To start our Book of Shadows series lets talk about different types one might have. This goes hand in hand with What is in your Book Of Shadows (BOS) You might choose to document your journey on your path, you might keep spells or rituals or songs, you might keep records of your events, or recipes. You might keep it all together or in separate books. The choice is yours and really you need to figure out what you like. To give you an idea of options I wanted to share this picture of some of my Books. I also keep several folders on my computer with information. One for my personal BOS, one for our covens book, and one for recipes. Ok so lets look at these Books from left to right I will tell you a little about each.
- The little one you can hardly see is small and green at the very back. This is my daily journal. Some witches call this a mirror book as it is a reflection of you day-to-day life. Not only is journaling good for your soul and well-being it is nice to record things to look back so you can see how you have grown or if your premonitions came true. I also will write my dreams in here though some folks use a separate book for that. This is also what I would use to do automatic writing.
- The one with the Tree is my Book of Days. I have this divided by month and I have little bits of lore about each month. I also have menus for each month based on what is available in my area and I have activities for both me and for Little. Like if I know I’m going to want to serve mead for Mabon I can put the recipe in July so that I know when to make it.
- The black book on top of the book of days is my Covens record book. This is rather like a meeting ledger where we record who was present and if anything “interesting” happened also if magic was done who asked for what. We only write on the right hand page so that later coven members can write on the left hand page or on back of the record page to comment on what the experience brought them.
- Under that the Brown binder is a BOS that I use to store lots of reference material in.
- The open one in back is my “Real” book I call it a Book of Blessings and it has things in it such as history and ritual that I want to keep permanent. It is also more of an art journal. (Don’t worry we will be going over what goes in a book in much more detail shortly, this is just an overview)
- The other journal to the right of that is my magic book. I keep all my spells in that and sometimes add art but mostly it has my spells.
- The black binder is of course my Covens Binder that anyone can add to or copy from and that has the rituals typed up and printed out in large print to make it easy to read by candlelight or moonlight. Lol
- The cute red one is my Filofax. I always have a planner on me so I always have somewhere to write down spells that come to me or messages or what have you. I also keep some daily prayers in there and a to do list of witchy things I must do.
bookofshadowsandblessings 