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::Book of shadows info::
This originated from a thread entitled, "What to put in a BOS?" at wiccantogether.Ning.Com , a pagan networking site. The original post said:
1. What topics/categories do you have in your book of shadows?
2. How did you know what to put in it?
3. Where did you find the information
4. How do you "protect" it?
5. How long did it take you to finish your first BOS?
6. How do you find enough information to fill several BOS?
7. How did you start your first BOS?
8. Any extras you would like to share
1. I started trying to do one with five different spiral bound notebooks, each representing the five elements. (Well the covers of the ones I happened to come by were red, green, yellow, blue, and black, so that was what i thought of right off.) Then I thought about what each element represented to me and which sorts of things I'd put in each one. For example, the red one, fire, always seemed to represent emotion to me, so I put in there things I felt about certain occurrences, like how I felt about my hand-fasting ceremony. Water, I saw as more of both the formality and the inner workings of something, the details, so I put in there objective outlines, like the set-up of my hand-fasting ceremony, or the blessing I wrote for another book. Green, earth, was obviously (to me) nature, so I filled it with correspondences and things about plants and stones and so forth. Yellow, air, has always been shown to me with information and mental type things, so I put down things I had learned that day.
In the black one, representing spirit, I just wrote down anything that came to my mind about magic or divine or spirituality during the day.
In my other book, which I made myself, I copied down others' works that I felt had significant meaning to me or my path. One of Pete Carrol's essays is in there, for example. I also included drawings that came to my mind at any given time, such as one of a girl (presumably me) with her eyes closed and her third-eye chakra wide open.
2. Anything I felt like putting in it, I did. Anything I thought was vaguely related to magic, I stuck in there. Things that didn't seem "magical" I kept written down in another book, more like a journal, and sometimes I'd see patterns or things like that that seemed magic-related and write down what I'd noticed in whatever section of my BOS.
3. Mostly personal experience, really. You can get stuff from sites and books and write down what you want, but until you actually try whatever they're telling you, or use that particular herb or stone, you're just taking their word for it, and what's right for them might not be right for you. (Of course, my viewpoint is slightly biased, as I'm an eclectic magician.)
4. Really, I don't. That sounds bad, but nobody pokes through my stuff, so I don't feel as though I have a reason to protect them. If I feel I need to hide them, I just stick them in a drawer or in an old suitcase of mine.
5. I haven't yet, heh. I've had a couple different ones started over the years, but it seems I've lost the ones before this "new era" of magic in my life. Sad, but that's the way it goes. Luckily I did manage to hang onto a detailed recollection of my most vivid meditation, which is really cool.
6. Look, read, do. Look at the world around you. Write down what you see. Read as much as you can. Write down what you learn and anything you feel about the work or even the author. (If you OWN a book, it is yours, you can write on it. Later, it's simple to transfer these margin notes to your BOS.) And obviously just DO it! Do your rituals and you spells, work your magic. Then write down what you did, why, what happened, how you felt, and so on.
7. I -hate- to admit this.... but my first one started with a Silver Ravenwolf book. *Braces for the tomatoes* Back in my uber-fluffy stage, I was pretty much in love with Silver's teachings, but I'm going to leave the blame with my mom and cop out with "It's the only thing I could get hold of at the time." Well, she's got these little "activities" at the end of each section in her books -- writing your opinions of stuff, mostly, and later on into it meditating and writing that down. So my first "Book of Shadows" was a yellow legal pad with a few things scratched on it about something I really knew nothing about.
Hell, we all gotta start somewhere.
8. It really helps loads to get in the habit of writing EVERYTHING down. I even go through my school day writing down "this happened this period" or "in this class". That's actually the easy part, 'cause me in my infinite laziness, I allow myself to just put down classwork for that class. But even that's a bad habit to get into, because the goal is to write down EVERYTHING.
Now, obviously, you can't spend every second of the day just writing down what's happening around you. That would be excessively boring, not to mention counter-productive. But it's also good to train yourself to remember everything that happens, so you can write it down later.
Another note is that drawings help loads too. Even if you suck at drawing, sometimes the most basic of sketches can work wonders in helping you to remember, plan, or explain something. I use again the example of my hand-fasting; when we were planning it out, I made a basic sketch of the alter and where everything was to be on it. I'm talking semi-straight lines gone over six times in blue ink pen, and vaguely round circular shapes, and so forth. Skill isn't important, as long as it conveys what you're trying to show.
As a final note; please don't take anything I've said as anything more than my personal ideas and beliefs. Read it, think on it perhaps, and let it go if it doesn't appeal to you. I'm not an authority on anything, and if I ever claim to be, e-slap me. (Unless you meet me in real life, then you can really slap me.)
