Hey guys, I just got a new book for all my witchy doings. I want this one to just be info.I'm starting to fill it. I already have lunar phases, sabbats and esbats, planets and their correspondences, and spell times. So I was wondering what kinda stuff you guys put in yours.
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Oh, wow, lessee.... The first thing anyone would find in my BoS is a bunch of folded-up papers (it's a small 6-ring binder, roughly A4 size) with information that I want to transfer into the book with nice writing instead of my high-speed note-taking chickenscratch scrawl. I have a "Welcome, Uninvited Guest" page near the very beginning, followed by a few quotes & poems that resonate with my practice & beliefs, along with a semi-rhyming personal credo. Then there is a many-pages-long essay on "What Is 'Magick'?" that's as much an intro & explanation for someone I may someday bequeath the book to as it is my getting my thoughts straight. Then comes a "Reference" section with info on color correspondences, candle flame & smoke interpretation, a selection of Magick Squares (to help in sigil design), some basic herbal references, info about the Wheel of the Year, info about the Elements, spell times & lunar phases, shell magick, and a few similiar things. Then comes a section of "Recipes" -- foods I plan to try, incenses I'm wondering about trying, and magickal inks. The last section (not counting a batch of blank pages I keep in the back) is "Spells." Some I've copied from various sources (mainly online), some are modified versions of others' spells, and there's a slowly-growing collection of my own. There's also a sub-section (thinner cardboard dividers) at the back with a small number of the kind of spells I reserve for nastier work, should it become necessary. (This part relates to the stanza in my credo that reads, "I seek to cause neither damage nor pain / but to defend myself and my loved ones / I will cause destruction to rain.") Thankfully, as dog-eared as many pages have become, that section remains unused. So far. Since the binder can hold only *so* many pages and the pages themselves are relatively small, I have 2 more of the same binder (each a different color); in one I'm slowly collecting information on my experiments in divination (Tarot, runes, and pendulum) and the other was meant to be a Book of Mirrors but I'm honestly not sure it won't just become Volume II of my BoS if I keep collecting interesting stuff to put in it :-)
Thank you for being in depth, very helpful!
I should probably collate all of my findings into one book. Right now its kind of spread out among... all of the paper I own? It gives me good incentive to celebrate the season by cleaning and sorting through my hoard though. Lolz.
Is it ok to print things out and put them into a binder for your BoS? My hand writing is horrible and I want to be able to read it my own self. 😆
i've done that before and i personally see no issue with it!!
I have a few pages in my BoS that I've printed out from the Internet. I just went the hand-written route for almost everything because it just feels more "mine" that way (but it can take a long time to produce even one page because "penmanship" is NOT my middle name, plus I actually write in my BoS in a specific font. If you find something that you really like (especially a graphic), its usually OK to just print it out for personal use.