Seeing the Signs

Maintaining a Book of Shadows

This is not the article that I was going to write. I was going to write about Runes. I was going to do a review of the book, Runes for Beginners, by Alexandra Chauran, and write about the history of runes in general. While researching the subject, I looked through the notebooks that comprise my Book of Shadows, sure that I had something about runes. I most certainly did – coincidentally, it was a print-out of a page that I had on my computer screen at that very moment! I had received it in an email from a Yahoo group I was a member of several years ago and printing left a lot to be desired. The end of every line was cut off. As I thumbed through other pages in that notebook, I noticed that many of the other print-outs were in the same condition, plus there were lots of things in there that I really didn’t need or want. So I decided to look seriously at the three notebooks that comprise my Book of Shadows and weed out, clean out and reorganize.

divination is like any other discipline. You have to practice on a daily basis to be any good at it. That means daily meditation – at the very least. It means using your tarot cards and your pendulum and your crystal ball. It means getting outdoors and smelling the air and listening to the birds and taking note of the sky. It means being aware of your surroundings at all times, including when you are sleeping.

Maintaining good notes is part of divination. Knowing what worked – or didn’t work – the first time, second time or the last time you tried a particular method of divination – or a spell – cannot be overstated. It’s important to note the date, the time of day, the moon phase, even the weather. You often hear – on Facebook, especially, where everything is reduced to a meme – that science and spirituality are at odds, but nothing could be further from the truth. A true spiritualist is just like a scientist. You have to go about your spiritual adventures just like a scientist goes about his experiments. Keeping notes helps you remember one “experiment” from another and adds you in coming up with new theories of divination. Proving these theories is the skill of the diviner. Sometimes it works out exactly like you thought it was going to and you congratulate yourself. But sometimes, something totally different happens and you can’t believe your eyes. Those are some fabulous moments!

My first Book of Shadows was a loose-leaf notebook – maybe thirty pages or so – that was a hand-copied version of Starhawk’s The Spiral Dance, which a friend had loaned me in 1987 and I loved so much I didn’t want to return it. Eventually I typed up those pages but once I bought my own copy of The Spiral Dance in 1990, I discarded all but the poetry. I still have those – printed out on my old typewriter that I haven’t had since 1992 – they bring back memories just looking at them. When I first started learning about Wicca and Women’s Spirituality – as it was called back then – most of my learning came out of books. I took copious notes and they all went into my “Book of Shadows”. I really knew nothing about a Book of Shadows or anything else. I was doing it all on my own. But I was doing it.

When the Internet took off, I joined Yahoo groups & groups on AOL – remember AOL? – and started getting all kinds of information about Wicca and Paganism and goddesses and gods. I printed out like a madwoman and my Book of Shadows grew from one notebook to three notebooks – I have an inch-and-a-half-wide notebook just for the Tarot and Numerology, the largest of the three books. The Tarot notebook was updated recently – it had always been kept up to date, since I work with the Tarot – spiritually and creatively – more than any other medium. But I do admit that the other two notebooks are rather a mess.

There’s a meme on Facebook about intelligent people being “messy” but I do take umbrage with that – I think some kid came up with that when his mother told him to clean his room – “And do your homework too!” – however, the thing about things being messy is that during the process of organizing your mess, you find things that perhaps you forgot about – like I am during this process of going through my Book of Shadows – and either you can’t remember why you kept it – and decide whether or not to keep it – or you remembering why you kept it, you decide you don’t need it anyway, since it’s such a part of you, you don’t need the reminder. Or – in the case of the poetry I just found – you decide to keep it, because it’s an important memento of who you once were and how far you’ve come.