Research is key when starting or learning something new. What you decide to learn on your path of a witch is completely up to you. It’s also good to keep notes on the topics your research. This will also help you fill up your grimoire with the information you need for your path and craft. Your grimoire or book of shadows isn’t limited to research and information. You would want to also fill it up with you spell work, divination, and any other things you want to include into your book.
I know most to all of you know how to do research. If you’re around the same age or younger than me, you had to do lots of research in school for school work. Your grimoire is a spiritual reflection of yourself and it isn’t something that can be done quickly. You can decide how much information you want to include in your book. It doesn’t have to have pages upon pages of information about one topic unless you want it too. For me personally, I like to have 2 to 3 pages about a topic. This would include basic and important information I want to know and use within my practice.
How and where you do your research is up to you. You can use books, podcasts, blogs, the internet, etc. However it’s always best to double and triple check your research and use your own intuition to gather the information you are needing and wanting to add to your practice. Even though there are many sources you can get your information from, it’s always best to make sure you are not giving misinformation. This is one of the reasons why it’s important to do your own research and the check what you are being told. Make sure you use multiple sources and to check what is being told to you. It’s also good to cite/credit your sources within your book. This will help you to remember where you collected the information and allow you to go back to that source.
Like I stated above, I’m sure most to all of you know how to do research. This blog post is to help you get the most out of your research. It’s always good to take notes on the topic you are researching. Pull information from different sources and write it down. Taking notes and creating a rough draft will help plan out your book pages. Once you have your notes, then add it to your book in away that will relate to you. I like to use graphics and images within my grimoire. So, I’ll include that along with the information I collected from my research. Also by doing this, you will limit tearing out pages in your book that you’ve worked so hard on.
As you create your grimoire, number your pages so you can create a table of contents or index. This is why I say it’s important to work on one subject at a time. It will also befit you to have a rough draft of your book before actually adding things within your forever book. I like to work on one subject at a time and then add it to my grimoire. Now I can’t do this with every subject because there is just way to much information and the subject will continue to grow. This is why I have a rough draft or binder for the subjects like crystals and herbs. This is another reason why I like to use a digital notebook so I’m able to move pages around easily. A binder is good for this as well.
I hope this helps you with creating your own grimoire or book of shadows. Sometimes you will end up having more than one book and that’s okay. It’s completely up to you on how you want to go about with your book(s). I’m still adding things into my grimoire and I do have a small A5 binder that I use as a rough draft book. I also have this blog to help me as well. I do plan to start creating how tos on digital notebooks. This will take me a moment to do because I’m also updating the design of my digital notebook that I’m using. There’s things I want to change up on the design to make it easier to get to things and to make it more user friendly.
If you have any questions about using a digital notebook as your grimoire/BOS, please comment below and I’ll be more than happy to answer them.
Checkout the rest of this series on Creating Your Grimoire below.
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