Opening the Book

As Autumn is arriving and the house has been cleaned, there is an energy in the air that has my creative and spiritual juices flowing.

For the past few days I have been working on a painting for my boyfriend for his birthday this weekend. I'm really proud of what I accomplished in it. When I finished the piece today I had excess energy and momentum left over from it. In addition, I recently brought back several of my books on paganism and magic and have been feeling drawn to the subject matter contained within them. Thus upon finishing the painting I started doing research on various magical and spiritual topics.

I started by researching Mabon practices and rituals and found myself moving onto an article about how to create a Book of Shows while being a broke college student. This article got me thinking about my own BoS and my desire to have one. Now I do have a book into which I started writing my BoS two years ago. But so far all I have in it is the Wiccan Reede and the Charge of the Goddess. It's a good start, but I'm stumped on how I want to organize it and this is why I have not progressed further on it. However, after reading Luna's article I have a few ideas for going about collecting the information and starting my BoS while still giving myself time to decide on how to organize the written version. So Now to make a digital BoS and figue out what exactly I want in my written BoS.

What's in a Book of Shadows?

Something I have been wanting to do for quite some time is create my own Book of Shadows. I have many books on my shelf that I use as resources, but I wanted my own book that kept all of the knowledge, rituals, spells, etc that I use in one easy to find place. I actually started making my own a year ago or so. I got a non-descript black book and wrote down the 'Charge of the Goddess' and the 'Witches Reede.' I felt these were good starting points to start my BoS off with. However, from there I am not sure how to proceed. How do I want to organize my BoS? What should I put in it? How do I factor in room for things that I have yet to learn and may wish to include at a later time?

To help me plan and undertake this endeavor I turned to the internet. I found may great sites talking about the ordering, layout, and creation of your BoS, but relatively little about the exact information mentioned in a BoS. As a solitary and someone still learning the pagan ways, being able to see what is inside someone else's BoS word for word would be extremely helpful.

I had bookmarked the Internet Sacred Text Archive over a year ago when I first did research for how to make a BoS, but I had never really looked into it that much until today. with little effort I was able to find both the Internet Book of Shadows and the Gardenieran Book of Shadows. Both are full text copies and in 12pt Verdana the IBoS is 447 pages long in MS Word. So now I have a lot of material to review.