Do you keep an equivalent of a book of shadows? What format do you keep it in? (digital, paper), how often do you use it, and is it categorized in any way?

When anyone mentions keeping a book of shadows, I have visions of a large, beautifully bound book containing handwritten notes and carefully pasted images, slips of paper and the occasional herbal charm bag stuck between the pages. Is this what my personal book of shadows looks like? (Please excuse me while I drag myself from the floor where I've fallen due to uncontrollable paroxysms of laughter.) No, my book of shadows isn't nearly as organized.

A bit of advice I read in one of the many "101" books suggested keeping your book of shadows in a 3-ring binder using loose-leaf paper. This would make it easy to add things and to change it over time - a practical and utilitarian approach. While that idea made sense to me, my artistic inclination wanted something more aesthetically pleasing. I found a binder covered in pretty green silk that was intended to be a photo album. It came with plain filler pages of thick cream paper and plastic sleeves designed to hold 4x6 photos. I decided I would use the pages to write and paste things on and would write spells on index cards that would fit in the photo sleeves. I designed section pages and printed them on my color printer. It is lovely. As far as using it is concerned, I have written spells on index cards but have been very bad about adding anything else to the empty pages. There are several pages of spells, written in a spiral-bound notebook, that I've torn out and crammed in among the index cards.

Thinking of the book of shadows as more than a place to record spells, but also to keep a record of meditations, impressions about experiences, meanings gleaned from tarot readings, dreams and other magick of the mind, I have been keeping this sort of a book of shadows in the form of journals. Daily journaling has been a required part of my formal training in the craft and I have filled numerous Moleskine notebooks with all of the items mentioned above. Mixed in you'll find the occasional phone number or book list written in and the journals are not organized in any way, simply flowing chronologically; a new one begins when the old one is filled.

Certainly, this blog itself is an adjunct book of shadows, a place where I have collected and recorded images and thoughts that have been important to me. I even created a Grimoire section where I intended to record spells to share with my readers. If you check out that section, you'll see that I've been just as bad about putting spells there as I have been with my index cards.

As with many ways that we all find to procrastinate in life, I keep thinking that some day, when I have the time, I will take all of the information I have amassed, organize it, and collect it together in one place to create a real book of shadows. Well, you know what they say about good intentions! For now I'll be satisfied with the fact that at least I'm producing the content, even if it isn't organized in a particularly cohesive way. In fact, I've discovered that when I'm poring through an old journal or looking through the archives of my site to find something that I wrote a while ago on some topic, I actually find other bits of information that I'd forgotten and am happy to be reminded of. If I had stored everything away in carefully cross-referenced sections, would they sit there untouched like old books on dusty library shelves?

Ideally, I do believe that a good book of shadows is a working thing, continually supplemented and annotated, referred to daily, lovingly worn. As a bibliophile and a lover of tactile things, I'm still drawn to the romantic notion of that big book. But I do think it would be really cool to have a digital document that could consist of textual documents and also links to blog entries and bookmarked web pages. When I end up at one place or the other, I'll be sure to let you know!

Thank you to Witches Weekly for the Q&A.

Posted by Angela-Eloise at 3:24 PM