What is a Book of Shadows?
A Book of Shadows (BoS), or Grimoire, is a notebook of magical practice, containing teachings and lore, rituals and recipes, spells and songs, and anything else suitable to the purposes the author has in mind.
You may or may not come across books of this sort in libraries and bookstores The Grimoire of Lady Sheba is one such title -- but those are OTHER PEOPLE'S books of shadows. YOUR book of shadows is a book you compile yourself, using a nicely bound "blank book" and beautiful calligraphy, or a spiral-bound notebook and ball-point pen, or loose-leaf and pencil, or any other materials you choose. Some people store their notes on a computer diskette, and call this a Disk of Shadows (DoS). It doesn't matter whether you type it or handwrite it; it is YOURS.
What goes into a BoS (or DoS)? You decide. It's YOUR notebook. Good candidates for inclusion would be anything you might have trouble remembering if you DON'T write them down: words to rituals, poems, chants, songs, stories, even favorite quotations; vital facts about herbs; recipes; astrological or symbolical correspondences; chronicles of your experiences; ideas for future activities. What matters to YOU. Depending on your particular religious tradition, there may be texts considered "scriptural", such as passages from Aradia, or Gardner and Valiente's "Charge of the Goddess", or "The Laws" ("Ordains") that are held as rules within the Gardnerian and Alexandrian traditions. If you join such a tradition, your teacher should provide such texts to you.
Where do you find texts to put into your BoS (or DoS)? Wherever. If you have a teacher in a BoS-using tradition, he or she may allow you to copy items from his or her own BoS (or DoS), or may read aloud sections for you to write down. (There are strong injunctions in some traditions to never let your own BoS out of your own hands, so don't insist on borrowing someone else's BoS, and NEVER pick up or read one without the owner's permission!) Perhaps you have favorite passages from published books -- write them down. (Copyrighted material should not be republished or distributed... but this is your own private copy.) If you learn worthwhile things from ANY source -- write them down. If you get completely original ideas -- write them down. There is no One True Way to write a Book of Shadows, although a given coven's members may choose to follow a consistent format. If you do belong to such a group, remember that nothing prevents you from having more than one BoS, and the OTHER volumes can have whatever you want.
As a practical matter, write your BoS in such a way that you can find the material you want when you want it. You may want one section, or a separate volume, for instance, to hold just the rituals for coven work -- written for high visibility. There are funny stories about people who composed intricately calligraphed BoS's they had trouble reading by moonlight deep in the woods. One person had a lovely BoS inscribed in silver ink... which became completely invisible in moonlight.
According to Doreen Valiente in The Rebirth of Witchcraft (London: Robert Hale, 1989, pp. 51-2), the phrase [Book of Shadows]'s first known appearance was in a magazine called The Occult Observer, edited by 'Michael Juste' (Michael Houghton), Volume 1, Number 3, 1949, in an article by a palmist known as Mir Bashir concerning a legendary Sanskrit manuscript concerning a means of divination by measuring a person's shadow. Michael Houghton, the editor of the magazine, also published Gardner's novel High Magic's Aid, and the issue in question contains an advertisement for that novel. Valiente believes that Gardner borrowed the name from the article by Bashir; it does not appear in his novel but does appear in his later writings. Though I have not seen the magazine, I am strongly inclined to accept Ms. Valiente's views on the subject.
tim@toad.com (Tim Maroney)