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Creating a Book of Shadows

© Karen Mitchell

Creating a Book of Shadows, Grimoire, or other sort of magical reference book is essential to your practice of Wicca or Witchcraft. Like most other things dealing with Wicca and Witchcraft, it will also be a highly individualized project with widely differing opinions on how to accomplish it. This article will discuss what I feel is important to include in a Book of Shadows, as well as giving some creative ideas and options.

For some, a Book of Shadows (BoS) is akin to a "magical cookbook" with sections on various sorts of topics. This is the sort of book I maintain. For others, a BoS is more of a journal, with a running commentary of all the things you've been working on and bits of stuff you've collected. It can also be a combination of these two ideas, or something else entirely. It all depends on what you're doing and how you like to have things organized.

My Book of Shadows is in an old one and a half inch three-ring binder I bought in college. This is a practical choice for me, since it allows me to rearrange the pages inside and organize them by divided sections. Since everything inside is either hand-copied on cheap loose-leaf notebook paper or computer printouts, I can add or toss out pages easily as well.

Mine is most definitely a "magical cookbook". I have a reference section, a section for spells, one for rituals, one for herbal magic, one for stones, one for a book list, one for incantations and poetry, and there's probably a few I'm forgetting. A lot of the information is stuff I've pulled from the Internet or out of books, with the source listed by each one. It's very important to list the source, in case you have a question about something later. Plus, if you ever plan to share your BoS with someone else, they'll be able to tell what is your own work and what you've borrowed from others. That's just good ethics.

My BoS saves me from having to dig through my collection of books or coven newsletters every time I need something. While I haven't copied down every single bit of good information I've come across, a lot of it is in here. Since three-ring binders are an expandable medium, I can keep adding as much as I want. If it gets too large for the one and a half inch book, I can move into a larger binder. I do keep journals as well, but those are in their own separate notebooks or hardbound journal books. I've separated things out this way because I currently have several journals going and I don't want to be toting around a giant four-inch binder every time I want to write something down.