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 (BoS—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 pocket-sized 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!
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 too!).
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!