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 9.)
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 nondescript-looking 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-mâché (or, in this case, tissue-papier-mâché). 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 I’m 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.
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:
• Core ritual (quarter calls, circle casting, elemental blessings, 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 Gardnerian 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 fifty-year-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 Gardnerian 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-mâché as a way to spruce up a binder BoS, I was rather skeptical, but it’s surprisingly easy to do.1 I was also able to create mine with materials purchased exclusively from a local discount store.
Decorating a Binder BoS with Papier-Mâché
For this project you will need the following:
• Regular white glue (such as Elmer’s) watered down
• Symbol printed out on paper (optional)
• Glue 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-mâché 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 Crafting
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.
1 This project was inspired by Lexa Olick’s 2013 book Witchy Crafts: 60 Enchanted Projects for the Creative Witch. I found Olick’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!