How to start a Book of Shadows that is really yours: one working, one source, one page

The page comes after the doing. Pick one small working from a source you can name, and do it this evening. Ten minutes is plenty.

If you want one ready to go, take a guard from what people really set at their doors, or one plant from the twelve kitchen herbs. Both give you the author, the title and the year, which is exactly what your page needs.

One working. Not a list of forty saved for a day when you have more time.

John Aubrey filled a notebook with the customs he heard in seventeenth-century England, and he wrote down where he had each one from, naming people and places, and saying plainly when he was unsure. The manuscript sat unprinted until the Folk-Lore Society published it as Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme in 1881. It is a working notebook, not a finished book, and it is a good model for yours.

Six lines are enough for any page:

1. The date. One line, so the book becomes a record and not a collection.
2. The source. Author, title, year, and the page if you have it.
3. What it was for, in the terms the record uses, not in terms of what you hope happens.
4. What you did, numbered, one action per step, the way you would write a recipe.
5. What you changed, and why. Label the page Old, Old pattern adapted, or Modern.
6. What you noticed. The room, the weather, your mood, whether you would do it again.

That last line is the one that makes the book worth keeping. Nobody else can write it.

Copying a list gives you someone else's working. Reading the pattern out of a record gives you your own. Four questions do it: what was it for, what did it use, when and where was it done, and who wrote it down and when.

Here it is worked through. Robert Chambers printed a Scottish rhyme in Popular Rhymes of Scotland (1826, and again in the 1870 edition): "Rowan-tree and red thread / Make the witches tyne their speed." Tyne is Scots for lose.

The pattern underneath it: the materials are rowan wood and red thread, the use is guarding the house and the beasts from harm, and the record is Scottish, printed in 1826.

Your version might be a short rowan twig with red thread wound along it, set above the inside of the door. On the page, label it Old pattern, adapted, and say what you changed: the rhyme and the two materials are old, the tidy rowan cross you see online is not in Chambers. Then read the full record in rowan and red thread and note anything you got wrong underneath.

Give the back of the book, or a second thin notebook, to a log. Four columns: the date, what you did, anything you want to remember about the day, and what you noticed afterward.

One line per working. "Nothing I noticed" is a real entry and belongs there. A log that tells the truth is worth more than a log that is pretty, and it is the only thing that will show you, a year from now, which workings you actually return to.

If you would rather not rule the columns yourself, the four books of The Practical Grimoire: Complete Series carry the method, worksheets and logs inside them, with every working's old source and year beside it.

For plants, borrow a four-hundred-year-old template. John Gerard's Herball (1597, enlarged by Thomas Johnson in 1633) gives every plant the same run of headings: the description, the place, the time, the names, the temperature and the virtues. It is still the cleanest plant page anyone has designed.

So for each plant you actually use: what it looks like, where it grows near you, when you can pick it, what people call it, what the old books record it being used for, and what you did with it. Add one line for pets.

Then the pages that are purely yours. Your own signs, made with a method rather than copied, as in protection sigils step by step. Words you adapted and why. A page of what did not work.

When the book is a third full, go back and fill in the index. That is the moment it stops being a notebook and starts being a grimoire.