Stuff that is relevant to you. Don’t waste time and effort filling out pages of astrology if you aren’t interested in astrology. If you are never going to use the page for that information, don’t waste the page on it. Don’t be worried about what other witches have in their book. This is your book, not everyone’s. And if you are planning on creating some fantastic book that you’ll pass down to your future witch children, know that the your first one probably isn’t going to be the one you’ll want to pass down anyway. Likely information you once thought was important you’ll later find doesn’t matter to you at all. Let your first book be the one you can mess up and explore in. You need room to learn and grow, not worry about every little detail of what you might be missing.
With that said, here is a list of ideas for what you might want to put in your grimoire. This is a collection of ideas taken from all over. Remember to fearlessly scratch things that you aren’t honestly interested in:
-A book blessing/protection to protect it from wandering eyes
-Your personal pages: a page about you and your goals for the craft, the day you decided to be a witch, your natal chart/zodiac info for you and/or your so/birth tarot cards or birth playing card, your craft name or personal sigil if you have one, any psychic abilities you have
-A page for your personal correspondences: your signature herbs/rocks/scent/sound/animal, your craft name/sigil
-A page for your familiar/s if you have any: their given/secret name, their sigil, info about when you met them and when they left/died, what they helped you with, what they like, how they can be contacted
-A portrait of your shadow self
-A list of your current witch tools, where you got them, whats special about them, how they were consecrated (if they were), etc
-An ancestor page: this could be your family tree, pictures of your deceased, locations of graves, etc
-Info about the plants/animals/rocks in your area
-The wheel of the year, if that’s applicable to you
-Esbat/Sabbat information if that’s applicable (personally I only observe the full moon)
-The monthly moon names if you observe the changing of the moon: you can google and see which ones speak to you, or since they’re outdated you can make up your own (for instance I have a Coyote moon because the coyotes howl outside my house, rather than a Wolf moon)
-Any rites/rituals/songs/poems/pictures/quotes/spells/recipes/etc that are important to you and/or your practice.
-A page to keep a list of all your active spells/wards/enchanted items
-Deity: history/picture/correspondence of any deity you are interested in, for secret witches you can have an altar for them inside your book, entries of your relationship/experience with them, family tree of the pantheon if applicable. Even if you worship an entire pantheon, you don’t need to have a page for everyone in the pantheon. And even if you are a secular witch, you can still make a deity page if you so decide.
-Divination info for the practices you’re interested in: history, correspondence cheat sheet, any spreads you think are important, record your readings, a pendulum board in your book if you’ll use it
-Sigils: how to create/charge, sigils you’ve found helpful
-Meditation, Centering, Grounding and Shielding methods/techniques/symbols/pictures
-Dreamwork: a dictionary of your personal recurring dream symbols, a collection of your dreams written/drawn
-Spiritwork: any spirits you are or have been in contact with and basic information
-Correspondences (remember to think about what your correspondence is and not what some list on tumblr tells you): herbs, rocks and crystals, animals,metals, moon phases, planets, planetary retrograde, colors, directions, your witch tools (this is mostly kitchen tools for me)
glitter jars, witch ladders, wand-making, crystal jewelry, etc.
Spells & Enchantments
sachets, spell jars/bottles, knot magick, candle spells, powder spells, curses (if you’re into that sorta thing)
Magickal Goals
Other ideas
Decorate your grimoire with pressed flowers, illustrations, cut-out photos, or collages
If you like the idea of handwriting in a book but cannot, check out this website: it allows you to download and print a template so you can write the alphabet in your own handwriting and upload it as a font
Ideas for your Grimoire (or a journal/collection/file similar to a Grimoire):
• Diary Entries • Meditative Pages - Inducing different states, emotions, trances, mindsets, and triggers for spells, realms, etc. • Spirit Communication • Symbol Meanings - Alchemy, elements, zodiac, Futhark Runes, your own, etc. • Symbology - Animals, mythical creatures, any items • Herbology - Both medicinal and metaphysical • Chakra Meanings - Or Energy Points, whatever you refer to them as or similar points that you use in your craft • Healing Methods • Divination Methods • Spells • Rituals • Rites • Incantations • Portals • Deity Worship - If you worship any deities of any sort, you can include them in your Grimoire if you’d like • Deep Feelings • (Divination) Readings • Notes from Your Books • Research in General • Mythology • Egregores - Thought forms, concepts • Coding Methods • Psychic-Gathered Information • Spell/Craft Logs • Correspondences to Easy-to-Get Supplies and Substitutes • Key Things You’ve Discovered in magic, the Paranormal, the Astral, the future, your abilities, etc. • What Colors Mean to You • Lore! • Traditional Known Methods • Urban Methods • Your Methods! • Potions - They don’t always HAVE to be all herb- based, just so you know. There’s plenty of magic in fruits and veggies. • Correspondences/Your Own Correspondences • Craft and Food Recipes • Blessings, Curses/Jinxes/Hexes, Enchantments • Spirit Friends • Things about your Past Life - If you’ve reincarnated (or have past lives in your beliefs or… Well.. Anything that gives you a past life) • Your Passions • Your Morals • Fun Activities You Find/Make • Astral Travel Experiences
Witch tip that I haven’t seen before: photo corners are a great idea for putting things in your grimoire. The items become removable, especially handy for closet witches or witches who are super indecisive about where to put things. Also convenient if you want to update information. Just put everything on notecards/bits of paper that are the same size and voila! As a bonus, the natural colored ones on the right don’t need adhesive, just to be dampened, so you could literally lick them if you wanted to–nothing extra needed. Find them in the scrap booking section of a craft store or Walmart!
favorite pages from my grimoire:
-moon on the front cover
-Norse rune for protection anointed with a candle
that I consecrated with my energy
-some art that I painted with my new acrylics
-planetary symbols
-pentacle meanings and how to invoke or banish
-my pendulum mat
all artwork was painted myself and I didn’t find myself to be much of a painter until I bought acrylic paints and started looking up tutorials on YouTube.
My grimoire uses lots of purples and blues and blacks. I’m a galaxy witch so those colors resonate with me. What does your grimoire look like?
😍 wow, the grimoire envy is real af right now. This is stunning!!!
So I’ve seen some posts here on Tumblr, and plenty of videos on YouTube about bullet journalling. It seems really interesting and it got me thinking about some alternative ways of creating a B.O.S using some popular journaling styles!
My dream Book of Shadows will probably always be a beautifully constructed screw-post binder. This is the best of every possible scenario, as far as I am concerned, when considering the dream B.O.S.s that most witchy-types want to have while balancing that against the practical limitations of those giant, ancient tomes. The screw-post binders come in a variety of widths, allowing you create your personalized book; whether you prefer the more streamlined grimoires or the massive, shelf-bending bricks. The advantage of this style is that each page can be added or removed over and over; your book is never hard-bound, and so new information can always be added in the appropriate sections. For instance, as you learn new things about different herbs, you can add them while maintaining alphabetical order!
Contrastingly, once you realize you’ve outgrown a particular paradigm regarding correspondences of tools, you can take out a single entry, or a whole group, without disturbing the integrity of the binding or the polished look of the book overall. (No ripped pages!) Also, each page can be completed with ease; written, drawn, or painted at a desk and then inserted. You do not have to work around a tome that will not lay flat, etc. However, this technique can be costly, whether you order a pre-fabricated model and personalize it after, or if you follow the above link and create the whole thing yourself. A pre-fab model may require paper of a specific dimension and so can be limiting in the future, while a DIY one can be built around easily available materials, but requires you to build the book itself.
Bullet Journals:
(photostill from above video)
Shown in the video above, bullet journaling is a style of journaling I have come across in severaldifferentplaces (although most people I have seen are using it as bullet scheduling, rather than journaling, but whatever). The beauty of this approach is its utter and total simplicity, and its focus on organization. Using bullet journaling as a base for a B.O.S is actually still an idea that I am developing. I like the idea of a book that grows, but is also indexed as you fill it in. As I imagine it now, I can see adapting the ‘collections’ and ‘index’ portions of bullet journals, and creating from there.
So, at the front of your journal, you can designate two full spreads (a spread is two pages facing each other, so this would be 4 pages total) for each subject, such as: herbs, rituals, spells, stones, astral work, journal/experiences, poetry, inspiration, etc. After these sections, you can start filling in the pages with all the information you’ve collected, in whatever order strikes your fancy. Number the pages only as you fill them (that way if you screw up a layout or something, you can rip it out and start over with minimal fuss), and then add each entry into whichever index you need. If, on pages 6-10, you describe a ritual using stones to create a sacred/safe place in the astral, you can name the ritual “Stones for Sacred Space pg. 6-10” and add it to the index labeled “stones”, the one for “astral work”, and for “ritual”. The index will still be slightly disordered, but still allows for some personalization and growth. I feel that the use of some of the more ‘organizational’ aspects of bullet journaling could still be used in this approach, but I’m still building this idea in my mind, so I’d be thrilled to see what the rest of you can come up with.
This format is similar to what you might do in a regular 3-ring binder for the same purpose, but remedies the issue of how flimsy and easily ripped most papers in a 3-ring binder become. Your papers stay in place, but you have room to grow, and no need to be overwhelmed by the disorder of a growing, nonlinear practice.
This, like the screw-post binder, is more of a format than a technique. This format could be used in a few ways, but is obviously compatible with the bullet journaling style.
The idea behind this format is that you have a protective book cover with an elastic running the length of the inner-spine. That elastic is used to hold smaller booklets in place that will eventually build a composite journal/scrapbook/agenda. You can see some example videos here, here, as well as here.
This approach is interesting because you can build a B.O.S. that is actually several small booklets inside, each containing a different subject. So, within your Midori ‘shell’, you can have a booklet on herbs, another on stones, and another on rituals. The Midori company also sells accessories for their books, such as zipper envelopes, dividers, pockets, etc.
As I mentioned before, each individual booklet can be organized how you like (bullet-style or otherwise), but what is really great is that it allows you to balance each subject as necessary within the larger book. By that I mean that, personally, I would probably fill up the herb booklet much faster than my ritual booklet, and my dream booklet would fill up somewhere between the two. Rather than ‘running out of space’ in my ‘herb section’ of a hard-bound book, I can just remove the herb booklet, archive it, and then insert a new one while my ritual and dream booklets continue to get filled up! This also means that you can carry it around and tailor the contents to where you are going! If you know you’re going to a friend’s for ritual, you probably won’t need your animal booklet; leave it at home and bring your poetry instead for dramatic ritual reading!
This approach can be costly if you are ordering directly from the Midori company (they ship from Japan, and while the merchandise is beautiful, it can start to add up to a lot of coin!). There are plenty of D.I.Y. posts and videos to create your own, as well as some ‘knock-off’ companies that might fit your budget a bit more squarely.
As you would with the bullet journal technique, as each part of your ‘journal’ begins to fill out you can archive it until such a time that you feel you are ready to start creating your final book of shadows. You can cut out pages and organize your journals until they create a cohesive whole that you can make into one hefty B.O.S., if that is what speaks to you, by recopying the info.
Conclusion:
I like these approaches because each has an element of organization not offered by your traditional ‘sketchbook/fancy journal’ B.O.S. techniques; a kind of permanence not offered by things like 3-ring binders that fall apart and become cumbersome and a bit drab; and personalization with limited stress about making mistakes.
Obviously each has its merits and flaws, and each individual will weigh those differently, but I think that by taking certain elements from each format or technique, it may be a bit easier for some of us to get those dream tomes, without having to wait 40 years for enough information to fill one, and enough bravery to commit it to paper without fearing a total disaster!
What approaches have you used or seen, and what adjustments could you make to any of the ones I mentioned to make them better?
(REMEMBER: you are writing your book for yourself and yourself alone. If it’s not relevant to you, if it’s not of interest to you, if you don’t want to include it, don’t!! You’re not writing an all encompassing instruction manual to publish for all witches, this is for your own personal beliefs and use)
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IDEAS OF WHAT TO INCLUDE
– date you decided to become a witch
(You’ll be happy you did once you’ve been practicing a while- you can see when you started, how long you’ve been practicing and how far you’ve come)
– personal beliefs
(Morals, deities, religion, what kind of magic is real and possible)
– what you’re aiming to achieve through your craft
(Could be spiritual, mental, or physical goals)
– divination experiences
(Note down answers to the questions you asked)
– your dreams and their possible meanings
– prayers
– poems you like
– quotes that are important to you
– self help and care
(Especially useful for witches who use spells to help their mental health- in mine I have a space next to my spells for depression and anxiety where I’ve listed all the things I know I can do to help myself when I’ve slipped down into that state again)
– natural remedies
– positive affirmations
– sigils
– symbols and meanings
– a list of your favourite craft related books / websites or ones that you want to read
glitter jars, witch ladders, wand-making, crystal jewelry, etc.
Spells & Enchantments
sachets, spell jars/bottles, knot magick, candle spells, powder spells, curses (if you’re into that sorta thing)
Magickal Goals
Other ideas
Decorate your grimoire with pressed flowers, illustrations, cut-out photos, or collages
If you like the idea of handwriting in a book but cannot, check out this website: it allows you to download and print a template so you can write the alphabet in your own handwriting and upload it as a font
teakepp 