass-market paperback book!).
Simon’s Necronomicon was not the first (or last) version of Lovecraft’s fictional grimoire; it was just the most successful. The earliest “version” of The Necronomicon was published in 1973 by Owlswick Press and consisted of an introduction by horror writer L. Sprague de Camp, followed by nearly two hundred pages in “Duriac,” a fictitious language. This might be the most useless of all The Necronomicons, though the publisher seems to have released this version with tongue planted firmly in cheek.
Necronomicon: The Book of Dead Names published by Neville Spearman in 1978 was an improvement over the 1973 version and again involved de Camp, who this time wrote the appendix. The introduction this time around was handled by Colin Wilson, one of the preeminent paranormal writers of the time. Most of the ideas in this book come straight from Lovecraft's short stories, with the magical system owing a debt to grimoires such as The Key of Solomon. Considering the names involved, it’s surprising that this particular hoax wasn’t more popular.
Perhaps the best version of Lovecraft’s book is Necronomicon: The Wanderings of Alhazred by Donald Tyson. Published in 2004 by Llewellyn, Tyson’s book is not out to fool anyone. Instead, Tyson lovingly recreates Lovecraft’s mythos while chronicling the adventures of Abdul Alhazred (the Mad Arab). It’s more a story than a grimoire, but it does include information on how to summon Lovecraft’s Old Ones. Since the publication of Wanderings, Tyson has released three more books on the subject, each one refining and elaborating on his version of The Necronomicon.
Even with all the various versions of The Necronomicon currently in print (and now there are even Necronomicon-themed tarot cards), it’s the Simon version that still sits atop the bestseller lists. Originally released in 1977 by the publisher Schlangekraft, Simon's book became a bestseller after it was picked up by Avon in 1980. Since then, his version of The Necronomicon has turned into a cottage industry, with The Necronomicon Spellbook, The Gates of the Necronomicon, and the “history” book Dead Names: The Dark History of the Necronomicon.
In my first outline of this book, I nearly put this bit in the section dealing with magical books in popular culture. But for thousands of people, The Necronomicon is a very real book of magick. I’m not a huge fan of “Simon" and his fictional works, but he’s simply the latest in a long line of magical forgers. Solomon didn't write any of the magical books in his name either. If the magick in The Necronomicon (regardless of the edition) works for someone, and they use it responsibly, what's the harm?
[contents]
· 2 Pallab Ghosh, “Cave Paintings Change Ideas About the Origin of Art,” BBC News (October 8, 2014),
www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-2g415716.
· 3 Gregory Curtis, The Cave Painters: Probing the Mysteries of the World's First Artists (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 15.
· 4 Gregory Curtis, The Cave Painters, p. 47. Despite me desperately wanting those rituals to somehow be connected to what went on there 30,000 years ago, it's doubtful that they were. However, we'll never know for sure!
· 5 Gregory Curtis, The Cave Painters, 114.
· 6 Virginia Hughes, "Were the First Artists Mostly Women?" National Geographic (Oct. 29, 2013),
http://news.nationalgeographic.eom/news/2o13/1o/131oo8-women-l
2 Md^oJefclShe^eav^d-tH- R. Woudhuysen, eds., The Book: A Global History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 5.
8 Suarez and Woudhuysen, eds., The Book: A Global History, 5.
2 Ibid., 40.
· 10 Clive Barrett, The Egyptian Gods and Goddesses: The Mythology and Beliefs of Ancient Egypt (London: Diamond Books, 1996), 4
· 11 Suarez and Woudhuysen, eds., The Book: A Global History, 43.
· 12 Suarez and Woudhuysen, eds., The Book: A Global History, 45-46.
· 13 Owen Davies, Grimoires: A History of Magic Books (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 9-11.
· 14 Antoine Faivre, The Eternal Hermes: From Greek God to
Alchemical Magus, trans. Joscelyn Godwin (Grand Rapids, Ml: Phanes Press, 1995).
· 15 Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1531; reprint, St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 1993), xv-XXXVIII.
· 16 Owen Davies, Grimoires: A History of Magic Books, 49-50.
· 17 Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 5, part 4 (Cambridge University Press, 1980).
· 18 Ronald Hutton, Witches, Druids, and King Arthur (New York: Hambledon and London, 2003), 119.
· 19 Allison Flood, “New Clue to Voynich Manuscript Mystery," The Guardian (Feb. 7, 2014), www.theguardian.com/
books/2Oi4/feb/O7/new-clue-voynich-manuscript-mystery.
· 20 Owen Davies, Crimoires: A History of Magic Books, 69-70.
· 21 Owen Davies, Grimoires: A History of Magic Books, 192.
· 22 John George Hohman, The Long-Lost Friend: A 19th Century American Grimoire, ed. Daniel Harms (Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 2012), 19. In 1802 a spell to prevent rabies was submitted to that body and ended up in the Senate record.
· 23 Ibid., 3.
· 24 Owen Davies, Grimoires: A History of Magic Books, 15.
· 25 Gerald Gardner, Witchcraft Today (London, Rider & Co., 1954), 43
· 26 Ibid., 105.
· 27 Witchcraft Today was originally published in 1954 by Rider &. Co. Since then the book has been reprinted at least half a dozen times by half a dozen publishers.
· 28 Sorita d’Este and David Rankine, Wicca: Magickal Beginnings
(London: Avalonia, 2008), 44.
20 Ibid.
30 Margaret Murray, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921; reprint, New York: Barnes and Noble, 1996), 35.
· 31 Sorita d'Este and David Rankine, Wicca, 42.
· 32 Doreen Valiente, The Rebirth of Witchcraft (Custer, WA: Phoenix Publishing, 1989), 51.
· 33 At last count The Necronomicon had sold over 800,000 copies.
https://danharms.wordpress.com/2oo8/o9/17/we-get-n1ore-necrono
34^flitelibnStpadR2an, H.P. Lovecraft and the Black Magickal Tradition (San Francisco, CA: Weiser Books, 2015), 43-50.
35 Daniel Harms and John Wisdom Conce III, The Necronomicon Files: The Truth Behind the Legend (Boston, MA: Weiser Books, 2003), 133.
chapter
4
WHAT TO PUT IN
A BOOK OF SHADOWS
There's no right or wrong when it comes to what you put in your Book of Shadows. If it speaks to you, it belongs in your book, and the things that speak to each individual Witch can be quite varied. I was once given a BoS that contained a Myers-Briggs personality test. While I didn't find that test particularly witchy, someone else must have felt that way since it went into their book.
When I evaluate what to put in my Book of Shadows, I generally ask myself the following three simple questions. If the answer is yes to all three questions, it goes in my book.
Do I think this will be valuable in a year or two?
Most Witches I know are exposed to a lot of information on a yearly basis, far more than they could ever write down or put in a BoS. When determining what should go in my “BoS permanent record," I tend to only choose information that I think will be useful in the future.
Does this ritual or material resonate with me?
Everything that goes into a BoS should mean something to the individual Witch who puts it there. If a ritual was uninspiring, it doesn't need to be in a Book of Shadows.
Will I ever use what Гт writing down?
I’ve come across a whole host of fabulous charms and spells over the years, but a lot of them I can’t ever imagine using, so they don’t go into my BoS. I have a great Witchcraft library, so those charms can stay there. I try to reserve my BoS's for what’s most important.
It’s tempting to fill up a BoS with everything and anything, but you’ll burn yourself out pretty quickly if you go that route. It’s better to be at least a little bit choosy and to focus on the things that will take your Witchcraft practice to the next level. When it comes to picking out what to put in a BoS, you are the ultimate authority.
What follows are some of the more common things that I've found in various Witch books over the last twenty years. If some of these ideas speak to you, that’s great, and if some don't, even better! One of the great strengths about Witchcraft is how it can be tailored to each individual Witch. My own books don't even include every example in this chapter.
The Opening Pages
Every good book should have a title page, right? I've seen lots of different book openings over the years, but several have proven to be more common than others. In my case, I use all four of the different openings listed here in my various books.
Personal Page
Many Witches choose to open their BoS with a bit of personal information. This can range from something as simple as “Jason’s Book of Shadows” to a detailed dedication listing when the book’s usage began or when the individual Witch first embraced the Craft. In such instances, most Witches will generally use their magical name, if they have one.
There are some Witches who are wary about sharing a whole lot of personal information in their books. One of the oldest beliefs in magick practice is that names have power, and if you allow someone to know your name (especially a magical one), you might be inadvertently giving them power over you. Overly cautious Witches will sometimes decline to put their name in their book and might instead identify it as their own with a symbol.
Curse
I’ve never been all that nervous about people reading my book and using it (or my name) against me, because all of my books open with curses! A curse sounds rather heavy-duty, but if someone finds themselves cursed from reading my book, it’s their own fault.
THE CURSE
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Curses in books are generally one-page warnings to the reader not to proceed any further in a BoS unless they’ve been granted permission. The practice most likely began in initiatory traditions that sought to keep their rites secret and later spread to all sorts of BoS's. The consequences of a BoS curse vary from Witch to Witch and tradition to tradition, but most promise harm to the person who is reading what they shouldn't be. None of mine call for anyone's gruesome death, but I’ve seen a few that do.
Lineage
In many Craft traditions, lineage is extremely important. Anyone can be a Witch, but to be a Witch in a specific tradition often requires an initiatory history that can be traced back to the tradition’s source. All Alexandrian Witches, for example, can trace their lineage back to Maxine and Alex Sanders, the tradition's founders.
A lineage can be more than just the family tree of a tradition. It can be used to trace the history of a particular coven, going from the coven's founders to each individual member. Another option is to illustrate the history of modern Witchcraft, listing all of its various influences (English Cunning Craft, Freemasonry, the Golden Dawn, etc.) before finally ending with a coven or a specific Witch.
Opening Instruction
Various magical mottos and pieces of advice have also been used to open a BoS over the last few decades. Some of the more common include the Wiccan Rede and the phrase “As above, so below." The Witch’s "Paths of Power" is another common book opener and is essentially a list of magical techniques that can be used to raise energy and alter consciousness.
Rituals
The first Books of Shadows were ritual books, and rituals continue to be a common thing in most BoS’s. Of course, what rituals will go into a book is up to the individual Witch, and there are all sorts of rites to choose from.
The Opening/Closing Frame
My coven meets for more than just sabbat rites, and we sometimes circle together for no particular reason. For this reason our
BoS contains our opening rites (cleansing, calling the quarters, casting the circle) and closing rites (cakes and ale, dismissing the quarters, taking down the circle), with a big hole in the middle for us to add whatever magical work needs to be done. Not all Witches include an open-ended type of ritual in their books (one could easily use something from a sabbat rite), but I've found this to be especially helpful over the years. It allows me to create a ritual in a hurry, and repeating the same opening for every rite has a transformative effect on the coven.
The Sabbats
Sabbat rituals form the Wiccan Wheel of the Year and articulate how we relate to the earth’s annual cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. Our sabbats are our “high holy days’’ and the foundation of most ritual books. If a Witch has chosen to put their opening and closing rites elsewhere in their BoS, they might include only the actual sabbat working in this part of their BoS.
Many Witches also craft seasonally specific rites from top to bottom, with new words for every aspect of the ritual. That's great too, and I have a ritual BoS full of those types of ceremonies. When I put sabbat rites in my BoS, I place them in chronological order (Samhain, Yule, Imbolc, etc.). Many Witches celebrate the start of the Wiccan new year at Samhain, but that’s not a universal practice. Some groups start a new turn of the Wheel at the spring sabbats (Imbolc, Ostara, and even Beltane).
Esbats
In addition to performing sabbat ceremonies, a lot of covens meet under the light of the full moon. These ceremonies are known as esbats, and the best ones belong in the BoS. My coven has a few esbat ceremonies in our book. A few of them are in there because we repeat them with some frequency. A couple of others were just special to us and we chose to preserve their memory in our book. If a coven meets for every full moon, putting every esbat in a physical BoS can get a bit unwieldy.
Dedication
A dedication ritual is a rite between an individual Witch and their gods. It’s a way to commit oneself to the Craft and to the Lord and Lady. Many people dedicate themselves to Witchcraft before becoming an initiate in a coven or tradition.
Initiations/Elevations
Not every coven has an initiation ritual or a degree system, but if yours does, it’s an important addition to the BoS. Initiations are an entryway into an extended family, and elevations recognize the hard work many Witches put into their Craft. Initiations and elevations are not just for established traditions either; any coven can craft these sorts of rites.
Wiccaning
A Wiccaning is a ceremony in which the Goddess and God are asked to bless and look over a newborn. Some traditions don’t allow children in their circles, but almost every witchy parent I’ve met has had some sort of Wiccaning performed for their child. If you are interested in working as Wiccan clergy, there should be a Wiccaning rite in your BoS.
Handfasting
A handfasting is a Witch wedding, and though I’ve performed very few handfastings in a properly consecrated circle, I’ve officiated a whole lot of handfasting rituals. The handfasting ritual in my second BoS was one of the first rituals I ever bothered to write down and is one I still use on occasion. Not every relationship blessed by a Witch is successful. Couples who break up may ask for a handparting ceremony to release them from their earlier vows.
Crossing Over
Perhaps the saddest ritual to put in a Book of Shadows is a crossing-over ceremony. Most Witches believe that when we die we eventually reincarnate, but before doing do so we "cross over” into the next plane of existence, where we wait for rebirth. A well-crafted crossing-over ceremony offers hope and comfort to those who have lost a loved one and helps the deceased let go of this world and begin their next journey.
Solitary Rituals
Rituals done alone are still rituals, and many of them are just as powerful as (if not more so than) rituals done with the coven. Some of the earliest BoS's contained material labeled "The Witch Alone,” documenting how to perform solitary rites. Witchcraft for one has always been a part of our BoS's.
Pagan Rituals
I’ve done a lot of Pagan rituals over the years that aren’t all that witchy but are still important to me. As a result, my BoS contains a few Druid rites and a mostly accurate re-creation of a ceremony from ancient Greece, and those are just a few of the non-Witch rituals in my books. If a ritual speaks to you, no matter the source, it can go in the BoS.
Ritual Extras
I keep a lot of supplementary material in my BoS that can be used at a moment’s notice in almost any ritual. Sometimes even the most carefully planned ritual doesn’t go as planned and you might find yourself needing a chant or poem at a moment's notice, so having a few little activities that you know work in your BoS can be very helpful. There are also those spur-of-the-mentment rituals that sometimes call for a story or other activity.
Calls and Charges
A call is an invitation to deity to attend a ritual, and it’s a part of most Witch rites. Many Witches write calls to the Goddess and God as part of a sabbat rite, but it never hurts to keep a few generic ones in a BoS for those times when you can’t find the words and need to do ritual in a hurry. I keep a few calls that can be used most any time of year to honor the Horned God and the Lady as maiden, mother, and crone. A call doesn’t have to be elaborate, but just something that you feel deity might respond to.
The Charge of the Goddess and the Charge of the God are part of nearly every BoS I’ve kept over the years. The Charge of the Goddess that is most familiar to modern Witches was written and assembled by Doreen Valiente in the 1950s, though there are several other versions available. It’s meant to be a piece of first-person instruction directly from the Goddess to those who worship her. (The word charge is actually an old Masonic term and refers to a set of instructions.) Valiente also wrote her own Charge of the God, though it's never been as popular as her Goddess charge.
In my own coven, we use the Charges of the Coddess and the Cod when we want to give a ritual a little extra oomph or when a drawing down the moon ceremony doesn’t quite work as planned. Charges are nearly always a welcome addition, and they can be used in place of a call if the mood strikes.
Poetry and Mythology
My BoS is full of poetry from a variety of sources. Some of it is from Witchcraft elders such as Doreen Valiente, but much of it comes from non-Witch sources. The nineteenth century was an especially fertile time for poetry about Pagan gods and goddesses. The poems of John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Algernon Charles Swinburne contain some of my favorite odes to deity.
Poems from the ancient world shouldn't be overlooked either.
The Homeric Hymns have been a part of the worship of the Hellenic pantheon for over 2,500 years. If you worship Creek deities such as Aphrodite, Demeter, Dionysus, or Apollo, the Homeric Hymns are a must! Poetry is a vital part of the human experience and its use in ritual can turn a good rite into a great one.
My BoS contains a smattering of my own poetry, along with that of a few friends. A poem doesn’t have to be written by someone long dead or famous to be of value. If it speaks to you or the coven, it’s a worthy addition to a BoS. Poetry can be used in a variety of ritual situations too; it can be an invocation to deity, a way to raise power when recited as a group, and a way to articulate the turn of the seasons.
Many ancient poems are full of mythology, which is another thing that many Witches add to their BoS's. Mythology exists to help us understand and relate to deity, which makes it a truly magical addition to any Witch book. Goddesses and gods, just like human beings, love to be flattered, so reading their myths in rituals dedicated to them will put you in their good graces.
One of the first things I wrote in my second BoS was a myth explaining the creation of the universe. It’s not my best piece of writing, but I felt like my BoS needed a solid beginning, so I created one. Mythology doesn’t have to be ancient to be valuable or meaningful, and as Witches we can (and should) actively create new mythology that will be a part of future covens and circles.
Chants and Dances
Chants are an essential part of most Witch circles. Group chants bring a coven together and can be used to raise energy. Most chants used by Witches tend to be simple and consist of a few lines repeated over and over, but a chant doesn’t have to be short. Fairly long poems have been turned into chants over the years, though to be used effectively they often require a little extra bit of study by coven members.
Oftentimes there’s very little difference between a chant and a poem. Some of my favorite chants began life as poems, and there are poems designed to lead directly into chants, with the poem's last couple of lines being repeated over and over. If it’s got a good rhythm and rhyme and is easily memorized, you've got the makings of an effective chant.
When putting a chant in my BoS, I like to include a few musical notes at the beginning and end of it. Even in my typed-out BoS’s this is easy to do thanks to word processing programs that include symbols. I’ve never seen the complete musical notation for a chant included in a BoS, but instructions such as “to the tune of” or "with lots of energy” are common. What’s important is to make sure that whoever is reading the chant in the BoS knows how it's meant to be delivered.
Chants are often performed while dancing around the circle and are another thing that can be added to a BoS. Writing down the “how to" of a particular dance step can be challenging, especially if you are putting it in a shared BoS. Pictures sometimes work better than written instructions, and there’s nothing wrong with snapping a few photos and then printing them and pasting them in the BoS. It certainly makes the instructions clearer.
Dances don't have to be done only when chanting either. Our coven sets our Maypole dance to recorded music, and a dance step with a couple of live drums is always fun. Dance is a great way to build energy and engage in a shared activity with coven members.
Witchcraft Extras
There's a lot of information I keep in my own BoS that’s not related to ritual or spellwork but is still an important part of my personal practice as a Witch. Rules, tools, and the language of the Craft were part of the very first BoS’s and continue to show up in Witch books today. There are many BoS’s that contain more “extras" than rituals or spells.
The Wiccan Rede and Other Instructions
The Wiccan Rede has been a part of Witch books since the 1950s and is seen by many as the one “law" or "rule" of Witchcraft. Such interpretations are fine, but the word rede actually translates as "counsel." The phrase "An it harm none, do what you will" is not meant to be a mandate; it’s just a piece of advice.
Even if the Rede is not the Wiccan version of the Ten
Commandments, it’s still given a prominent place in my Books of Shadows. Many Witches do need a bit of ethical guidance when it comes to magick, and the Rede certainly provides that. My coven's BoS contains more than just the eight words that make up the Rede; it also includes a bit of history and interpretation. A little commentary never hurt anybody!
In the early 1970s a long-form version of the Rede was released consisting of twenty-six different rhyming couplets. It included not only the familiar “An it harm none" but also twenty-five new pieces of instruction. This particular version of the Rede was transmitted by American Witch (Lady) Gwen Thompson (19281986) and is an important part of my Witch traditions. My BoS includes both versions of the Rede.
In addition to the Wiccan Rede, many BoS’s include coven rules and guidelines in their pages. Sometimes these are known as Ardanes, with the original Ardanes coming from Gerald Gardner in the late 1950s. Gardner’s Ardanes were written to sound archaic and genuinely old, with each rule ending with the very dramatic-sounding "So be it Ardane!" While Gardner’s rules were quite dramatic, there’s nothing requiring anyone else to write rules in such a manner.
Included in some BoS’s are rules as generic as “Witches should be prompt and show up at least fifteen minutes before the scheduled start of a ritual." Some Witches include rules about coven donations or hierarchy in their books. If rules are important to a group, they should go in the BoS to make sure everyone is entering the circle with the proper expectations.
Tools and the Altar
When I started my current coven five years ago, I never imagined that we’d have a specific way of setting up an altar, but we eventually settled on one. We've been doing it this way for so long now that it has practically become a coven tradition, which also means we've added it to our BoS. My coven isn't an outlier here either; many groups mandate a certain altar setup, along with a few specific tools.
If a BoS has a picture of an altar setup in it, it invariably includes a list of the tools that particular coven uses in circle. Some groups do more than list their tools; they also provide a bit of explanation about what they are used for and when they are used during ritual. Some of this may sound like Wicca 101, but some tools have widely different roles depending on the circle you’re in. I’ve been in situations where people have used the wand for casting a circle, something we’d never do in my own coven.
You may also want to keep track of how you acquired your ritual tools. Many of my favorite tools were gifts, and I like acknowledging that in my BoS. Our tools tend to pick up the energy of the people who have handled them over the years, so keeping up with where things were purchased and who handled them might come in handy at some point. This is especially true if you’ve inherited a tool from a deceased Witch.
Witch Words
There are many terms and words that appear only in modern Witchcraft. The word athame (a Witch's knife), for example, exists only in the Craft and first appeared in print in 1949. The word Mabon as a name for the autumnal equinox became a part of the Witchcraft lexicon only in the 1970s. In this age of the Internet and readily available Witch books, it’s easier than ever to figure out the various meanings of words, but adding them to a BoS gives them extra resonance.
I've seen lists containing thousands of Witch words, and while I think that's a bit of overkill, there are several hundred I probably use throughout the course of a year. Making sure everyone in the coven knows what those are and how they are used is an important part of any complete BoS. And Witches are constantly adding words to such lists too. Muggle isn't our word (it's from the Harry Potter books, of course), but it's one a lot of Witches use and has pretty much replaced the term cowan (a word that comes from Freemasonry) to designate a non-Witch.
The Lord and Lady and Other Deities
Many Witches connect with particular deities and godforms and will often dedicate a part of their BoS to those goddesses and/or gods. You might include information on your relationship with a particular deity, such as when they first approached you (or vice versa) and what that relationship means to you. This is also a good place to include poetry specific to that deity or any specific myths you find especially noteworthy.
Nestled in between a lot of Pan poetry and mythology in my BoS’s are rituals specific to him that I've written over the years. Various particular deities are important to the practice my wife and I share, and information about those goddesses and gods is an important part of our books. The title page of my second BoS includes the words "Child of the Horned One."
History
My coven BoS includes a timeline detailing important moments that contributed to our practice and information on how we all came together as a Witch family. Our timeline starts with the alleged initiation of Gerald Gardner in 1939 and continues onward from there, with important Witch moments and the dates when everyone in the coven joined our group. It’s a fun little extra to keep, and who knows, Witches forty years from now might be studying it.
In addition to the timeline, I’ve added a lot of historical information to my BoS. Several years ago I was given copies of a few poems written by a long-deceased Craft elder. They aren't the type of poems I'd ever recite in circle, but I thought they were an important part of history, so they went in my book. I've also included a few excerpts from letters and books that I think have historical value.
Family history outside the coven can also be put in a BoS. Since many Witches work with their ancestors, including a list of those ancestors or a family tree fits nicely into a personal BoS. Many Christians record family births and deaths in their Bibles, and this can also be done with a Book of Shadows.
Familiars
Over the last twenty years I've been blessed enough to have two different feline familiars. One of them passed many years ago, and I documented her loss in my BoS. My dearly departed Princess deserved a spot of her own in my book, so she ended up with her own little memorial page detailing how she came into my life, the magick she brought to it, and when she passed. I’ve never heard one of my cats speak, but they’ve both taught me things over the years, and those lessons are worth a page or two in my BoS.
Magick and Spellwork
Magick and spellwork have been part of magical books for thousands of years. While the first BoS’s were designed primarily for rituals, the first books that we might recognize as witchy were full of magick. That magick came in varied forms; some of it was of the high magick variety, involving lots of words and tools, while other spells and operations were what we might think of as folk magick. Modern Witchcraft has its roots in both traditions, so any and all kinds of effective magick belong in a BoS.
Many BoS’s go far beyond simple spells too, offering detailed instruction on how to curse, conjure, and cure through various magical means. If you are putting together a BoS for a group or plan to pass down your Witch book, you may want to include such material in your BoS. Several of the tutorials I’ve come across in Books of Shadows are often just as good as (and sometimes even better than) the ones I’ve encountered in published books.
Magick is hard to define, but anything that changes a person's consciousness, affects the outcome of an event, or contains energy that transforms is often thought of as magical. That’s why information about various oils, stones, and plants is considered magical by many Witches.
Spells
My various BoS’s are full of spells. When something works, I try to document it so I can use it again later or pass it along to a friend. Spellwork is often how we interact with our deities and the world around us. It’s not selfish or self-serving; it’s an active part of Witchcraft.
When I record a spell in my BoS, the description generally follows this fourfold pattern: intent of the spell, materials needed, operation/words used in the spell, and results. This usually means including a blank space at the end of the spell for future reflections and often a few extra lines after my spell transcription if it’s all gone into my BoS before enacting it.
Start by writing down the purpose of your spell. This means more than jotting down “Love Spell"; it means going into the true essence of the work you are doing. Is it a spell to find love? Is it a spell to open yourself up to love? When I was just getting started in the Craft, I used to do spells “to fall in love," which always ended up with me falling in love with someone but that love not being reciprocated. I should have been doing spells “to give love and receive love.” In magick, we get what we ask for, which is not always what we want.
Below your spell's true intent, include all of the tools necessary for your magical operation. Generally this means things like candles, oils, pins, or whatever else you are using. If circumstances have forced you to use an item in your spell that is a little less than ideal (perhaps lavender oil instead of rose oil), make a note of it. Include what you did use, and what you would ideally replace it with.
The words of a spell are extremely important because they speak to the true intent of your magick, so you’ll want an accurate recording of them in your BoS. But writing down what was said isn’t enough. Be sure to note any gestures or movements that were part of your spellwork. For my own record keeping, I also like to include the phase of the moon (or sun) the spell was performed in, along with a list of whatever deities were present in the circle. If Aphrodite was invoked, be sure to make a note of that.
After putting a spell in my BoS, I like to revisit that spell later and record the results. If I found what I thought was my true love but he turned out to be a scoundrel, I make a note of it. If I do a prosperity spell and receive a check from my dad for my wedding anniversary, I document it. If things didn't turn out as I'd planned, I write that down too. No result is still a result; having it all written down will help you make adjustments to the spell in the future.
Astrology
Many Witches use astrology in their day-to-day lives, and it makes for a valuable addition to any Book of Shadows. Astrological information that might be part of a BoS includes when and which planets are set to go retrograde (which means specific planets appear to be moving backward in the sky), the attributes of sun signs (Cancer, Capricorn, Taurus, etc.), and information on the current astrological age (which is currently either Capricorn or Aquarius, depending on who you ask).
In addition to astrological data, the individual Witch might wish to include their own astrological chart in their personal BoS. A coven book might include the charts of every member to better plot magical activities. A famous Witch in my downline kept a daily BoS that she put her horoscope in to better see how astrology played out in her life. How much astrology goes into a BoS will vary among Witches, but if it’s important to you, there’s never too much that can be added.
Lunar Phases
Even Witches who don’t do much with astrology tend to acknowledge the influence of the moon in their daily lives. A waxing moon is best for prosperity spells and any magick involving gain. Magick done when the moon is waning should be focused on getting rid of things or banishing bad habits.
My coven doesn’t update the phases of the moon in our BoS on a yearly basis, but we do include just what to expect when dealing with moon phases. Information about what’s most effective magically depending on where the moon is at is a useful addition to any BoS and is extremely practical, especially if you are part of a teaching coven.
Rocks and Gemstones
Stones, gems, and other natural materials are frequently used in magical activities. Information about the ones that you use the most (or perhaps that appeal to you the most) is part of many BoS’s. Things to include about particular stones include their attributes and magical uses. If you have trouble keeping track of stones, a description of the ones you put in your book might also be useful.
Herbology
The natural world is full of magick, and this is especially true when it comes to plants and herbs. Plants can be used for magical purposes (a few marigold seeds under a pillow will prevent bad dreams) and mundane ones (my wife and I keep an aloe vera plant growing in our backyard to ease the pain of sunburns). When cataloging herbs and plants for inclusion in a BoS, I suggest including as many of their names as you can, including their scientific ones. Plant names vary a lot from region to region, so this is especially important if you add one to a shared BoS.
Since plants can harm as well as heal, it’s important to document which ones are poisonous or harmful to the skin. There are a lot of plants used in spellwork that can’t be consumed, for example, and it’s better to be safe than sorry. I also suggest including a description of any plant you add to your BoS, as well as a picture if possible. Some of the earliest magical grimoires included information about herbs and their magical and mundane uses alongside rituals for summoning demons. The natural properties of plants have been associated with Witches for centuries, and I'm sure that association will continue long into the future.
Correspondence Tables
Many Witches use a wide array of symbols and sigils in their work, and the easiest way to keep track of them is in a correspondence table. Many tables of this nature can be copied out of a book, or they might be created by an individual Witch especially for their book. When people think of correspondences, they often picture divinatory items such as runes or tarot cards, but nearly everything we use in Witchcraft is related to certain elements or emotions.
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CORRESPONDENCE TABLE
Correspondence tables can be drawn up for all sorts of things, and it is often simpler to create a table than to write down entries for lots of individual items. I've created tables for the elements, my altar tools, the tarot, colors, herbs, and types of wood. The possibilities are endless. If you need to keep track of a lot of little pieces of information, tables are extremely useful.
One of the most amazing things about magical traditions is how they can all be looked at as interrelated. There are certain tarot cards that line up with different parts of the Jewish
Kabbalah, for instance, and keeping track of such similarities can help Witches with their magick. My favorite tables are the ones that illustrate how everything is connected, which allows me to use lots of different magical items at the same time.
Incenses and Oils
Information about oils and incenses in a BoS can range from the simple to the complex. For some Witches, a simple chart listing the correspondences of the most popular incenses and oils is all that’s required, but the world of incenses and oils can be quite a bit more complex than that. Many Witches include detailed instructions in their BoS’s on how to create special incense blends and oils. How much information you should include in your BoS about these two items probably depends on how elaborate your use of them is.
In my own coven, we have our own specific incense blend, and it’s only used when we are meeting together. Many Witchcraft traditions require the use of certain oils during initiation and elevation rituals. Oftentimes those oils must be homemade, include only certain ingredients, and be made to exacting standards. (Witchcraft has always involved work!) This results in something unique to the tradition and helps to create a truly magical atmosphere during ritual.
Fairy Folk
Many Witches work with the fey, or fairy folk, and include those activities in their BoS. Even if you don’t work with them, a quick sketch of the fey associated with the elements of air, fire, water, and earth can be valuable. If you've experienced the fey firsthand, you might want to include a picture of them as well.
Divination and the Future
There are dozens of different divination tools and systems used by modern Witches. The most popular is probably the tarot, but that’s just the beginning. There are Witches who use pendulums, crystal balls, scrying mirrors and bowls, spirit (Ouija) boards, runes, palmistry, the I Ching, numerology, oracle cards, palm reading, and lots of other methods. One of my first Witch tools was a deck of tarot cards, and I recorded some of my experiences with them in my first BoS.
Due to space considerations, I can’t write about all the various divination methods that might go into a BoS, but I can offer a few general tips. Most divination tools can be written about in three steps: interpretation, use, and results. Since divination information in a BoS tends to be personal (it's not something I see in a lot of coven books), it probably doesn't need to be incredibly detailed; it should contain just enough information to help you do your work effectively and understand the message being given.
The first step is to write down how you interpret a particular divination tool. Many tarot writers believe that the Empress card, for instance, implies fertility, but if you see something else in your deck of cards, that's what you want to write down. How-to divination books are useful, but what's most important is how we as individuals interpret a particular tool.
In the case of something like a scrying mirror, you might want to write down what you believe a mirror can show you to better prepare you for the result. Different divination tools and techniques will reveal different things and provide their own unique insight into what is going on in our subconscious. Tea leaves and tarot cards might indicate similar versions of what is about to happen in your life, but they generally do so from different angles.
The Use of Divination Tools
This varies from Witch to Witch. There are several tarot readers in my coven, and we all read cards differently. We use different card spreads, for example, and we differ in terms of how much we want the person for whom we are doing the reading to touch the cards. For something like reading tea leaves, you might want to document how many times you swirl the leaves in your cup. Write down the techniques that work best for you and don't worry about how others say to do a particular thing.
For many Witches, recording the use and interpretation of their divination devices is enough, but some Witches like to document the results of their readings. I know Witches who draw a tarot card daily and record the results. There are others who make a note of the readings they do for others and the readings they’ve had done for themselves. A record of past readings can be very useful; it might cause a Witch to change how they interpret a particular symbol or card.
Dreams
There are Witches who keep dream journals, and I think there’s value in recording prophetic dreams. These can be recorded in a separate BoS or, if they feel important enough, in your primary book. You can also record any experiences you've had while traveling the astral planes. If the experience was noteworthy and magical, it’s worth documenting.
Every Trick in the Book:
A Blended Book of Shadows
a friend of mine once said that a scholar uses every tool at her disposal. Witchcraft has a lot in common with scholarship, and I think the same rule applies to us Witches: when we see something useful, we use it.
But it can be tough to feel comfortable with this mindset if, like me, you grew up in a faith tradition that insists on keeping itself “pure." Even when I rejected Judaism’s and Christianity’s scare tactics, the notion of a pure spiritual practice was hard to shake. Part of me insisted that if I was going to practice Witchcraft, I had to do it “right"—meaning, with no outside influences whatsoever.
Because all religions evolve in a vacuum, right?
When I decided to pursue a blended practice, my Book of Shadows was instrumental in helping me figure out what I wanted it to look like. In a little handmade journal I got from a museum store, I recorded the Charge of the Coddess and some chants I liked. Then I turned to my Jewish background. Which prayers were meaningful to me? Which felt numinous? I wrote down the blessing for lighting Shabbat candles. I found two versions of the Shema (the declaration of faith) that I liked—one that used goddess language and another that focused on compassion and justice—and spliced them together. I thought about my Buddhist practice and added the refuge vow.
Not only did recording these prayers in my book, alongside spells and other more traditionally witchy content, help me order my thoughts and give some structure to my practice, but it also made my practice fully mine. Writing is an act of power, and my book helped me create a practice that grew like a permaculture garden: with diverse species mingling and supporting each other to create a vibrant, healthy whole.
Whenever I fill up one journal and start another, I get to see how my practice has evolved. New spells and chants replace ones I've decided to retire. The wordings of prayers and blessings change. Entire chunks of my practice fall away as I learn and grow. Cumulatively, my Books of Shadows tell the story of my journey as a Witch and devotee of the Goddess. But no matter how my practice evolves, my books keep me anchored to my core values: love, compassion, justice, magick, strength, and beauty. My words are my power, and my book is my cauldron.
ASA WEST
Asa West blends her Witchcraft with her Jewish heritage and secular Buddhism. She lives in Los Angeles, where she works as a librarian and is currently training to be a priestess at the Kohenet Institute.
[contents]
chapter 5
THE BOOK OF SHADOWS-
OUT OF THE SHADOWS
We tend to take published rituals for granted today. Between websites, e-books, and bookstores, there are probably hundreds of different “Books of Shadows" available for perusal and personal use. But that’s a modern development; it took nearly twenty years from the Craft first going public for ritual books and BoS’s to become readily available. In many ways these early books brought the BoS out of the shadows and into the light, though they were not without controversy.
The earliest Witchcraft books didn’t include much in the way of rituals. They tended to include a lot of history, along with a general overview of what Witches believed back in the 1950s and 1960s. Such books might contain a small ritual bit, but there was nothing in them to guide a practitioner in a ritual from start to finish. To receive Witch rituals, a person had to either be an initiate of a tradition or make up their own version of things.
The first attempt at a mass-produced BoS appeared in pamphlet form in 1964 and was done in an attempt to devalue the Craft. The BoS included in the pamphlet was allegedly that of Gerald Gardner himself and was published by Charles and Mary Cardell, a couple who liked to pretend they were brother and sister. (If that makes no sense to you, well, you aren't alone. The Cardells were some strange fish.) The Cardells got their copy of Gardner’s alleged BoS from a disgruntled initiate of Gardner named Olive Greene (who may have also been their “spy"—I told you the saga of the Cardells was a weird one).
The Cardells’ early attempt at publishing a BoS didn’t work out very well for them. Privately published and not very popular with the Witchcraft community, their pamphlet/book was quickly forgotten. Other published BoS’s fared much better in the court of public opinion and have been in print now for several decades. What follows are some of the most popular mass-produced BoS’s, and I think it’s fair to say that they all changed Witchcraft forever—though depending on who you talk to, not always for the better.
From Sheba to Cunningham to RavenWolf BoS’s from 197а to the Present Day
The first book to contain full-length rituals resembling those in modern Witchcraft was Paul Huson’s Mastering Witchcraft: A Practical Guide for Witches, Warlocks ef Covens. Huson’s book is a long way from being a BoS, and many of his spells and formulations feel closer to ceremonial magick than Witchcraft, but there’s also a lot of the familiar in Huson's work.
Huson’s book opens with an illustration of the Wheel of the Year before going into a whole lot of spellwork. There are also invocations to deities such as Cernunnos and Diana, pentacles, and familiar exclamations such as "So mote it be!" Much of the material in the first two-thirds of the book is interesting but bears little resemblance to Wiccan Witchcraft, but that changes in the book’s last chapter, “The Coven and How to Form One."
It’s here in the book’s waning pages that Huson begins outlining more than just spells; he basically provides a primer for creating one’s own BoS. He includes two initiation rituals, complete with excerpts such as "Blessed be thy knees that shall kneel at the holy altar,” 36 which is a line common to a whole lot of BoS’s and traditions. Huson’s book also includes the first published version of the Charge of the Goddess, though his version is a bit different from the one most of us are used to.
Huson’s book was a considerable step forward in published Witch rituals, but the biggest (and most contentious) step came in 1971 with the publication of Lady Sheba's Book of Shadows. Lady Sheba (born Jessie Wicker Bell in 1920) claimed that she had been initiated into Witchcraft back in the 1930s and that her Book of Shadows came at least partially from that initiation. In actuality, Bell received her BoS, along with a Gardnerian Witchcraft initiation, via proxy, in 1970, from English Witches Michael Howard and Rosina Bishop. Bell later claimed that the Goddess had urged her to publish what were most certainly oathbound rituals.3?
Sheba's book was published in 1971 by Llewellyn Publications (the publishers of this book), whose then-president, Carl Weschcke, was part of Bell’s coven.38 Lady Sheba’s Book of Shadows isn’t quite a complete Witch BoS, but it comes very close. There are sabbat rituals, initiations, and elevations, along with The Laws of Witchcraft, known by some as the Ardanes. A longer edition was published the following year as The Grimoire of Lady Sheba and included even more rituals, along with several magical rites and spells and other odds and ends.
To say that Gardnerians were outraged in 1971 when Sheba's book was first published would be an understatement. To this day its publication remains contentious, and by the late 1970s Bell had retired from public Paganism and Witchcraft. Though Bell's book was the first to truly present a Witch ritual in order from start to finish, it wasn’t a complete Cardnerian BoS. Bell's version of a BoS contained a lot of information about rituals but completely lacked any context for those rituals. A Cardnerian BoS is more than just a collection of rituals; it’s a source of information about the Craft, containing the wisdom of generations of high priestesses and high priests. The BoS received by Bell at her initiation also only represented one particular strand of Gard-nerian Craft, and a rather unique one at that. Michael Howard has openly admitted that his line changed certain parts of Gardner’s original Book of Shadows.^?
Just how big was Bell’s impact on Witchcraft? We’ll never know for sure exactly, but I can offer an interesting insight. In 2011 a friend and I visited the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, where we rummaged through the diaries and rituals of American Witch Aidan Kelly.40 In the late 1960s, Kelly, along with a few friends, created a tradition known today as NROOGD (New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn), drawing ritual inspiration from texts such as Margaret Murray’s Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) and Robert Graves’s The White Goddess (1948).
Upon studying Kelly’s early rituals, I was amazed at the changes that appeared in them, especially from 1971 to 1972. At one point I loudly exclaimed, "That’s when he must have read Lady Sheba!,” surprising my colleague (and many of the library’s visitors), who had missed what had obviously caused the tonal shift in Kelly’s rituals. Within just a few months of its publication, Lady Sheba’s Book of Shadows was already quickly influencing other Witch traditions.
Despite the misgivings of many Witches, Bell’s book has been
in print now for over forty years. In 2001, just a year before Bell’s death, Llewellyn released a beautiful hardcover edition of Sheba's Grimoire, along with a new edition of her Book of Shadows the following year. Lady Sheba may be gone from this world, but “her” BoS lives on and will continue to influence new generations of Witches.
The next complete Book of Shadows published proved to be a lot less controversial. Raymond Buckland's 1974 The Tree: The Complete Book of Saxon Witchcraft featured no oath breaking and was the first attempt at a Witch book for the solitary practitioner. Buckland is one of the most influential Witches in history, and that influence goes well beyond The Tree. Buckland was born in London, England, but emigrated to the United States in the early 1960s. In the States he began corresponding with Gerald Gardner and later received an initiation (along with his then-wife, Rosemary) from Monique Wilson, one of Gardner's high priestesses.
The Tree bears a lot of similarities to British Traditional Witchcraft, but Buckland's sabbat rituals were completely different from those of Gardner and Sheba. With The Tree, Buckland essentially created a brand-new Wiccan tradition, one he dubbed Seax-Wicca, and one that’s still being practiced today. Buckland's BoS also included something sadly lacking in Sheba's book: context. More than just bare-bones ritual, Buckland's BoS provided information explaining how his rituals worked. For many years The Tree was the best source for Witchcraft in the tradition of Gardner and his initiates (other than initiation itself, of course).
The year 1978 saw the publication of Д Book of Pagan Rituals by
Weiser Books, with New York occultist and Witch Herman Slater listed as editor. The material in Pagan Rituals was originally created by a group known as the Pagan Way (which continues to this day) and was passed along in the magazines and Pagan periodicals of the era. The rituals created by the Pagan Way served two functions: the rituals could be used in Outer Court-type settings (an Outer Court is a pre-initiation training circle used in some traditions) or in public settings where Witch-style rituals were being shared. Since nothing in the Pagan Way material of that era was oathbound, things could be shared without violating any trust.
Since much of the material in A Book of Pagan Rituals was designed for groups, many of the rituals and ideas in it lacked context, but it also represented a huge step forward in the distribution of Witch ritual throughout the English-speaking world. It was also one of the first books to include the word Pagan in its title instead of Witch or Witchcraft, another milestone.
Hailed as the “mother of modern Witchcraft,” Doreen Valiente (1922-1999) was one of the great writers and architects of the modern Craft revival. Initiated by Gerald Gardner in 1953, Valiente went on to write much of the material found in the Gard-nerian Book of Shadows and many of the later books that were influenced by it (or that copied it directly). She was a tremendous poet, and her words have been a part of my own personal journey as a Witch nearly from the very beginning. (We also share a birthdate of January 4, which is of no real consequence, though I find it tremendously cool.)
In 1978 Valiente released Witchcraft for Tomorrow, a book so good that writer and Witchcraft historian Philip Heselton called it her “magnum opus.’’ Ц Witchcraft for Tomorrow was the first Witchcraft book published in England that provided full rituals for each of the sabbats, along with a self-initiation ritual. For many in the United Kingdom, Valiente's 1978 work provided a way into Witchcraft away from the up until then traditional coven structure.
One of the most important books in the history of modern Witchcraft was released in 1979 and closed off the decade in style. The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess by Starhawk was the first great “American Witch Book," with Doreen Valiente calling it "practically a new Book of Shadows.’’ 42 Starhawk's book wasn’t just about Witchcraft as practiced by Gardner (and the various offshoots that used his system); it detailed a new kind of American West Coast Witchcraft, complete with feminism, environmentalism, and the influence of Cora and Victor Anderson, two of the most important Craft teachers in American history (and also the founders of a truly unique Witch tradition).
Starhawk’s book was not meant to be a BoS, but it might as well have been. Even today, years after first reading it, I’m amazed at just how many pages in it look like ones from my own BoS, and read like it too. Every spell and rite in The Spiral Dance feels circle-tested and as if it was lifted straight from the rituals that must have been going on in Starhawk’s home before its publication.
In 1981, English Witches Janet and Stewart Farrar released Eight Sabbats for Witches, featuring rites and ceremonies from the Alexandrian Witchcraft tradition. A companion volume was released in 1984, titled The Witches' Way: Principles, Rituals, and Beliefs of
Modem Witchcraft. Both works featured input from Doreen Va-liente, and the three collaborators thought of The Witches' Way and Eight Sabbats as a way of "publishing a definitive text of the (Gardnerian) Book of Shadows.” 43
Much like the release of Lady Sheba’s book nearly ten years earlier, there were some who saw the publication of the Farrars’ books as a violation of their secrecy oaths. But as Valiente wrote to the Farrars during the lead-up to The Witches' Way: "I am the co-author with Gerald Gardner of the Gardnerian ’Book of Shadows' and therefore, it seems to me, I'm entitled to say whether or not it should be published." 44
The Farrars and Valiente succeeded masterfully in their attempts to create a working BoS based on Gardner’s work in the 1950s. The rituals flow like water, and thanks to Valiente’s participation, the reader knows that everything in both books (later collected into one volume as A Witches' Bible) is being presented in exactly the way the composer of those rites intended. Unlike Lady Sheba’s books in the 1970s, both volumes by the Farrars provide plenty of context while succeeding as a BoS.
Before the Internet became our primary form of communication in the extended Pagan world, many Witches and other likeminded folks kept up with one another through magazines and other periodicals. One of the pioneers in this area was Ed Fitch, whose work has had a lasting effect on Witchcraft. Fitch not only helped craft the rituals of the Pagan Way (discussed earlier) but also put together two "underground classics" that helped bring Witchcraft-style rituals to the masses.
The Grimoire of the Shadows and The Outer Court Book of Shadows circulated privately throughout the 1970s (and into the present day) and allowed coven leaders to present rituals without worrying about oath breaking.^ (Those two works saw an eventual “official” release in 1996 through Llewellyn Publications as A Grimoire of Shadows.) In addition to writing his underground books, Fitch also founded the Witchcraft magazine The Crystal Well in 1965, in which he and writer Janine Renee shared several sabbat rites. Those rituals also circulated widely in the Pagan underground and were finally collected and released as Magical Rites from the Crystal Well in 1984.
One of the most influential BoS’s of the past forty years first appeared publicly back in 1989 as "Section III" in Scott Cunningham's (1956-1993) Wicca: A Guide For the Solitary Practitioner. Cunningham's Wicca was revolutionary for a number of reasons. Perhaps most importantly, it was the first widely circulated book in the United States to use the word Wicca in its title instead of Witchcraft. That was a pivotal moment in the history of the Craft and is often overlooked.
The second revolutionary bit in Cunningham's book was that "Section III" (titled the "The Standing Stones Book of Shadows") was a complete BoS, with sabbat rituals, spells, and magical oil recipes. For much of the 1990s (and even up until now), Cunningham's work served as an entryway into the Craft, and as a result the rituals in his BoS have influenced an entire generation of Witches. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I’ve seen bits of Cunningham's rites show up in rituals across the United States and Canada. An extended version of Cunningham's BoS was released in 2009 as Cunningham's Book of Shadows: The Path of an American Traditionalist.
Another of the most influential American Witches of the 1990s was Silver RavenWolf. Her 1994 book To Ride a Silver Broomstick appealed to the new generation of Witches raised on the 1996 movie The Craft and TV's Charmed. (Confession: Broomstick was one of my absolute favorite books as a young Witch, and still is.) RavenWolf’s 2003 Solitary Witch: The Ultimate Book of Shadows for the New Generation, weighing in at over six hundred pages, might be one of the most complete publisher-produced BoS's in existence.
Over a span of just thirty-five years, published BoS’s went from being rather slim affairs (and, in the case of Lady Sheba, mostly plagiarized) to full and complete volumes that could be used to get a coven or solitary practice up and off the ground quickly. It's amazing to think of how far these types of books have come in such a short period of time, and the innovation is not over yet. In addition to BTW (British Traditional Witchcraft) and eclectic Wicca BoS's, all sorts of other Witchcraft traditions are being shared.
If the last fifty years are any indication, publishers will continue to release full BoS's, with many of us in the Craft continuing to buy them. I don't always use the BoS’s shared by Craft leaders and elders, but I do look to many of them for inspiration when writing a ritual or puzzling over one of Witchcraft’s many mysteries. I hope there are more to come.
Every Trick in the Book:
An Excerpt from Gnostica News
while і was working on this book, my editor came across an article on the Book of Shadows published back in March of 1973 in Llewellyn's Gnostica News periodical. The article itself doesn't offer a whole lot of insight into the BoS, but it does cast a very illuminating light on the time period in which it was written. The article's author (given as the “American Brotherhood of Wicca” in the magazine) calls the BoS "a true holy book” and dismisses any Book of Shadows that doesn’t resemble that of Lady Sheba! Times have certainly changed.
Here is an excerpt from the “Brotherhood Messenger" column in Gnostica News, March 21, 1973:
... The Book of Shadows was published (except for minor typos) exactly as it was handed down within her family for generations. Perhaps Lady Sheba’s names for the Sabbats, her wording for the Circle Chant, and other chants, differ from other sources—but who is in a position to say which is the more correct? Knowing Lady Sheba to be a true hereditary Witch Queen, I give more weight to her copy of the Book than I do to either Gardner, Grillot de Givry, or similar sources. ...
Reading and listening to some of the new “authorities" on Witchcraft, I have learned that some think that a Book of Shadows is merely a Witch’s record book, either as a Grimoire or collection of rituals being worked, or as a magickal diary recording the person's psychological and spiritual growth. This is not so!
“The Book of Shadows" is a true holy book, the “bible" of the Wiccan religion. It is the only Wiccan book to be traditionally handed on from generation to generation. All other books, the personal grimoires, the personal magickal diaries, the “lecture notes", etc. were traditionally to be burned at death.
The Book of Shadows contains the Witch Laws, the basic rituals and initiations, and the Sabbat rituals. It is not to contain notes of explanation, commentaries, additions, alterations, etc. This “Book" is to be handed on unchanged except for those changes approved by the Council of Elders. (I may be allowed to write more about the Council of Elders in a later column—but let me say that these Elders are not elected or appointed by the covens!) At the same time that the "Book" is handed on without change, it is proper for each generation, each coven, to make changes and additions to the practice of the rituals, initiations, and Sabbats. Note, however, they must always go back to the original source, the unchanged Book of Shadows as their one authority. Each generation thus starts off fresh with the Book of Shadows basic material. These changes and additions are part of the "experimental research" that is proper to a Witch or magician—if it proves to be truly valid and "ageless", it may be incorporated into the continuing Wiccan tradition upon the Elders' approval.
This, The Book of Shadows is not a personal record book— it is a true Holy Book! Unlike the holy books of other religions, it is not a collection of folk lore, myths, family history, etc.—it is a Book of Worship and a Book of Living—it shows the way to the Cods!
The true Book of Shadows is now available in published form only because Lady Sheba, as hereditary Queen, was directed to publish it to meet the need of these and the coming times. Only Lady Sheba had the authority to do this. And now IT IS DONE!
END
Are There Any Secrets Left?
Periodically people will ask me, as a Gardnerian, if the Gard-nerian BoS is still a secret since so many texts seem to be based on it. The short answer is that yes, most of the Gardnerian BoS is still a well-guarded secret. A Book of Shadows is more than just a collection of rituals; it's the living history of a tradition, and a BoS passed down over the decades will always be added to. I find things that are similar to what’s in my BoS in the pages of Sheba and the Farrars, but the material is not exactly the same.
Traditions are more than just the sum of their words. Any Witchcraft tradition (and coven, for that matter) older than six months will have its own oral lore and unique way of operating. Some things just never get written down in a book and can only be learned by experiencing them firsthand. Even the best and most complete BoS will always be missing something.
When I was elevated to the third degree in Gardnerian Craft and was preparing to initiate my first students, I was given a long list of things to do by my own initiating high priestess. After looking at her list, I replied stupidly with, “This isn’t in the book." She laughed and told me that not everything gets written down and that it’s my duty as a Witch to pay attention to what we're doing in the circle and pass down the things that don’t make their way into our BoS.
The portion of our Gardnerian BoS that my wife and I give to our first-degree initiates weighs in at nearly two hundred fifty pages! Even my most curious and well-read students have never encountered the majority of its contents. And when they stumble onto something online that’s in our Book of Shadows, it's generally in a different form from the one found in our secret, oathbound book.
My Gardnerian BoS includes the work of six priestesses in my upline,^ along with many of their initiates. There's no way all that material will ever make its way online. Much of the material in my oathbound BoS is relevant only to my wife's and my particular coven, along with our immediate initiators. Initiatory Witchcraft includes the work of many amazing high priestesses and priests who are generally unknown outside their own tradition.
Initiatory strands of Witchcraft have also gotten pickier and more selective over the last forty years. No one wants to be the person who initiates the next Lady Sheba, so we pick students whom we believe will honor our secrets and traditions. Besides, with all the different forms of Wiccan Witchcraft floating around today, there’s no need to break an oath or reveal a secret. There are plenty of doorways into the Craft, and a person does not have to be initiated by anyone else to be a Witch.
Before I was initiated into the Gardnerian Craft, my initiating high priest said to me, “Jason, you’ve seen all of the stuff in Gard before, but how we use it and present it is very different." And he was right: most of it was familiar, but it was also unique and it differed from what my wife and I were doing at the time—which was to be expected in a tradition that's been passed down continually now for at least seventy-five years.
So are there secrets left in our initiatory traditions and their attendant BoS’s? You better believe it, and more are being created all the time. Craft traditions are living and growing things, and no one person or book is capable of revealing all of their secrets. Long may the mysteries of the Craft remain, and long may people share how they understand those mysteries!
Зб Paul Huson, Mastering Witchcraft: A Practical Guide for Witches, Warlocks af Covens (1970: reprint, New York: Perigree Books 1980), 224.
· 37 Michael Howard, Modern Wicca: A History from Gerald Gardner to the Present (Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 2009), 222-223.
· 38 Chas S. Clifton, Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2006), 96-97.
· 39 Michael Howard, Modern Wicca, 223.
· 40 Kelly is probably best known for coining the terms Mabon and Ostara for the fall and spring equinoxes, along with Litha for the summer solstice. He donated his early papers to the Graduate Theological Union in order to preserve them for future generations.
· 41 Philip Heselton, Doreen Valiente: Witch (The Doreen Valiente Foundation, 2016), 191.
· 42 Doreen Valiente, The Rebirth of Witchcraft, 187.
· 43 Philip Heselton, Doreen Valiente: Witch, 235.
· 44 Ibid., 237.
· 45 Chas S. Clifton, Her Hidden Children (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2006), 23.
· 46 Think of an initiatory branch of Witchcraft as operating much like a family tree: my upline includes my initiators and those who initiated them, all in an unbroken chain that stretches back to at least Gerald Gardner.
chapter 6
Alphabets, Fonts, Inks, and Symbols
In the process of creating a Book of Shadows, the most important tools we have at our disposal are our brains and the words, scripts, fonts, and symbols that go into our books. We use our minds to formulate our ideas, but we bring these ideas to life when we write them on a page or type them on a keyboard. It’s easy enough to compose a BoS using everyday language, but it's much more magical to include a few things in code, a foreign language, or a magical alphabet.
The most popular magical alphabet in many Witch circles is Theban. Despite its rather Egyptian-sounding name, Theban was developed in Germany during the sixteenth century either as a cipher or perhaps explicitly for magical purposes. It became popular in the magical community after its inclusion in Agrippa’s Third Book of Occult Philosophy and has been a part of the Western magical tradition ever since.
Agrippa wrote that magical alphabets were used among the ancients because it was "unlawful to write the mysteries of the gods with those characters with which prophane (sic) and vulgar things were wrote." While that’s not a law in Witchcraft, the use of magical alphabets has been a part of our Craft since at least the 1940s, when Gerald Gardner had his magical name (Scire) inscribed on a bronze bracelet in Theban.
There are Witches who have composed entire BoS’s in Theban, though the practice is not common. Today, Theban is used primarily in spellwork, where it's thought that the extended level of concentration needed to write in Theban makes one’s magick more powerful. Names and magical mottos are often inscribed on magical tools in Theban, as are certain attributes of specific tools. (For example, the word Will might be written on an athame, as it's a tool used to project one's will.)
Nearly as common as Theban is the script known as Passing the River (sometimes also known as Passing of the River), which also appears in Agrippa's book. He lists it as one of the languages of the Kabbalah and includes it alongside two alphabets of his own devising, Malachim and Celestial. Unlike Theban, which looks very rune-like, all of Agrippa's "celestial writing systems" are quite fluid and contain lots of small circles.
THEBAN SCRIPT AND PASSING THE RIVER
Another common alphabet in Witch circles is Enochian, which is said to be the language of angels. Enochian was first used by the Englishman John Dee (1527-1609) and his spirit medium Edward Kelly (1555-1597) in their private journals. Several hundred years after the deaths of Dee and Kelly, Enochian began to appear in magical orders such as the Golden Dawn. Magical systems based on Enochian are modern inventions, but that hasn’t stopped the alphabet from gaining in popularity.
The Norse runes are used in spellwork and divination and might be the most commonly used magickal alphabet in the Pagan community. While they don’t appear in this chapter, I haven’t forgotten about them. There’s an extended look at them in chapter
2 in the section "Odin and the Runes."
Ogham
Ogham (sometimes spelled ogam) is an ancient Celtic script found predominantly in Ireland and western Britain. The ancient Celts used it primarily to identify memorials to the dead, but it most likely had other uses as well.^ Until quite recently, ogham was associated primarily with the ancient Druids and ancient Celtic Paganism and was used by a variety of Pagans and Witches for all sorts of magical purposes.
OGHAM
Medieval Irish literature linked the symbols in ogham to specific trees and plants, an association further popularized by the English writer Robert Craves (1895-1985) in his book The White Goddess (1948). Because of this, many Pagans today refer to ogham as the “Tree Alphabet," and its letters are often used to represent particular types of trees. This has made ogham very popular in a lot of magical operations, and its letters often function like the Norse runes. The ogham letter duir (see illustration), for example, is often associated with the oak tree and might be worn around the neck of a magical practitioner with an affinity for oak trees or their properties. (As someone whose coven is named “The Oak Court," this is most certainly my favorite rune.)
Ogham was originally written on a straight line from top to bottom, making it a particularly challenging alphabet to use in magical operations. To get around this, many Witches and Druids today write it from left to right (like most of our modern alphabets) and forgo the long line that connects ogham letters together on ancient Irish monuments.
Foreign Languages and Magical Mottos
For the last five hundred years, the English-speaking world has often looked to other languages for magical inspiration. The first grimoires were generally written in Latin and Creek, and it sometimes took several centuries for English-language translations of such influential texts as The Key of Solomon to become readily available. Magical orders such as the nineteenth-century Golden Dawn required their members to have a working knowledge of Hebrew. As useful (and as magical) as I find the English language to be, it was not all that popular in magical circles until relatively recently.
I don’t know a whole lot ofWitches who keep their BoS in anything other than their native language, but using another language is certainly an option. Writing one in German, Spanish, or French would probably help to keep it private and lend it an air of mystery. It would also maintain the long standing tradition of magical books for English speakers being written in a foreign language.
Writing an entire BoS in a foreign language is most likely beyond most of us, but foreign phrases have a place in the BoS. Old spells cast in ancient Greek or Hebrew pack a bit of an extra wallop, and even Latin phrases have a touch of the exotic. Perhaps that’s why it was common in the Golden Dawn for every member to adopt a magical motto.
A magical motto is similar to a magical name in that it's meant to emphasize the magical nature of the practitioner. Many who adopt a magical motto often use it as a name inside the circle, while others see it as representative of something deep inside themselves. The most famous motto in magical circles is perhaps Perdurabo, a term chosen by Aleister Crowley that translates as “I Will endure to the end" (the “will" being capitalized by Crowley to emphasize its importance to him).
English occultist and writer Dion Fortune chose Deo, non fortuna as her motto, which means "By God, not by chance." Bible-related mottos were popular with many magicians; the American occultist Israel Regardie's was Ad Majoram Adonai Gloriam ("For the greater glory of the Lord"). Mottos could also be regal and a bit pretentious. One of the founders of the Golden Dawn, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, chose ’S Rioghail Mo Dhream ("Royal is my race") as his identifier. Mathers’s wife, Moina, used Vestigia nulla retrorsum, which translates as "I never retrace my steps."
With Latin-to-English translation apps and pages on the Internet, coming up with a Latin magical motto is easier than ever. I recently added Et Qui Sapienter ("He who speaks wisely”) to the title page of my own BoS. When I showed it to my wife, she suggested I amend it to Et qui vult, loquitur sapienter ("He who wishes to speak wisely"). If you do add a magical motto to your own book, I suggest not sharing its meaning with a whole lot of people. It’s probably best to let people wonder.
The Creative Use of Fonts and Scripts
Several years ago, my coven presented a large ritual (200-plus people) at a public Pagan festival. It was a very “tallcy" ritual full of nineteenth-century English poetry and long passages borrowed from Freemasonry. Due to its length, none of us even really tried to memorize it, so we each made it a part of whatever BoS we had chosen to use for that ritual. I didn’t pay much heed to how things were arranged in each individual's book until I looked in my wife’s BoS several months after the event.
Peeking into her book was like looking at an entirely different ritual. Each role in the rite had its own distinctive script. My lines were written in a small and claustrophobic sort of style, with each word separated by only the tiniest of spaces. The way she wrote my lines in her book made my contributions to the rite feel almost insignificant. Her lines, on the other hand, were written in a large, graceful, and flowing script that felt full of confidence and authority. In this version of the ritual, she and her goddess were the centerpiece of everything.
There were practical considerations for her approach in writing down this ritual, of course. By making her lines bigger than everyone else's, she made them that much easier to keep track of and read during the ritual. But I think her way of doing things took all of this a step further. Every person involved in the ritual had their own personal style of script that seemed to reflect their personality.
Witches engage in all sorts of ritual, but many have trouble understanding the differences between a ritual with ten people and one with a hundred. Even when the words in a big rite are the same as in a smaller one, they often need to be read differently in order to convey what's going on in the ritual. Public ritual in large spaces calls for big actions, along with slow, loud, and deliberate speaking. My wife’s way of writing down her lines was like a form of personal stage direction. How something is written down or typed up influences how we read it.
Magick and ritual are about breaking free of the mundane world, and there are few things more mundane than fonts such as Times New Roman or Helvetica. They make us think about work or paying the bills, not about the mysteries of the Lord and Lady. Simply using an unfamiliar yet appropriate font in a Book of Shadows is an effective magical trick. It takes the mind to a different headspace and reminds us that we are engaging in something out of the ordinary.
When I write things down in my BoS, I generally print, which is how I've written the majority of my life. (I stopped using cursive shortly after I learned to write it.) But print is perhaps the most mundane form of writing we have. It's often far easier to read than cursive, but it's easier to read because it's generally boring.
The only time I really write in cursive is when I'm signing my name to something, and I'm always delighted with how it looks. My signature is a mess, of course, but it’s full of personality and energy. It represents me in a way that no other form of handwriting does. It's the kind of personality I should be putting into my handwritten BoS.
DIFFERENT FONTS IN A BOOK
Most of us aren't going to write our books in ogham or Passing the River, but we can write in cursive. A great BoS is more than just a collection of spells and rituals; it's a document detailing who we are as individual Witches. Why not use a type of handwriting that reflects something about us as individuals?
Calligraphy
This is a style of decorative writing generally associated with broad-tip, antique-looking pens. I first became aware of it while studying American history in the fifth grade, but today it has other meanings for me; it's the type of handwriting I most associate with magical things. The first modern Witches wrote in a very ornamental style in their BoS’s. This gave their work a timeless and archaic look, making it that much more magical. When we envision ancient wizards and sorceresses, we most likely picture them writing with a fluid hand in a beautiful script. Why not link what we do to such notions?
An effective Book of Shadows should most certainly be practical, but there’s no reason it can't also be magical. Using decorative styles of writing and fonts outside the mundane is a way to break free from the ordinary and impart a bit of extra energy to our most important personal book.
Magical Symbols and Shortcuts
In the earliest BoS’s, Witches would often use a particular symbol to represent a ritual tool, a deity, or an idea. For many years this was something that could be done only with a handwritten BoS. When people began typing things out from a BoS or creating new pages with a word processor, they would sometimes leave a blank space to write in that special symbol later. Today, no matter how you create your BoS, it’s incredibly easy to use symbols in the text. Most word processing programs will let users add their own alphabets, along with various symbols.
Even the previously mentioned hard-to-use Theban script can be downloaded as a font. One doesn’t even have to really learn Theban to write (type) a BoS with it today. Others have already done the hard work and made sure that the equivalent to “e" in Theban ( ) shows up in the right spot on your keyboard. Of
course downloading a font isn’t the same as really learning a different alphabet, let alone being able to read it.
Most of us are probably not going to use Theban script or a particular set of runes to compose our BoS's, and that's all right. There are still some really handy little symbols we can use whether writing by hand or typing things out on the old keyboard. Most of them can be found in "Wingdings,” a collection of symbols available in most word processing programs (such as Microsoft Word) and in the "Character Viewer” if you are using an Apple product. Some of the symbols I use can also be found on a standard keyboard, and it's easy enough to simply come up with your own.
My Favorite Symbols and Shortcuts
Why would anyone want to use symbols to represent words or ideas in a BoS? Many covens like to keep the names of their gods and goddesses secret, and using a symbol is a lot more elegant than leaving a blank space or a line in their BoS. Using a magical shorthand also means there are fewer characters to write down, which is especially useful if you are crafting your BoS the old-fashioned way. I also like using a shorthand because it helps to keep things just a little bit secret. If you or your coven adopt a few symbols for the BoS, then anyone reading your BoS will need help translating it. This is especially helpful if you want to reserve a rite, tool, or prayer for only your coven.
For many covens, oral lore is just as important as a BoS. Keeping a few things out of a BoS and whittling them down to symbols means that everyone has to eventually learn that oral lore for things to make sense. I remember my first extended look at a BoS filled with symbols that I was expected to know—it was intimidating. Maybe it makes me a bad person, but I like the idea of a book I’ve put hours and hours of work into being intimidating to someone outside the Craft (and even a few in it!).
Here are some of the symbols I use in my own BoS’s. This list is not meant to be exhaustive; it's just a collection of a few things I use in my own practice and have found useful over the years. There are also some other symbols sprinkled into a few of the rituals in this book.
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1 use the slash if I’m saluting one of the quarters or raising my hand for some reason. |
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o* |
1 use this symbol for casting the circle. My coven uses a kiss as a greeting with some regularity. |
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A sun symbol is perfect for the Cod. |
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c |
> |
1 use a circle for the moon, which is sacred to the Goddess. This symbol works for “As above, so below,” a familiar refrain in magical circles. |
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1 |
Zeros work well for the circle and look different from the circle used for the moon. |
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An upside-down triangle is a very common symbol for a first-degree Witch in initiatory traditions. |
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A peace sign is perfect for the phrase "Blessed be.” 1 want something that says stop to represent the words “So mote it be.” |
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A filled-in circle reminds me of an eclipse, which is a joining of the sun (male) and the |
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moon (female), so it makes a handy symbol for the Great Rite.
Squares and rectangles are easy representations of an altar.
I use this symbol for the Wheel of the Year.
If you do choose to use symbols, there are some important points to remember:
· • Make sure that whatever you’re using is unique-looking, so you won’t get it mixed up with something else. There are lots of star symbols available on a keyboard, for instance, but they can easily run together in your brain. Also, some symbols look a lot like a letter of the alphabet, which can be confusing.
· • I try to use the same symbols in my handwritten and typed-up BoS’s, so generally I only use symbols I can easily find on a keyboard.
· • When typing in a symbol, make sure it’s big enough that you can see it easily. This sounds like a no-brainer, but it’s a mistake I’ve made before. If you're using a small font size, some symbols look more like smears than symbols when printed.
· • Make sure to be consistent! I keep a legend of the various symbols I use in things so I've got a reference point.
Symbols are a practical and attractive addition to any BoS. I highly recommend using them.
Homemade Ink and Pens
Most Witches don't write their Books of Shadows with homemade pens and ink, but it can be done, and it's not even all that difficult. Both items can be made with simple household items in a relatively short period of time. Homemade ink is often good for the environment too—there are many formulas for it online that are 100 percent organic!
Why make your own ink? Anything we create we infuse with our own energies, and the BoS is no exception. Using your own ink in a BoS or even a spell puts a little more “you" in it, and in magick that’s always a good thing. Writing with a quill pen and homemade ink can be challenging, and I wouldn't recommend creating a whole BoS this way, but for one-off projects or especially important parts of a book it has value.
Even if you decide not to make your own ink, you can easily spruce up store-bought ink to make it more magical. Adding just a touch of your favorite essential oil will give it (and your BoS) a delightful scent. You can also crush up your favorite dried herbs and add them to your ink for a similar effect. You can buy ink today with glitter in it, but you can also add your own. This is especially useful if you want to charge the glitter and infuse it with a little extra magical energy.
Make Your Own Organic Red Ink
To make red ink you will need the following:
“ Vi cup raspberries
“ A strainer
“ A bowl
“ A potato masher or large spoon
“ Vi tablespoon salt
“ Vi tablespoon vinegar
“ A fork or wire whisk
· • A small jar or bottle to store your ink
Start by extracting as much juice as you can from the raspberries. I recommend using a potato masher to mush up the berries in a strainer and then pressing down on them with a large spoon. If you don’t have a masher, you can use a spoon for that too. Obviously you want the juice from the berries to go into whatever bowl you are going to mix all your ingredients in.
Once the juice is extracted, mix it with the salt and vinegar. I suggest using a fork or small wire whisk for the mixing. Once it's all blended together, bottle it up and your ink is ready to go.
This rather easy formula can be used with any berry that stains. If you are looking for a dark or purple ink, blackberries are a good choice. If you can find the right shade of blueberries, you can make a nice blue too. Also, your ink will smell better than everyone else’s.
Make Your Own Black Ink
Black is generally the default color when people think of ink, and unless you are using blackberries, making black ink from scratch is a bit more involved than our raspberry-red ink. For black ink you will need the following:
· • Carbon black (lamp black)
· • A bad, sooty candle
· • Several spoons
· • Two small dishes
· • Vodka
· • Gum arabic (mixed with water)
· • A small jar or bottle to store your ink
Black ink generally requires a small amount of carbon black (sometimes referred to as lamp black), which can be collected using candles or an oil lamp. The easiest way to collect carbon black is with a bad, sooty candle (think dollar-store candle— there’s a reason “organic” isn't in the section title here). Beeswax won't work; it burns too cleanly. After lighting your sooty candle, hold a spoon near the flame with the "bowl” part of the utensil touching the candle’s flame. The black that collects in the spoon is carbon black. To make ink, you will need a decent amount of it, so you may want to have a few spoons handy.
Put the soot in a small dish and mix it with some vodka; it will be paste-like at this stage. In a separate dish, mix some water with a bit of gum arabic (available at most craft stores), then add this to the soot and vodka. Continue adding small bits of water and mixing all the ingredients until you reach the desired consistency, then immediately use or bottle the ink. The gum arabic is what binds the ink to the page, so if your ink doesn’t "stick," add a little bit more of it dissolved in water.
Feather Quill Pens
I have stained all sorts of things in my house while making ink and managed to burn myself once while collecting soot, but feather pens? Those are ridiculously easy to make. All you need are some long feathers (think at least eight inches long; a foot is even better), which you can buy at your local craft store or get from a poultry farm. (If you have any friends who buy an organic turkey from a local farm during the holiday season, ask them to pick up some feathers for you when they get their bird.)
All feathers have a bit of a natural curve. To make your pen, start by finding this curve. You'll want your pen tip to follow the curve and point downward. Using a marker or pencil, put a small dot on the place where you’d like the pen tip to be. Set your feather on a cutting board and cut it with a sharp, heavy knife (don’t use a steak knife) so that you create a definitive point at the feather's end. Depending on how fresh or processed your feather is, there could be gunk left inside of it at the quill’s point; that can be removed easily with a pair of tweezers.
And that’s it, really. Now you’ve got a quill pen to use with your homemade ink! If you want to get a little more fancy, you can trim some of the feather back to make it more comfortable in your hand. You can also paint on the feather’s surface or add a bit of glitter—whatever works. While I suggest turkey feathers (they just tend to be easier to get), goose and peacock feathers are good choices too.
Super Secret Witch Stuff-—
Invisible Ink in a Book of Shadows
If you want to take secrecy to another level, you could always write your BoS in invisible ink. Most of us probably experimented with “invisible ink” made from lemon juice when we were children. It's an easy trick. You just mix some lemon juice with some water, write with it on a piece of paper, then hold the paper up to a light bulb (or other heat source) to reveal the hidden message. This works well enough for single sheets of paper but is pretty impractical in book form. Fortunately, there are alternatives.
Today there are many different kinds of "ghost ink” on the market that are designed to be used with modern fountain pens. Ghost ink is an ink that’s invisible in normal light and can only be seen under black light. It’s a pretty cool-looking trick—that is, if you don't mind everyone in your coven wielding a flashlight during ritual.
Ghost ink and homemade pens are not going to be for every Witch, but they can add a little extra enjoyment to your practice. When we take the time to make everything we do in circle and as Witches different from our everyday mundane lives, we are showing our tradition the respect it deserves and making the magick we create even more powerful.
[contents)
· 47 Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1531; reprint, St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 1993), 558.
· 48 Ronald Hutton, Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 44.
chapter 7
Goddesses and Cods of the Books
Witchcraft has never had any specific rules when it comes to deity. Many Witches I know use specific gods from history and mythology in their rituals. Others are perfectly content to call upon less specific entities, deities such as the Triple Goddess or Horned God. Some Witches use the titles Lady and Lord to signify the deities they honor. There's no right or wrong here, and individuals are free to call upon whomever (and whatever) they wish. In my own practice, I use a combination of all these things.
There have been many deities over the centuries associated with themes such as wisdom, spellwork, literature, poetry, alphabets, and literacy, but very few with books. Since a Book of Shadows is a mixture of poetry, literature, spellcraft, and everything else a Witch might find useful, there are a great many gods and goddesses you can invoke to help you while writing your BoS. Deities can inspire and empower us and reveal things that we might not otherwise see; bringing them into the writing process can produce unexpected and powerful results.
GODDESSES AND GODS ASSOCIATED WITH LITERACY, SPELLCRAFT, ALPHABETS, AND WISDOM
Athena
Athena is the Greek goddess of wisdom and civilization. She was known by the Romans as Minerva.
Brigid
Brigid (also spelled Bride, Bridget, and several other ways) is one of the most celebrated of all the Celtic-Irish deities and is a goddess with many talents. As a goddess of the arts and poetry, she’s an especially useful companion when working on a Book of Shadows.
Ceridwen
Ceridwen is a Welsh fertility goddess but is probably better known for her cauldron of knowledge.
Ganesha
Ganesha (or Ganesh) is a Hindu god who is best known for resembling an elephant and for his rather happy-go-lucky nature. He’s also a god of wisdom and literature. Ganesha is an excellent deity to call upon when trying to find a situation's lighter side.
Hermes
Hermes was originally the messenger of the Greek gods and in some traditions is seen as a trickster figure. He eventually became associated with a whole host of magical traditions as Hermes Trismegistus ("Hermes thrice greatest’’), and in that role he is a god of magical texts and grimoires.
Odin
Odin gave the runes to humanity after hanging from Yggdrasil, the world tree.
Ogma
Ogma (also spelled Oghma) is an Irish god usually credited with inventing the ogham alphabet. In addition to being wise, he's also a tremendous public speaker.
Sarasvati
Sarasvati (also spelled Saraswati) is a Hindu goddess of knowledge, music, speech, and the arts. She is credited with creating the Sanskrit alphabet.
Serapis
Serapis (also spelled Sarapis) is a Hellenic god from Egypt and serves as an intermediary between the two pantheons of Greece and Egypt. He is a god of wisdom and sometimes is honored as the husband of Isis. Because he walked between two different cultures, Serapis is also a god of harmony between different magical practices.
Seshat
Seshat (sometimes called Sefkhet-Seshat) is the wife of the Egyptian god Thoth and in some Egyptian myths is credited with being the inventor of hieroglyphics. Seshat is also the goddess of writing, scribes, planning, and architecture.
Thoth
Thoth (called Djehuti in his native Egypt) is the Egyptian ibisheaded god of knowledge, writing, magick, the moon, and wisdom.
SPELLS AND RITUALS INVOLVING INDIVIDUAL DEITIES
Over the years I’ve called to several different goddesses and gods while writing my own BoS's. Sometimes I've looked to them when I’ve lacked inspiration, and other times I’ve called on gods like Odin to thank them for what they have revealed to us. I’ve asked gods to bless the pens I use when writing my BoS and to empower the curses I place in my BoS's to keep out unwanted visitors.
Before working with a deity in ritual, I suggest talking to it first and perhaps giving it an offering. I don't think it’s wise to ask a deity we don't know to help us with a problem, just like we wouldn't ask someone we don't know to help us move into a new house. Most goddesses and gods are very happy to be worshiped and honored by us mortals in exchange for a bit of assistance, but proceed cautiously when calling to an unfamiliar deity.
If the deities in the following rites don’t necessarily call to you, you can place your own favorites in them with some adjustments. I’ve tried to write about deities from a variety of pantheons to serve as many different Witches as possible, and I hope there’s something here that inspires your own practice.
Thoth Pen Bles sing
When thinking about what deities to write about in this book, I immediately thought of Thoth, the Egyptian god of knowledge, writing, magick, the moon, and wisdom. With the exception of Hermes, Thoth is perhaps the best known magick user among all the gods worshiped in the Roman Empire. Often depicted as a man with the head of an ibis, Thoth is the Creek name of the Egyptian deity Djehuti (sometimes also spelled Zehuti).
The mythology surrounding Thoth is somewhat garbled. Some stories portray him as being the father of all the Egyptian deities, while others claim he was one of the sons of Osiris. The most interesting tale of his origins claims that his parents were the gods Horus and Set and that Thoth was born from Set after Horus tricked Set into eating his seed. While the myths may not agree on Thoth’s parentage, he's a very old Egyptian god and survived into the modern era as a part of Hermes Trismegistus.^
Through the centuries, a whole host of magical practices have been attributed to Thoth. He was said to have had one of the largest libraries of magical books in existence, which could be accessed in some fashion by following him. Perhaps most famously, he was often viewed as a scribe and as the creator of the Egyptian hieroglyphs. As the inventor of Egyptian writing, he was often pictured with a pen made of reeds in his hand.
Because pens are commonly associated with Thoth, I like to ask for his blessing when designating one for magical work. As Thoth is also a god of innovation and creativity, I don't think he minds that the pens I use for my BoS are of a more modern variety than what he used back in the days of the Egyptian pharaohs.
Pen Blessing Invoking Thoth
This blessing should be done at night, preferably under the light of the moon, as Thoth is a moon god. As for materials, you’ll need whatever pens you are blessing and a piece of nice paper for each pen. My preference is faux parchment paper, which can be found at most office supply stores; it is often a tan or gray color and resembles old pieces of parchment. “Special" paper always feels more magical to me than plain white copy paper, but the stuff you use in your copier will work just fine if you don't want to make the extra investment.
Because this blessing involves actual writing/drawing, I tend to perform it indoors near a window where I can see the moon. If the glow of the full moon doesn't provide enough light to see well, light a couple of candles. This blessing can be performed independently or in the middle of a proper ritual—whatever feels most appropriate to you.
Symbol of the Moon
Place your piece of parchment paper in a spot where it will be illuminated by a little bit of moonlight. Once it’s in position, draw the Egyptian hieroglyph of the moon upon it using the pen you wish to bless. There’s no reason to draw a small glyph either; make it big, and if it takes up the top quarter of your paper, even better. While you’re drawing the glyph, chant the following to the moon:
/ call to the moon in the deep dark sky, Bless my work and hear my cry. This symbol tonight I draw for you From this Witch's heart so true.
If you have to repeat the chant while drawing the hieroglyph, all the better.
Thoth
After drawing the moon, draw the symbol of Thoth. While the ibis hieroglyph might appear difficult to draw, it’s actually pretty easy. If you aren’t much of an artist, start with a diamond shape for the body before moving on to the boomerang-like head. His legs can be rendered as simple lines. Take your time; there’s no hurry. As you're drawing the symbol ofThoth, invoke the god:
Great Thoth, hear my call this sacred night And assist me with my magick plight.
May your hand guide me as I write, Your wisdom serving as my light.
Even if you get the hieroglyph drawn quickly, repeating the chant a few times will increase the presence and power of Thoth in your magical space. Sometimes I simply trance out a little bit and picture Thoth in my mind, repeating the chant long after I'm done drawing the glyph.
When you’re satisfied with your hieroglyphs and the presence ofThoth, place the pen you wish to bless on the paper, making sure it’s touching both symbols. Visualize the hieroglyphs you've drawn glowing in the moonlight, charging your pen with the powers of the moon and Thoth. While visualizing energy moving into the pen, repeat these words:
For this instrument I seek the blessings ofThoth! God of the moon, god of knowledge, hear my prayer! May I write only truth with this pen set before thee, And may it serve both me and the gods I hold dear!
I place this pen in your service as an instrument
of truth!
May my words flow freely from it, and may those words contain the mysteries!
Let my script be precise and my writing clear, And may this tool serve me well as I document my journey!
Bless this pen, О Thoth, that it may serve me as a Witch.
When you are done blessing your pen, you can allow it to sit on the glyphs until the morning to soak up their power (and that of the moon). Alternatively, you can take your newly blessed pen and place it on your altar or writing desk. (Since your pen is now a tool blessed by a god, it’s best to keep it somewhere special and not with the ordinary pens.) The hieroglyphs you've drawn can be cut out and glued into your BoS, and if you keep your BoS in a binder, the whole page can be added to it. If you don’t want to keep the glyphs, burn them in the fire as an offering to Thoth.
SOPHIA AND JESUS: JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN MAGICK Few issues in modern Paganism are more contentious than that of Christo-Paganism. There are many who believe that the god and goddesses of Judaism are off limits in both general Pagan practice and Witchcraft. But as we have seen, Judeo-Christian influences have contributed greatly to the development of the grimoire tradition, and many practitioners of magicks labeled Witchcraft over the ages identified as Christians.
Horrible things have been done in the name of Christianity over the centuries, but the essential message of Jesus (“Love your neighbor as yourself") is exceedingly positive. I’ve never had much use for biblical figures in my own practice, but I know many good Witches who work with both Jesus and other figures related to the Bible. If you don’t work with those types of figures, this is an easy enough section to skip.
Some of you reading this might be surprised to learn that the God of the Old Testament (and, by extension, Judaism) has been associated with many female deities over the years. The most notable is probably Asherah, a very popular mother goddess figure throughout the region that today we call the Middle East. She was most likely worshiped as the consort of Yahweh and as the Queen of the Heavens in Ancient Israel. In 1999 archeologists found a jar dating back to the ninth century BCE on the Sinai Peninsula with the inscription “I bless thee by Yahweh and by his Asherah," providing further proof as to the one-time marital status of Yahweh.^
Asherah does not appear as the consort of Yahweh in the Old Testament (in fact, she's generally depicted as an evil, foreign goddess), but there’s another female deity who does: Wisdom, who is also known as Sophia in many (Pagan) Gnostic traditions. Wisdom appears in chapter 8 of Proverbs, where she extols the virtues of her very name:
Doesn't Wisdom cry out?
Doesn’t understanding raise Her voice? On the top of high places by the way, where the paths meet, She stands.
si
Sometimes I need to be reminded that ritual and my BoS’s are not the only ways to see and hear the divine. Taking a cue from Proverbs, there’s a wisdom blessing on the front page of one of my BoS’s to serve as a reminder that knowledge exists everywhere. Sometimes it’s too easy to get wrapped up in books, and it’s important to remember that as Witches we should also be listening to the earth.
Wisdom Blessing
Let Wisdom be my guide, These shadows by my side. May I hear the earth's voice And in my soul rejoice.
Д child of book and breeze Amongst the gods and fairies.
Over the last several years I have seen a significant uptick in the number of Witches who call upon Jesus of Galilee. Not all of them think of him as a god in the traditional sense; many see him as a great teacher of wisdom, and there are even some who think he might have been a Witch! (He did wander around in the desert for a while performing miracles. That sounds pretty witchy to me.)
The New Testament is mostly silent on the childhood of Jesus, but the writer of Luke mentions him as a twelve-year-old in the great Jewish Temple “sitting in the middle of the teachers, both listening to them, and asking them questions." 52 This certainly doesn't prove that Jesus was literate, but I find it likely. It also illustrates just how much he must have loved learning new things.
I haven’t worked with Jesus for nearly twenty years now, but the figure that appears in the Bible certainly seems to value learning and transmitting sacred ideas. Both of those things are qualities of a powerful Witch, and what we learn we often put into our BoS’s, and through our BoS's we share ideas. Jesus may or may not have been a Witch, but I think he’d be happy being a part of a BoS today regardless.
Due to the frequency in which Jesus appears throughout the grimoire tradition, as Witches we might best be served to come to some sort of understanding with him. We don’t all need to worship him or bring him into our rituals, but when he appears in a spell or charm, we shouldn’t necessarily recoil from it. There have been many powerful and amazing magical people over the centuries who have identified as Christians or at least followers of Jesus.
When copying a spell out of a book that mentions Jesus, such as The Long Lost Friend, it’s best to remember that Jesus has been a part of the magical tradition now for 2,000 years. Of course he’s going to be there, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Witches use what works, and if a spell has been circulating continually for hundreds of years, then it probably works. We should utilize that to our advantage, no matter what god that spell invokes.
ODIN AND THE RUNES
The most popular magical alphabets in many Witch and Pagan traditions are the Norse (Scandinavian) runes, especially the ones known as the Elder Futhark (sometimes known as the Older Futhark, especially in scholarly circles). Runes have been in use as an alphabet for nearly 2,000 years now, first becoming popular at the beginning of the Common Era, with their last “mundane” use occurring as late as 1900.^ During the Viking heyday of the runes, they were generally just used as an alphabet, but, like most ancient alphabets, individual letters were thought to have magical associations. Most runic inscriptions are found on memorials to the dead, but there are surviving instances of runes being used in invocations to Norse gods and goddesses.^
Out of the two different styles of runes, it's the Elder Futhark that is generally the most popular among Witches, most likely because it contains twenty-four letters, mimicking the twenty-six letters found in our own Latin alphabet. Even though the Elder Futhark are the runes that are most likely to show up among Witches, they are the ones we know the least about. The Elder Futhark were generally used to write a Proto-Cermanic language that has not been fully translated.^
The Younger Futhark, with only sixteen letters, is harder to use in a modern context but is more well known to scholars because the language it was used for, Old Norse, is much better understood today than Proto-Cermanic.^ Whatever your individual preference in runes, both sets were said to come from the Norse deity Odin (also known as Wodan, Woden, and a few other variant spellings), the All-Father of the gods. Odin was a god of many things, including poetry, war, royalty, and the sky, but most importantly for this book he was the god of knowledge and, by extension, the runes.
Elder Futhark
According to myth, Odin hung himself from a branch of the world tree Yggdrasil for nine days after first stabbing himself in the side with a spear. There, lingering between life and death, he discovered the secret of the runes, learning their magical properties and how to utilize those energies in the living world. The power of the runes granted him all sorts of magical powers and cemented his status as the strongest of the Norse gods. Eventually he shared the gifts of the runes with his people and, later, with us Witches.
One of the most important parts of the Odin myth is sacrifice. Odin had to work to earn the runes and he suffered physically for them. Witchcraft is similar, and while there are no hanging rituals involved in the practice, it does require work and perseverance. As Witches, it’s possible that we are forced to sacrifice many things (friends, family, time, and resources) in order to grow in our art. When a sacrifice has been made for us by a god or even a coven member, we should be respectful of it and take a moment to honor it.
While Odin is not credited with being the creator/revealer of magical scripts such as Theban, I'd be willing to bet that as a god of knowledge he's pretty proficient with most of them. Because of his mastery of the runes, I like to ask for his assistance before transcribing a magical alphabet into my BoS. We certainly don't have to ask for Odin's blessing while writing down his runes, but considering how much he suffered for them, I think his sacrifice should be honored.
Odin Blessing
Since Odin is a god of the sky, I prefer to work with him during the day, preferably outside on a table in my backyard or perhaps a park bench in a sunny spot. If going outside is not possible, choose a spot near a window where you can feel the sunlight pouring in. No tool other than a pen (or other writing instrument) is required for this blessing, though you may want to bring some mead or other liquid to give to Odin as an offering.
Start by taking a deep breath and imagining Odin in your mind's eye. Picture him suffering and lingering between life and death upon Yggdrasil while he gained the knowledge of the runes. Now picture those runes (or other magical letters) being used in your magical work. See them written in your BoS, upon slips of paper in spellwork, or perhaps worn around your neck or on a magical tool. Wherever you see them, imagine them glowing and radiating with power.
As you begin transcribing the runes into your BoS (I generally start by matching up each rune with its corresponding letter in our alphabet), start to quietly utter this chant:
Odin, bless these runes and my bless my art With love and gratitude from my heart.
This chant is deliberately short so it can be memorized easily, and it should be repeated until the transcription is complete. As you write down each of the runes, feel Odin empowering them, blessing them with magical energy. Continue to picture him close to you as you write and chant, allowing him to be a part of the process. Upon copying down the last rune, finish your chant with an emphatic So mote it be!
Because Odin suffered so much to give us the runes, you can further put yourself in his good graces by leaving him an offering at the end of the blessing. Because Odin and the ancient Vikings enjoyed mead with some frequency, it’s my preferred offering for the Norse gods, but any sort of liquid will do. If there's a tree around that calls to you, leave the mead there; if not, then any spot on the ground will do. While pouring out the mead, picture the god again and say:
I give thanks to you, great Odin!
As always your will be done!
So mote it be!
THE BLESSINGS AND CURSES OF ARADIA
Aradia is one of the most popular goddesses in modern Witchcraft, though her actual origins are hard to determine. She first shows up in the English-speaking world in the 1899 book Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches by American folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland (1824-1903). Aradia appears there as the divine daughter of Diana and Lucifer (the Morning Star). In the cosmology of Aradia, she’s a messianic figure who teaches Witchcraft to those who are downtrodden and oppressed.
Even Witches who aren't familiar with Aradia (or the book named after her) have been influenced by her. The earliest version of the Charge of the Goddess appears in Aradia. There, Aradia teaches her followers how to properly honor her mother, Diana:
When I shall have departed from this world,
Whenever ye have need of anything,
Once in the month, and when the moon is full,
Ye shall assemble in some desert place,
Or in a forest all together join
To adore the potent spirit of your queen,
My mother, great Diana. She who fain
Would learn all sorcery yet has not won
Its deepest secrets, them my mother will Teach her, in truth all things as yet unknown. And ye shall all be freed from slavery, And so ye shall be free in everything; And as the sign that ye are truly free, Ye shall be naked in your rites, both men And women also: this shall last until
The last of your oppressors shall be dead. &
The influence of Aradia on modern Witchcraft cannot be overstated.
Witches and their goddesses have traditionally been associated with the moon. Diana (Artemis in Greek mythology) was worshiped and honored as both a goddess of the moon and a goddess of Witchcraft. This association to Witchcraft has never wavered, and after Europe was essentially Christianized, Diana continued to be associated with Witches. Why would we expect any less from her daughter?
One of the biggest differences between the Italian Witchcraft of Aradia and most modern Witchcraft traditions is just how aggressive Leland’s Witches were. The phrase “until the last of your oppressors shall be dead" isn't an isolated instance of negative magick in Aradia-, the text is full of such proclamations. Because of this, I’ve always seen Aradia as a goddess of protection, and I often celebrate her as such in my coven.
While I have many BoS’s that I don’t mind sharing with others, some are not for public consumption and are reserved for only my wife and me. To these books I like to add a curse, and to give that curse a little extra added potency, I write the curse while invoking the goddess Aradia. Since Aradia is a goddess of the moon, when I write a curse in her name I prefer to do it either in the middle of an esbat (full moon) ritual or simply in a magical space on a full moon night. (A magical space could simply be a place outdoors that I find especially spiritual or my usual ritual room.)
Curse Invoking Aradia Most curses in a BoS are placed near the front of the book and generally serve as a warning to the nosy. My BoS curse gives the curious an out before the curse is activated, which is why it starts off in a rather positive light before getting a bit nastier. I’d hate to accidentally curse my father if he just innocently picked up a book off my shelves.
This ritual does not require any tools. You will need a pen and a little bit of ceremonial wine (or grape juice), preferably held in a chalice or other magically significant container. Start by making sure your book is bathed in moonlight. If you're working in a space where natural moonlight is not an option, then use the light of the candle. Hold your book open to the space where you want to add your curse, and call to the goddess Aradia:
Just as the Witches of old once did, I call to you, great Aradia, this night of the full moon.
Hear my pleas, and if it would please thee, help me in my magickl Lend your energies and power to my rites so that I may preserve my secrets as a Witch!
While keeping your book in Aradia's moonlight, begin writing the curse in your BoS. As the moonlight traces over your pen and your fingers, feel its energy moving into your BoS as you write the following:
For Witches true this book shall only be.
Close it now if you aren't meant to see.
I conjure this curse upon those who pry.
Read not my words unless thee wish to cry, For the unwanted are not allowed in.
Break ye my trust you shall be awash in sin. Torment, pain, and sadness be upon you.
Those who would not to the art be true, Go no further, thee who would avoid woe.
In the name of Aradia, let it be so!
After writing the curse down in your book, seal it into place by lightly dipping your finger into the wine (lightly being a key word here) and drawing a banishing pentagram over the page where your curse lies. As you draw the pentagram, say these words aloud:
With wine and power I seal this spell. By the power of Aradia all will be well. Out of my book trespassers will stay.
Aradia and I shall have our way!
So mote it be!
Before closing up your book make sure the wine has dried upon the page your curse has been placed. Be sure to thank the moon and Aradia for lending their energies to your work and for keeping your BoS safe from prying eyes.
[contents]
· 49 Clive Barrett, The Egyptian Gods and Goddesses, 138.
· 50 Jonathan Kirsch, God Against the Gods: The History of the War Between Monotheism and Polytheism, (New York: Viking Books, 2004), 31.
· 51 Proverbs 8:1-2 in the World English Bible, www.bible-gateway.com/pas-sage/?search=Proverb-s+8. (Emphasis and capitalization by Mankey.)
· 52 Luke 2:46 in the World English Bible, www.biblegateway.com/ passage/?search=Luke%2O2:46.
· 53 Anders Winroth, The Age of the Vikings (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 214-215.
· 54 Ibid., 217.
· 55 Ibid.
· 56 Ibid.
· 57 Charles Godfrey Leland, Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches (1899), ch. 1, www.sacred-texts.com/pag/aradia/ara03.htm.
chapter 8
The Book of Shadows in Ritual
Writing this book presented several challenges, the biggest one of all being that we Witches don’t really do all that much with а Book of Shadows in ritual. Unlike an athame or a chalice, a BoS is not an active ritual tool. I don’t use my BoS to cast a circle or call the quarters, and it's not a part of the Great Rite or cakes and ale. It’s not something I wave around to direct magical energy, like a wand, nor is it a magical focus, like a mirror or pentacle.
All that I really do with my BoS in ritual is read from it, and sometimes even that is looked down upon by some people. Ritualist and blogger Steven Posch suggests that if something is worth saying in ritual, it’s worth memorizing. While Posch is not wrong here, it’s also easier said than done.^ My rituals are all in my BoS precisely because I don’t have them memorized, and probably never will. I’m just not good at memorizing things, especially specifics.
There’s certainly a place for memorization in ritual. If your coven uses the same quarter calls, you should probably memorize them (and most likely will end up doing so by default). My coven uses the same blessing prayer at the start of every ritual, and over the course of a year, thanks to repeating it again and again, we all memorized it. After a few months, some of us were reciting it from memory and some of us were reading it out of our BoS’s, but that didn’t have any effect on the ritual or the meaning of the prayer.
Some groups use their BoS (and simply written rituals) as a kind of outline. They throw out specific line readings and let intuition guide their quarter calls and ritual workings. The Reclaiming tradition of Witchcraft, for example, works this way. They know what they will do during ritual, but they leave the exact words up to whoever is leading the rite.
I tend to like working from a fully written ritual, with every і dotted and every t crossed, but it's often more of a safety blanket than a ritual script. The fully written rite is something to get me back on track if the ritual starts going down the wrong path. Also, sometimes it's easy to space out and lose focus, so having a fully written ritual is a great fallback.
There are some traditions that require a mostly precise reading from a BoS or a ritual script. To be an initiated Gardnerian Witch, there are certain steps that have to be done in the process of initiation. Leaving things up to chance and “I thought I remembered how to do it” doesn’t work in such instances. Witchcraft traditions are called that because they contain traditions, and often those traditions have to be followed rather close to the letter.
The Advantages of Reading from Your BoS During Ritual
Several years ago I was part of a big ritual whose overriding theme was “finding yourself." The moral of the story was that ultimately we are all responsible for finding our own destiny. The ritual itself was a lot of fun and was based on The Wizard of Oz. (I got to play the Cowardly Lion because of my great mane of blonde hair!)
The climax of the ritual had the Mayor of Munchkinland chatting with Glinda the Good Witch about each of us finding our own way home from Oz. It should have been the grand and glorious climax of an enjoyable rite, but Glinda the Good Witch forgot her lines and the ultimate point of the ritual got completely lost. I don't blame Glinda. These things happen. She thought she had her lines memorized and then just didn't. The last bit of ritual ended up going wildly off track and we never quite recovered, despite the best efforts of Munchkinland's Mayor (who did have a script in his hand).
Incidents like this are why I keep my BoS close to me during ritual. I don’t have to read everything from it line for line and word for word, but it’s nice to have a bit of guidance at hand just in case (or, most likely, when) I need it. Why bother to write out a ritual if you can’t use that writing?
Like most of you reading this, I'm not an actor. I don’t have much experience with having to remember lines or blocking scenes. Enacting rituals is also not my job. Granted I get paid a little bit of money to write books and write about Pagan stuff, but doing those things takes me away from preparing for ritual—and memorizing all of it. Most of us work full-time jobs, take care of our families, and need time to read and perhaps watch TV. There’s no shame in admitting that you simply don’t have ten hours a week to set aside to memorize an Imbolc ritual that might be shared only once or twice.
Reading out of a BoS has a lot of precedent too. Witchcraft’s greatest poet and liturgist Doreen Valiente referenced Gerald Gardner reading from his BoS during their first ritual together: “In one hand he brandished ’Old Dorothy's’ sword while in the other he held the handwritten 'Book of Shadows' as he read the ritual by which I was formally made a priestess and witch." ” If Doreen didn't mind Gerald reading from his BoS, I think everyone can forgive me for reading from mine!
My ability to memorize things is so poor that I generally can’t even remember my own rituals most of the time. Nearly eighteen years ago I wrote my own Charge of the God for a large Beltane ritual my local college group was putting together. I've used that Charge probably over a hundred times now in ritual, yet I have completely failed to memorize it over all these years. Could it be because it's just too long? Maybe memorization of long passages is just something some of us are incapable of.
Reading in Ritual
For those who believe that every line said in ritual should be memorized or spontaneous, I say, "That’s great!” I admire your dedication and respect the way you do ritual. For those of us incapable of doing things that way, here are some hints on how to read from your BoS during ritual. And the how here is really important, because there are right and wrong ways to do it.
Be Familiar with the Material Before Ritual
just because someone has a script in their hand doesn’t mean they are ready to enact a ritual. Whether the ritual is memorized or read, anyone taking part in it should be familiar with their lines and duties before it starts. This doesn’t mean that every ritual requires two months of pre-ritual practice; what it means is that no one should sound like they are reading the ritual for the first time while it’s being performed.
With all the thees, thous, motes, and various deity names, the words spoken in Witch ritual are often very different from the everyday language we use in mundania. You can keep your ritual free of tongue twisters by saying all of the dialogue aloud a few times before ritualizing with the rest of the coven. I’ve seen even the most experienced high priestesses trip over the goddess names Melusine and Arianrhod.
In addition to knowing all the spoken words in ritual, it’s important to know the actions needed to successfully implement a rite. Rituals aren't plays either, so sometimes it takes more than stage directions (“walk to the right of the altar*'); it takes detailed instructions. Ritual is a sacred act, and often even the smallest gestures are imbued with meaning and significance.
Over the years I’ve seen and heard way too many Witches read ritual stage instructions as if they were parts of the rite to be said aloud. Hearing “High priest walks over to the north of the altar*' in the middle of a moving Samhain ritual has caused a few giggles on my end over the years. There's no excuse for it, and with just a little bit of preparation it’s something that should never happen. One of the ways I’ve managed to avoid this over the years is by placing spoken text in a different font (or color of ink) in my BoS.
You Can Read from a BoS and Hold On to a Sword During Ritual (Maybe)
It can be hard to juggle all the moving parts of a ritual with a big fat BoS in your hands. Luckily there are a few alternatives to simply holding and reading a book in ritual. One of my Witch teachers used to keep her book on a stand during ritual. She placed it near the altar so she could easily consult it whenever she needed to; all she had to do was simply look down and the text she needed would be there.
A book stand can be elaborate or simple. My high priestess's was probably originally designed to hold a decorative plate and not a BoS. Music stands make great book holders, and they can often be raised and lowered to fit the needs of the individual Witch.
When my wife and I find ourselves in the middle of a really big ritual, we’ll sometimes employ “assistants" to hold our books for us. When wielding a sword in ritual, it’s probably for the best that my high priestess-wife doesn’t hold her own BoS. She usually only allows a trusted coven member to hold her book. We’ll also share the same book with each other, with me holding it open to the right pages for her and vice versa. It's just a little extra closeness with my most important magical partner!
(К <4 1 “II >V|| ГІ 4Л I -IVV l*Wl k^-J ?/>*”(• V
off your walls. Put two of them up for every cheat sheet, and you can rotate your memory aids in and out of plastic sheet protectors. This is especially useful if you've got a few different circles that meet in the same space.
We Can Do Better Than Reading from a Piece of Paper in Ritual
While most of this book pertains to BoS’s and other magical books, I’m fully aware that many of the rituals we Witches perform never make it into our Books of Shadows. Oftentimes well simply write a ritual for a specific event and then print it out to use in ritual. It’s something I’ve done many times before and will do again in the future, but I think ritual works better when we turn that standard piece of paper into something that better resembles a ritual tool.
Many of the things we use in ritual are about creating atmosphere. We don’t just use candles so we can see in the dark; we use them because they provide a certain sort of ambiance that electric light just can't provide. Nothing ruins the aesthetic of a ritual faster than someone reading the ritual off of a plain piece of paper they just took out of their pocket. Not every line is worth memorizing, but every line is worth presenting in an attractive way.
If your ritual isn't going in the BoS, at least put it in a nice folder before bringing it into the circle. Even better, tape it into your BoS (or another attractive book) before the ritual and then remove it later. It’s a small thing, but it will make you look prepared and professional.
I've seen a lot of people use notecards in ritual over the years, and while that’s a step up from printer paper, it’s still not ideal.
Books just look magical and authoritative in ritual. I think we do ourselves a service when we at least pretend to use them. Appearance counts for a lot in the circle!
What a Book ofShadows Is Not
Christians, Muslims, and Jews are sometimes referred to as "people of the book” because of the importance they place on their holy texts. My BoS’s are important to me, but they aren’t holy books, nor are they infallible. The rites, rituals, rules, and spells contained within them were all written by women and men. Some bits were perhaps divinely inspired, but that doesn't make them infallible.
A Book of Shadows is a guide and oftentimes a chronicle of events and ideas, but it's not an absolute. If a BoS is representative of a tradition, it's important that the main tenets of that tradition are preserved, but that doesn't mean there’s no room for innovation. A wise person once said to me, "A BoS should never be subtracted from, but it can always be added to." The only downside to such thinking is that some of my BoS’s are the size of War and Peacel
A BoS should never be the master of a Witch. Ultimate authority in a coven lies with its leaders, members, and the gods. A BoS can serve as a useful source of information and offer insight, but nothing in a BoS is truly holy writ. The Lord and Lady did not dictate the BoS, nor did a Witch prophet descend from a mountain on high clutching a small black book full of ritual.
As an initiate of a lineaged tradition, I’ll admit that some of what I’m writing here is causing a bit of internal dialogue. I believe that it’s important to practice the rituals that were given to me as they were written, but that doesn't mean I can't add new pieces and additions around the edges. In my experience, the various BoS’s held by people in my tradition all tend to be very different, with a very specific core preserved intact.
Initiatory covens with long family trees tend to pass their BoS's down from teacher (high priestess or high priest) to student (initiate). During that process various coven members add material to the BoS, meaning that as each member becomes eligible to receive their BoS, they become free to add things to it. The core remains, but it's been added to. Contrast that with books such as the Bible or the Quran, which are set in stone, with no additions allowed.
Witchcraft and magical practice have a long and distinguished history. As a Witch, I often feel like a caretaker of that history. I adore and value where we’ve come from, but a Witch is constantly on the move. Our practices need to move ever forward. That’s why it’s important to remember that we don’t exist to serve our books; our books exist to serve and assist us.
Every Trick in the Book:
Holding the Keys to Mystery
we usually read nonfiction books to gain information about a topic. A book only acts as a guide to an experience; it is like reading a menu in a restaurant, not like actually eating the food. In a Book of Shadows, we often find ritual scripts, spells, myths and lore, recipes for herbs and oils, and similar materials. The book acts as a manual for doing a certain kind of Witchcraft. But if we think of a Book of Shadows as being part of a wider tradition of magical books, it can be more than just a guide.
Scholar Arthur Versluis has a fascinating theory about particular Renaissance grimoires. He suggests that many occult traditions were passed down the generations continuously—but not in a direct initiatory transmission from teacher to student. Rather, the mysteries were communicated through literature and art, and in densely illustrated occult texts. Versluis suggests that the purpose of elaborate illustrations in Rosicrucian and alchemical literature is to emphasize and amplify the hieratic nature of these traditions. If a book is to serve an initiatory function, it can better do so if it reveals its subject in both words and images. In this way, the book becomes hieroglyphic—it is not merely an abstract discussion about some topic; it actually reveals (hiera ) the nature of its subject.^
If a book can enable a connection between the absent writer and the reader, Versluis suggests, the result can be a moment of gnosis—a revelation of divine knowledge that cannot be fully contained in words. In other words, the book can trigger an initiatory experience.
The books that Versluis has in mind are ones in which text and image are equally important. Modern occultists have continued to use combinations of art and text to convey mystical experiences. Probably the most famous example of this approach in the twentieth century is that of artist-magician Austin Osman Spare, whose haunting illustrations and writings were a major influence on chaos magic. Sigil magic—a practice in which an intention-laden phrase is reduced to a set of letters, converted to an image, and then charged with sexual energy—evolved out of Spare's work.
More recently, several British comics creators have employed comics’ unique combination of text and image for occult purposes. Writers such as Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, and Steve Moore (no relation to Alan) have used comics both to educate the reader about magick and to convey the essence of particular magical experiences. Alan Moore and j. H. Williams’s Promethea series, for example, takes the reader on an immersive journey up the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. Each issue’s tone, colors, and artistic style reflect the nature of a unique otherworldly realm.
For the Witch who is an artist or a poet, a Book of Shadows can capture magical experiences in artistic form. Under a skilled hand, such a book becomes more than a guide to having magical experiences, or a diary of them: it contains the keys to mystery.
CHRISTINE HOFF KRAEMER, PHD
Christine Hoff Kraemer, PhD, specializes in contemporary Paganism, sexuality, theology, and popular culture.
She is an instructor in the Theology and Religious History department at Cherry Hill Seminary and author of Seeking the Mystery: An Introduction to Pagan Theologies (2012) and Eros and Touch from a Pagan Perspective (2013). She has also co*edited two collections:
Craven Images: Religion in Comic Books and Graphic Novels (2010) and Pagan Consent Culture (2016).
[contents]
· 58 John Halstead, "Five Ritualists I'd like to Invite to Dinner, Part 2: Steven Posch,” Patheos (April 8, 2014), www.patheos.com/blogs/al lergicpagan/2Oi4/O4/°^/^ve' ritu-i sts-id-li ke-to-vite-vite-di n-ner-part-steven-posch.posch.
· 59 Doreen Valiente, The Rebirth of Witchcraft, 47.
· 60 Arthur Versluis, Restoring Paradise: Western Esotericism, Literature, Art, and Consciousness (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004), 142.
chapter 9
Cleansing, Consecrating, and Other Rituals
Witches generally love to consecrate, dedicate, and bless their working tools. Over the years I’ve come across consecration rites for statues, candles, swords, and chalices, but never for a BoS. Since I often consult my BoS during ritual, it’s become my most handled and “used" ritual tool bar none. My original blue BoS is my most continually used working tool, as I’ve changed cups, knives, and deity statues over the years.
I don't think I’m alone either when it comes to using a BoS frequently in ritual. Many of my Witch friends frequently consult their BoS’s and often keep the same operative one for years and even decades. That being the case, why do people so rarely seem to bless their working books?
There are many people out there who don’t view the BoS as a proper working tool. It’s not deliberately used to manipulate energy (like a wand) or to represent the Goddess or God (like a statue or a candle) or even an element (like a chalice full of water). As a result, they see it as a background or nonessential ritual item, and nonessential items don’t have to be consecrated.
Dedicating, blessing, and consecrating are three very different things, so before we proceed with the rituals, I feel like I should explain the differences. Dedication links an item to a specific person, deity, or group. In the case of a BoS, the book might be dedicated to the coven, since a coven-specific BoS would be designed specifically for that group or tradition. To bless something
is to ask a higher power to watch over it. We often ask the blessings of the gods in my coven, meaning we want them to walk with us and help us in our day-to-day lives.
Consecrating a ritual tool is a way to forever link that tool with the Craft. When we consecrate our working tools, we are dedicating them to both Witchcraft and the gods and goddesses we serve in the circle. Consecrating an item is a way of marking it for ritual use. I don't like to use the word holy very often, but it's appropriate here. We are making tools holy to the gods when we consecrate them.
Cleansing is a part of many consecration/blessing/dedication ceremonies, and though it fits in nicely with such activities, it’s something else entirely. To cleanse an item is to remove all negative energies from it. Sometimes those bad energies show up in the manufacturing process (if your BoS comes from an industrial sweatshop in China, it might need to be cleansed of that energy) or they accumulate over time. If you came across your BoS secondhand, it may have other energies attached to it, particularly if the previous owner met with a tragic end. If my wife and I were to ever get divorced, whichever one of us ended up with our shared BoS would probably want to cleanse it to remove the energies of the ex-spouse.
Most consecration rituals give lip service to cleansing an item, but I think the best way to cleanse an item is to get it in tune with your own personal energies. For me, that often means just leaving my ritual tools on a personal altar, a space that’s generally full of my individual vitality. When an item is especially "dirty,” from an energy standpoint, I tend to bury the offending object in the ground. Since I don't want a rotting BoS, that’s not really an option for books (or even BoS’s on flash drives!), so keeping it close to your personal space remains the best approach.
One last word about cleansing: it’s a word used in a lot of rituals, but the thorough cleansing of an item involves more than just sprinkling some salt on it and running it through some incense. Even if your BoS is one that has simply been passed down in a tradition via a computer printer, make sure to spend some time with it. When it comes to magick, things will go much more smoothly when we are in sync with everything we use in the circle or even study in our free time. All the salted water in the world won’t replace simply holding something in your own hands.
Consecrating and Blessing a BoS for Personal Use
The first BoS most of us ever buy or receive is generally for personal use. Because of that, I thought it was the right way to start the rites in this chapter. Before beginning this consecration, you'll want to cast a circle, call the quarters, and invite whatever deities you work with to the party. When doing this as part of a coven working, I prefer to place consecrations immediately after calling to deity.
Start by placing your BoS on either a pentacle or the center of your altar. If you need to read from your BoS for the rite, all the better; it’s always a good idea to use your tools during and immediately after a consecration! After setting down your book, stop and think for a moment about all of the things you plan to place in your BoS over the next few years. Imagine the spells, the rituals, the calls to deity; see yourself holding your book during ritual and it helping to guide your experience in the Craft.
After you've steadied and readied yourself for the rite, begin by blessing and consecrating your BoS with the element of air, here symbolized by incense. Pick your book up off the pentacle and run it through the incense smoke, making sure the smoke touches the front and back covers, along with a few pages in the middle. Once you’ve allowed the power of air to touch your book, say these words:
Powers of air, spirits of the east, bless and consecrate this Book of Shadows set before you. May I find the inspiration to fill its pages and draw closer to the powers of this world. So mote it
be I
Place your book back on the pentacle and place a lit candle near it. Make sure the light shines on the book and its pages when opened. Take a moment to look at your book in the candlelight, let the light reflect off of it, and imagine it absorbing some of that light. Then continue:
Powers of fire, spirits of the south, bless and consecrate this Book of Shadows open before you. May it be a source of light and wisdom as I walk the path of the Witch. So mote it be!
Sprinkling water on the inside pages of a book is not a particularly good idea, so for this third step just sprinkle a little bit of water on the front and back covers and along the spine. As you bless the book with water, say:
Powers of water, spirits of the west, bless and consecrate this Book of Shadows lying before you. May it chronicle my journeys both in the Craft and around the Wheel of the Year! So mote it
be!
Most Witches use salt to represent the power of earth, and it's also especially effective at removing negativity. On the plus side, unlike with water, sprinkling a little salt on the pages of your BoS won't hurt anything. As you sprinkle the salt on the book, recite these words:
Powers of earth, spirits of the north, bless and consecrate this Book of Shadows placed before you. Grant me the knowledge, experience, and insight to use it wisely on my journey as a
Witch. So mote it be!
If you are going to exclusively use particular deities in your BoS, you'll want to use those names in this next part. If you’re like me and prefer to keep your options open, go ahead and use the generic (yet still effective) invocations to the Lord and Lady provided here. I usually have deity statues on my altar, but if you don’t have such things, simply using two candles to represent them will work, as will objects that connect you to them. I associate acorns and oak leaves with the Horned God and seashells with the Goddess, for example.
Place your book on the pentacle and picture the Horned God (or whatever male deity you honor; and if you work exclusively with goddesses, that’s fine too!) in your mind’s eye. Visualize him standing tall and strong in a forest of green. Breathe deeply and draw that power into yourself. Now pick up your BoS and exhale, and as you exhale, pour his energy into your book. If it feels right to you, repeat this step several times to give your book a little extra oomph. Hold your BoS in both hands and present it to your God statue (or whatever you are using to represent him), saying:
Horned Hunter, god of the wild spaces, lord of death and resurrection, bless and consecrate this Book of Shadows. May it bring me ever closer to your mysteries. So mote it be!
Now repeat the same process but with the Great Goddess. Picture her standing on an ocean shore, the wild powers of the ocean behind her and the never-ending cosmos above her. Know that she controls all, yet her face is warm and kind, and you can feel her love for you and the earth radiating from her. Breathe deeply, collecting that energy and emotion, and as you exhale, release that energy into your BoS. Do this for as long as you feel comfortable, and when you feel her energy radiating in your book and ritual space, present your book to her statue (or symbol) while saying:
Great Goddess, lovely lady, she who is maiden, mother, crone, and master of all, bless and consecrate this Book of Shadows.
May it serve both you and me as we walk the path of the Witch. Guide my steps and guide my hand, heart, and mind that I may draw ever closer to you. So mote it be!
Using blood in ritual is something that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. If you are one of those people, feel free to skip this next part. A book that has been consecrated to and blessed by the Lord and Lady and the four elements is certainly more than enough; however, if you want to add a little extra power to this rite, please continue.
Blood has a lot of magical power, not to mention it carries both our DNA and our life force. Because of how important my BoS's are to me, I wanted to create an extra bit of ritual that requires me to give something of myself to my book. I think my BoS is the most personal tool I own as a Witch. Inside its pages are the things that are the most important to my practice of Witchcraft. I’ve never made my own athame or chalice, but my BoS is generally all mine. It represents me in a way no other tool does.
Blood magick is not to be trifled with, and I'd never recommend much more than a pinprick. In order to do this safely, you'll want to buy a medical-grade lancet (they usually come in boxes) and have a bandage and some disinfectant ready for afterward.
Place your BoS on the pentacle and open the book to the first full page (or whatever page you want to mark). When you are comfortable, prick yourself with the lancet on the tip of your forefinger (which is generally thought to be the best finger for directing magical energy). After a small drop of blood has formed, press that onto the book page while saying:
FINGERPRINT ON BOS
My words, my vision, my book! May it ever serve me and the gods, and may I ever serve the Craft! So mote it be!
Before closing up shop, tend to your finger; stop the bleeding and put some disinfectant on it. When that's done, continue on with the rite.
Before taking down the circle, state the purpose of the rite one last time and thank all the powers that you called to during the ritual:
With the blessings of the Goddess, the God, and the four elements, I have blessed and consecrated this Book of Shadows! Thanks to those who have blessed and witnessed this endeavor! May my book ever be a useful tool in this, my journey. Blessed be!
If you can keep your book open for a bit longer to let the blood dry (there shouldn't be much on it), try to do so. It will smudge, which is completely fine—every BoS should have a few smudges in it!
A Coven Book Blessing
A Book of Shadows shared by a coven is often extremely different from a personal BoS. Rites and rituals generally reflect the words and work of a number of different people. My Gardnerian BoS has contributions from dozens of writers stretching back to long before I was born. A BoS I wrote specifically for my coven has our group’s ritual outline (which I wrote) but also rituals from other coven members. I think books specific to traditions and covens need a different type of ritual, a group ritual.
Most covens I know that have "a book” have multiple copies of that book. Rare indeed is the high priestess who keeps one ultimate ritual book just for herself. With that in mind, the rite here is designed to consecrate and bless the words contained within a BoS shared by a coven. Whether that means enacting the rite with just one book (generally the one used by whoever does most of the heavy lifting/most of the talking in the coven) or having everyone bring their copy of the coven BoS is up to your group. For this ritual I chose to put the focus on one book because I think it flows more easily.
I've been lucky enough to be a part of several different covens and traditions. This ritual comes from a coven not tied to any particular tradition. We began practicing together as a circle (no perfect love or perfect trust) and eventually evolved into a coven over a period of about a year and a half. During that time we eventually settled on a pretty specific way of doing ritual and came up with our own Book of Shadows. This ritual represents a BoS written and grown in such circumstances.
Since the rituals in my own coven are generally led by my wife and me, I have chosen to use the titles high priestess and high priest in this rite. However, either part can be enacted by anyone, or even just one person. Two high priestesses or two high priests are completely acceptable alternatives, as are forgetting titles altogether.
Start the ritual as you normally would with quarter calls and circle castings. Once the gods have been invoked, begin the book blessing.
High Priestess: We have all walked many paths and been down many roads. At this time in our lives those travels have led us all here to this place.
High Priest: A coven is more than a group of Witches; it's a chosen family. We were not born into this assembly, but we have embraced it gladly and with an open heart.
High Priestess: "Perfect love and perfect trust" is more than a casual turn of phrase. We should feel love and trust encircle us when we gather together. (Turns to high priest on her left and places her hand in his.) Tonight I put my hand in yours. You are my love and my heart, and my secrets I willingly share with you.
High Priest: (Turns to covener on his left and places his hand in hers.) You are my love and my heart, and my secrets I willingly
share with you.
This phrase and these actions are repeated by everyone in the circle until all are holding hands. The circle ends where it began, in the hands of the high priestess.
High Priestess: Tonight we bless our secrets, our mysteries. The rites and rituals of this coven are the result of the roads we have all traveled, together and alone. The members of this coven are the links of a chain, stronger together than apart.
High Priest: The words and rituals we bless this night are the ones we have chosen to honor the Lady and Lord, the powers of this world, and each other. It is only right that we bless and sanctify the book and words we have chosen together.
The high priestess picks up the BoS being blessed and places it on the altar, with pages open for all to see. If the coven has a pentacle, you can add a little extra bit of power to the ritual by placing the BoS on it.
High Priestess: Eternal Lady, Great Goddess, Mother of All the World, we seek your power and magick this night. Upon this altar sits our Book of Shadows, the words and rites of this coven. We ask that you bless this, our BoS. May its words help to bind us all together and make our circle stronger. So mote it bel
The high priestess should now lightly dip the index finger of her power hand into the bowl of salted water on the altar and make the sign of the Coddess upon one of the book’s open pages. As she steps back into the circle, the high priest should step forward to continue the rite.
SIGN OF THE GODDESS AND SIGN OF TH EGOD
High Priest: Homed One, Lord of the Harvest, Shining One, we seek your power and your magick this night. Our Book of Shadows sits upon our altar; its words represent the experience and knowledge of this coven. We ask that you bless this, our BoS. May its rites and rituals carry us forward as Witches. So mote it be!
The high priest now makes the sign of the God on one of the book’s open pages, just as the high priestess did. When he’s done, the book should be opened to a blank page near either the beginning or the end of the book (your choice; it all depends on how your book is set up and where some empty space is). An unlit candle should be placed near enough to the BoS that it's light will shine upon the book's pages when lit.
High Priestess: Our Book of Shadows helps to illuminate our path, but we are not slaves to it. It is a source of guidance, wisdom, and ritual but is not the source of all absolute truth. As Witches we hold our own power and answer to the Lady and Lord whom we adore and to this, our chosen family.
High Priest: We honor the words in our Book of Shadows, but we do not worship them or believe that they are holy, as some in other faiths do. The words in this book were written by mortals, and while they may have been divinely inspired, they are not of themselves divine. It is we Witches who shine with divine light when we embrace the mysteries and swear to harm none and abide by the Wiccan Rede.
High Priestess: But even knowing that the words of mortals are limited, we continue on with our rite. For tonight we honor and celebrate the words we share together. Lord and Lady, we do not stumble blindly in the darkness, for you walk with us this night and always.
High Priest: We also know that you help those who help themselves, and we have put this book together so that it might help guide our steps and draw us closer to you. It is not the only light we see, but is one of many that brings us closer to the powers and mysteries found in the Craft of the Wise.
High Priestess: As a family we have chosen to sanctify these, the rites of our coven. We are separate yet operate as one when in the confines of the magick circle. If there are any here who object to these words and rites, may they speak now before we proceed.
High Priest: There are no objections, my Lady. We all wish to proceed with the rite.
High Priestess: As we have all agreed upon this Book of Shadows, let us all now affix our names to it and claim it as our own.
High Priest: We shall claim this book as ours by sharing our magical names here on this page. I, (magical name), proudly claim this book and these rites as my Book of Shadows in this coven. So mote it be.
High Priestess: I, (magical name), proudly claim this book and these rites as my Book of Shadows in this coven. So mote it be.
Coing clockwise, everyone steps forward to sign the book, using their given or magical name (whatever they prefer). Coveners should feel free to express any other thoughts they have about the BoS while signing the book. When everyone has signed the book and accepted the BoS, the rite continues.
High Priestess: family we have accepted these rites as our own.
Long may they serve and guide this coven. Let wisdom and truth always guide our words and actions in the circle. So mote it be.
Retiring a Book of Shadows
The simple act of using a Book of Shadows will contribute to its eventual demise. Spines will eventually break, and pages will fall out. That cover that looked so magical fifteen years ago will begin to droop and sit oddly over the rest of the book. It’s a sad day when a BoS nears its end, but well-loved and well-used things don’t always last forever.
My wife's first BoS looks much like the book I just described. Its cover is about to fall off, and there's about an inch between the book’s spine and its contents. She has used it for almost twenty years now, and it shows. I hope all of my handwritten BoS’s eventually look like hers, because it will mean that they have served me well.
For the Witch who has invested in their magical tools, it's likely that those tools will last a lifetime. My first athame looks much the same today as it did nineteen years ago, and the same goes for my first chalice. There’s a permanence to those items that’s largely the result of what they are made of. Our blades might tarnish and rust a bit, but they aren’t going to fall apart (and since my sword is over a hundred years old, I know that to be true!).
In my time as a Witch, the only magical and ritual items I’ve ever had to dispose of have been deity statues. There have been unfortunate incidents with shelves and moving vans, with the end result being a representation of Aphrodite in dozens of pieces. I think the image of a deity deserves more than a trip to the wastebasket, so I’ve always buried my broken statues. But for whatever reason, I can't imagine doing the same thing to a BoS. It deserves a different fate.
I can imagine someone out there thinking, "Why would you ever want to retire or dispose of a Book of Shadows?” Some of it comes down to oathbound promises. If a book is actively leaking pages and you have certain ideas and practices you want to keep secret, it might be time to retire a BoS. Sometimes we simply change the path we are on and want to start over. There’s no shame in that. Things die, so to speak; as Witches, we know that’s a part of the natural cycle.
This next ritual is one I hope no one will have to use very often, but now and then there comes a time when certain things need to be let go of. That day is coming soon for my wife's BoS, and when it does, I want to pay respect to her book because it’s been a part of our lives for so long. Its contents will end up being copied to other pages, and the words she placed in that book will live on just as powerfully as before. But the original physical book will be no more.
We have a strange relationship with fire today. Burning things is often seen as a negative, but for ancient Pagans it was how they sent gifts to the gods. Flag burning as a form of protest is seen as disrespectful by many, but the proper way to "retire” a flag is to burn it. In my personal practice, I burn all sorts of things: prayer cards, written-down spells, and offerings to the Coddess and Cod. I do so because I think it's a respectful way to end something and because it releases the energy in those items back out into the universe.
Letting Co of a Book of Shadows
Anytime you choose to burn something, it should preferably be done outdoors, or perhaps in a fireplace. Small charcoal briquettes designed for indoor use are fine for burning small things, but for something as big as a BoS you'll want to be outside. We have a portable fire pit container that we use for outdoor rituals, but a regular charcoal grill works fine too. Unless you put together a roaring bonfire, you’ll want something that you can put a screen over to prevent book pages from flying away in the breeze.
Start the ritual as you would any other. Cast a circle, call the quarters, and invoke the Goddess and God. I suggest starting the fire before the ritual starts so it’s ready for when you need it. Begin the letting-go rite by holding your old BoS aloft and saying:
Tonight I let go of this Book of Shadows! For many years it has served me and my gods well. We have shared magick and
mystery, ritual and rhyme, and now in light of this service I offer it up to the Lord and Lady that the words within it may ever honor them and the energy contained within it may be released. So mote it be!
If you are retiring your old book because you have put together a new working BoS, stop for a moment and place your old book on top of the new one. While holding both books, think of the shared words between them and try to direct the energy of the old BoS into the new one. Imagine the times you've used the old BoS; picture the rituals and work you've done over the years, and take those memories and place them in the new book. Feel your fingers tingle as the energy leaves the old book and enters the new one.
Now place both books on your pentacle (or just the altar) and say:
While I come here tonight to release a Book of Shadows, I know that its words and rites shall live on. The power of those rituals is now contained within this new space and will ever be a part of my power and journey as a Witch. So mote it be!
Pause for a moment and focus on the old becoming the new. When you feel satisfied that the energies of your original book have transferred into the new one, continue with the rite.
If you have Goddess and God statues (or things representing them) on the altar, present your old book to them, starting with the Horned God:
Horned One, this book has served me well over the years, leading me ever closer to your mysteries. As the Lord of Death and Resurrection, I ask for your blessings as I let it go this night.
Blessed be!
Now turn to the Goddess, perhaps stopping to look up at her as the moon if she’s shining upon you. Present your old book to her and say:
Great Lady, Mistress of the Moon, this book has brought me light and wisdom. It has shined upon the path that we've walked together. May the secrets between us remain ever that
as I let go of these Shadows this night. Blessed be!
If you are like me, it’s very possible that you’ll cry when you set your book on its funeral pyre. If this happens, remember that burning in fire is a much better end than rotting slowly in the ground or, even worse, being unearthed by someone who doesn't care about the mysteries of the Craft. Place your book in the flames and then say your final goodbyes, knowing that it has served you well:
Well have you served me and well do I let you go. With respect and thanks I release this book from my service. May its words ever live within and without me. The physical is fleeting; it is
the spirit that is eternal. Go from me knowing that your lessons and teaching reside forever within the heart of this Witch. So mote it be!
Stay near the fire until the book is completely consumed by the flames. As your old BoS burns, imagine its remaining energies dissipating into the world, ready to be used anew.
Witches are consummate recyclers, and this rite provides a great opportunity to do just that. The day after the ritual, go and collect the ashes from your BoS. Place them in a bowl or bag and then sprinkle them around your house so that their remaining energies will keep your home safe and sound. As you sprinkle them around the perimeter of the house (being especially vigilant around windows and doors), say:
With Witch's fire I do protect My family and home from harm. With the power of secrets kept,
I invoke this, book’s power to charm. By Lady, Lord, and Witchcraft’s might, This house shall be safe day and night.
As you sprinkle the ashes, visualize all of the rites, rituals, and spellcraft from your old BoS safeguarding your home. I usually imagine this as a warm blue-white light, but you should picture whatever colors imply protection to you. When you’ve sprinkled the last of the ashes, let out a strong So mote it be! to end the rite.
[contents!
chapter ю
NEW FRONTIERS AND THE BOS
One of the weirdest parts about writing a book is that people will often ask you about it and offer comments and suggestions. When this happens, I'm often not sure how to reply. Do they want me to enthusiastically talk about the book and give them a mini-lecture on what I’ve discovered so far? Maybe they don’t really care and are simply asking to be polite. I’m never really sure.
When people offer advice on what to put in a book, I sometimes get the feeling that they don’t trust me as a writer. Perhaps they think I’m going to overlook something of major importance, or maybe they think my take on Witchcraft is wrong and they are trying to preemptively correct me. It's easy to get turned around in these situations because it’s hard to be sure of people’s intentions.
I've gotten more suggestions about what to put in this book than any other written project I’ve ever attempted. Some of that is most likely because people have strong opinions on what should and shouldn't go into a BoS. But I think in the case of this book, some of my friends are looking for validation. They want to know that what they are doing is acceptable and beyond reproach.
Witchcraft exists in a strange little pocket between cutting-edge and old-fashioned. We were one of the first spiritual communities to really utilize the Internet as a way to communicate and share information, yet we also like "old" things. Many call Witchcraft the "Old Religion" and refer to our practices as the “Old Ways.” In my own rituals I like to use archaic-sounding language on occasion, and like many of us, I often look to the ancient Pagan past for ritual inspiration.
Modern Witchcraft, in my estimation, is just that: modern; but through its power we are able to connect with magickal currents that are centuries old. The tools we tend to use in ritual (knives, brooms, cups, swords, and wands) are timeless. They also existed five hundred years ago and will continue to exist in varying forms in another five hundred years. Witches aren’t resistant to change, but we tend to like the classics, and there are few things more classic than a book.
However, technology is changing right before our eyes. Many of you are no doubt reading this on a Kindle or an iPad. Both things didn’t even exist ten years ago, and if you're like my wife, you might well be reading this book on your phone. When I was a kid, the only thing I could do on a phone was talk to other people. As media changes, the Book of Shadows is changing right along with it, and I think some people need to know that's okay.
In fifty years it's possible that only the most hardcore (or old-fashioned) of us will be using a paper BoS. Technology changes and how we consume images and words is changing right along with it. We’ve already gone from cave paintings to pottery shards to scrolls to books. The evolution of written ideas has always been ongoing, and it's only going to become more pronounced as we head into the future.
My BoS on a Flash Drive and a Tablet
just last year a high priest in my tradition gave me a flash drive containing not only our Book of Shadows but also the BoS’s of several other groups and traditions. To say that I treated those two inches of plastic and metal with a reverence usually reserved for my athame is an understatement. I made sure to wrap it up carefully after it was handed to me and to keep it in a place of honor once I got home.
It’s unlikely that I'll ever set a flash drive on my working altar or lovingly place one between the antlers of a Horned God statue, but that flash drive was very much a BoS. Once I accepted it, I was making a promise that neither it or its contents would ever fall into the wrong hands (in this case, the hands of someone beyond our tradition). By accepting that flash drive, I was making a promise to care for its contents as I would for a conventional written or printed Book of Shadows.
That particular flash drive has proven to be extremely beneficial over the last year. I can now go into my tradition's BoS and easily fix typos and other small problems. ( Just the other day I fixed the misspelling of a high priestess's name, and now all I have to do is print a copy of that page and give it to my initiates to fix the mistake in our paper BoS.) Making edits and other changes in a text has never been easier. This has resulted in my three-ring-binder BoS’s being far more fluid than ever before.
Before my extended Witch family shared things via digital file, we basically had to retype everything from scratch. For those of us who are fast typists, that's not so bad, but most people don't write for a living or spend hours and hours in front of a keyboard. Now, when I see a mistake, I can fix it with just a few quick key strokes.
Even more importantly, it’s now become so much easier to compare my BoS to the many other BoS’s out there. That flash drive given to me contained thirty years of BoS’s, some from the
United Kingdom and many more from the United States. It's now super easy to simply line up all of those various BoS versions side by side and compare them all in real time. I can now reasonably pinpoint when BoS’s were added to or subtracted from and how various Witch ideas evolved over time. Before digitizing our files, there simply was no way I was ever going to get to see some of these far-flung books.
I will admit that there's a part of me that sees a digital BoS as a source of information instead of a sacred book. Sure, I have to keep the contents of those files secret, but they don’t fill me with a sense of awe since I can't really "use” them in ritual unless they are printed out. Of course that’s changing, and with the advent of smartphones and tablets it's possible to use a digital BoS and never print out a copy.
Recently I used my iPad as my BoS in ritual when my printer decided not to cooperate with me, and it wasn’t as awful as I thought it would be. The words were easily seen on the screen, even before we had all of our ritual candles lit. My iPad is also just about the right size for lugging around in ritual. I probably wasted a little extra electricity that night because I had to change the settings on my tablet so it wouldn’t auto-lock and go blank after a few minutes of non-usage, but other than that things went fairly smoothly.
In the coming years I'm sure this will become more and more common. Experts have been predicting a paperless society for decades now, but I think we are finally headed that way. Entire covens might soon carry their tablets into ritual to use as BoS's. Whether this is good or bad probably depends on how comfortable you are with technology. Traditionalists will scoff, of course, but it's all probably inevitable.
iPad ritual
There are some downsides to working with a digital BoS. The first is the intense amount of light that comes from a cellphone or tablet. Many people find that sort of thing distracting, and in a darkened room my eyes will always dart to the shiny thing, such as a phone display. There’s also the worry that the energy released from a portable electronic device might mess up the natural energies of the circle. I’ve heard from many of my friends that digital things just don’t work very well around magick and have a tendency to “mess up” in such circumstances. This is not something that I’ve ever encountered, but I certainly believe it’s possible.
Covens are generally concerned about the peace of mind of every member, so no circle can comfortably go digital unless everyone is on board with it. This means that if you are tempted to use a tablet to guide your ritual, you should probably ask everyone you're doing ritual with if it's okay first. Many are going to resist such changes.
A Printon-Demand Book of Shadows
As you've probably guessed while reading this book, I’m rather serious about what goes into my BoS. When my eclectic coven began to develop a consistent ritual structure, I thought I should document that progress in written form. Our first BoS was more pamphlet than book and was put together as a quick Yule gift for everyone in our coven.
That “book” was titled The Rites and Rituals of the Oak Court and contained all sorts of typos and poor formatting choices. On the positive side, it included our core ritual (opening/circle cast-ing/quar-ters/cakes and ale) and an outline of how our rituals tended to be structured. I had it printed at a local print shop for a rather high fee considering how few pages were in it.
This book was formatted using a basic word processor and printed on standard sheets of paper. Considering that I put it together in just a few hours, it's a pretty good-looking little booklet. We jokingly refer to it as our “BoS.5” since it wasn’t substantial enough to qualify as a full “1." As our rituals continued to evolve over the following year, my wife suggested that I put something a bit more substantial together (which allowed me to get rid of the typos!).
The following Yule, I presented everyone in our coven with a 150-page book, complete with The Oak Court Book of Shadows printed on the spine. In that BoS I put all of our sabbat rituals, poems that had shown up in ritual, and complete explanations of everything we were doing in circle at the time. It ended up being so impressive-looking that I have friends from outside our coven who occasionally ask for a copy. I remain very proud of it. It’s not very often a person can say they created an entire BoS for a coven!
Instead of printing the material on sheets of paper and inserting them in a three-ring binder, I had actual books printed, complete with a glossy cover. Fifteen or twenty years ago the cost of such a book would have been prohibitive, but today there are all sorts of print-on-demand publishers that will produce a book for as little as seven to eight dollars a copy. I ended up with twenty copies for the coven for under one hundred fifty dollars, which is an exceedingly good deal. If you want to make your own book, just turn a document into a PDF, design a cover, hit send, and you'll be good to go.
Over the years I’ve used the online company Lulu when selfpublishing our BoS, but that isn't the only option. Amazon's Cre-ateSpace is a popular alternative, as are Blurb, Wo rd cl ay, and BookBaby. Companies like Lulu and CreateSpace don’t just offer an easy way to create books; they also sell them online. If you upload your BoS to such a service, make sure to keep it private, unless you want everyone getting hold of your coven's secrets.
I don’t expect every or even most covens to go to the trouble of printing an actual book, but if you've got a BoS you want to distribute to a lot of folks, it’s a pretty good alternative to copy machines. The final cost is generally less expensive, and everyone will think your book is exceedingly cool. It’s definitely one of the best decisions I've ever made.
The Cloud and Even Further Frontiers
During most of the computer’s history, the things needed for it to work were stored on its hard drive, along with all the music, books, and other files we wanted direct access to. That’s changed dramatically over the last few years with more and more files being added to the "cloud." The cloud is a form of online storage, and if you use Spotify or Apple Music, you are already using it. Instead of keeping a digital library on your phone or computer, your files are hosted somewhere else and then accessed via the Internet.
This is destined to have major repercussions when it comes to the BoS, because we will inevitably end up keeping copies of our books on the cloud. There will be a lot of advantages to this. Instead of having to print things out for an initiate or new coven member, we will simply point them to an Internet address and let them download (and then print or copy) the material to their heart’s content. It will also mean a world free of flash drives and email attachments. I can imagine a world not too far in the future in which I store literally dozens of BoS’s somewhere other than on my computer's hard drive (and I'm sure at least a few other Witches are already doing this).
I love the idea of sharing my BoS with a Witch from Australia in exchange for a copy of their book, and I look forward to comparing and contrasting Witch books from across the world that are a part of my tradition. But I'm also scared of this day. Things stored online leak and leak often. While I can't imagine anyone intentionally looking to break into a cloud-stored BoS, some will eventually be made public through no fault of their owner. Will I be violating my oaths to keep my BoS secret when the giant tech company hosting it fails in their promise to protect it?
The cloud is only the beginning of our current digital revolution. In thirty or forty years we might bypass cloud storage and our smart phones altogether and download things directly into our brains. It sounds ludicrous, but we are already implanting computer chips in people's brains that can move robotic armsAJ If we find ourselves downloading whole books directly into our brains, at least we won’t have to worry about memorizing things anymore.
All this future technology might have a reverse effect. Perhaps it will drive many of us to write by hand and carry us straight back into the arms of pens and paper. I love being a Witch, but it's also not supposed to be easy. Magick requires work, and rituals are not meant to be hollow words and empty gestures. In an age where privacy is becoming harder and harder to preserve, the actual written word may end up being our last solitary outpost.
There’s no easy way to copy a book by hand, and even scanning one into a computer is time-consuming. For Witches wanting to keep their mysteries secret, the Old Ways might again prove to be best. I don't know what the future holds, but I’m confident that Witchcraft and magick will be part of it, and as long as there are Witches and magicians, there will be grimoires, spells read by candlelight, and Books of Shadows.
[contents]
61 Ariana Eunjung Cha, “Future of Potential Brain Chips Is Limitless after Man Controls Robotic Arm with His Thoughts,” The Washington Post (May 22, 2015), www.washing-tonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/05/brain-brain-that-let-man-man-trol-robot-arm-is-just-the-begin-ning-heres-look-at-the-ture-ture-plantable-ch ips.chips.
Bibliography and Further Reading
I feel like this book is only the beginning of the discussion when it comes to the history of grimoires and other magical writings. For more information on the topics covered in this volume, I recommend the following books.
Barrett, Clive. The Egyptian Cods and Coddesses: The Mythology and Beliefs of Ancient Egypt. London: Diamond Books, 1996. The resources in my library about Egyptian deities are few, but Barrett’s Egyptian Gods and Goddesses has come in handy over the years.
Curtis, Gregory. The Cave Painters: Probing the Mysteries of the World's First Artists. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. This is a fun and quick survey of the European cave paintings, detailing the ideas describing their uses and the history of their exploration in the modern world. Because research into Europe’s painted caves is proceeding at such a fast clip, some of the information in the book is now a bit dated.
Davies, Owen. Crimoires: A History of Magical Books. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. This is the definitive book about magical books. Even though it's designed for an academic audience instead of a popular one, it’s not all that difficult of a read.
-------. Popular Magic: Cunning-Folk in English History. London: Hambledon Continuum, 2003. Sadly, cunning-folk all seem to have generally practiced Christianity, but their magical practices would later influence modern Witchcraft all the same. I didn't cite this book in this book The Witch's Book of Shadows, but it has greatly informed my thinking over the last five years, so I felt it was worth including.
d’Este, Sorita, and David Rankine. Wicca: Magickal Beginnings. London: Avalonia, 2008. This is one of the most informative books on the Craft ever written and a must for every Witch interested in the origins of our Craft.
Faivre, Antoine. The Eternal Hermes: From Creek Cod to Alchemical Magus. Translated by joscelyn Godwin. Grand Rapids: Ml: Phanes Press, 1995. This is perhaps the best book on the origins of Hermes Trismegistus and a must for anyone looking for deeper insights into this particular god and figure. On a personal note, my copy was either given to me by Professor Christopher Chase (Iowa State) or borrowed by me from Christopher and never returned.
Gardner, Gerald. The Meaning of Witchcraft. London, Aquarian Press, 1959. This book is slightly more readable than Gardner's Witchcraft Today, but that's not really saying much.
-------. Witchcraft Today. London: Rider & Co., 1954. I don’t think Gardner’s books are required reading these days, but since he was the first modern public Witch, his works are still important.
Harms, Daniel, and John Wisdom Gonce III. The Necronomicon Files: The Truth Behind the Legend. Boston, MA: Weiser Books, 2003. This is the best and most comprehensive book ever written on The Necronomicon. It’s a little dated, as new information on the “Simon mystery” has come out since its publication, but that information is easily accessed at Daniel Harms's website, Papers Falling from an Attic Window, https://danharms.wordpress.com.
Heselton, Philip. Doreen Valiente: Witch. The Doreen Valiente Foundation, 2016. This book is amazing and helped me in a few spots when adding Doreen-inspired things to this book.
Hutton, Ronald. Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. Everything Hutton writes matters and should be part of the library of any book-obsessed Witch. This book was particularly helpful to me while working on the bits about ogham.
------. Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. I did not quote from Triumph directly in this book, but it has informed my thinking tremendously over the years.
------. Witches, Druids, and King Arthur. London: Hambledon and London, 2003. The work of Ronald Hutton occupies a very special place in my library. He spends seven fascinating pages in Witches writing about The Greek Magical Papyri.
Leland, Charles Godfrey. Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches. 1899. I prefer the new translation by Mario and Dina Pazzaglini that was released in 1998. Sadly the Pazzaglini version is only available as a digital download today, but at least it’s still available. Aradia is one of the most important books in the modern Witch revival and is available for free online (its copyright expired long ago) and in various editions, many with commentary and additional notes.
Long, Carolyn Morrow. Spiritual Merchants: Religion, Magic, and Commerce. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2001. This is an absolutely excellent book on the history of hoodoo drugstores and botanicas in the United States.
Murray, Margaret Alice. The Witch-Cult in Western Europe.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921. Murray’s book is not held in high regard by modern scholars, but her influence is all over modern Witchcraft. I sometimes call her "the grandmother of the modern Craft."
Steadman, John L. H.P. Lovecraft and the Black Magickal Tradition. San Francisco, CA: Weiser Books, 2015. The first half of this book is really good; it's a short overview of Lovecraft's life and work. It bogs down a bit in the second half as Steadman attempts to prove the historicity of Simon’s Necronomicon. Bonus: Steadman and I once lived in the same city.
Suarez, Michael R, and H. R. Woudhuysen, eds. The Book: A Global History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. The Book is a sweeping history of books, letters, the printing press, and their influence and impact on the world. This is a huge volume and contains a wealth of information. However, none of the various writers in the book spend a whole lot of time talking about magical books. It's a part of history that often falls through the cracks, and it does in this volume.
Valiente, Doreen. The Rebirth of Witchcraft. Custer, WA: Phoenix Publishing, 1989. Doreen’s memoir is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of modern Witchcraft. Valiente also wrote and/or assembled many of the most well-known pieces of Wiccan liturgy. Dozens of them litter my many BoS's.
Winroth, Anders. The Age of the Vikings. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. Winroth’s book is full of all sorts of information, but his bit on the runes was truly enlightening. If you want to know more about the Vikings, I highly recommend this book.