The Magician’s Handbook - A Grimoire To Have On-Hand

When practicing magic, an extremely practical tool that one can have is what I have come to call a handbook, or ritual book. This would be a small book where the magician or sorcerer would store all the working notes and spoken parts that would be needed during any given ritual or other working. There may be short descriptions of actions to take, basic magical exercises to refer to, and symbols and seals of spiritual forces commonly worked with.

This thing is nothing new, though. I remember when I was first learning Wicca back in 1997, the literature at the time recommended keeping one’s own Book of Shadows. At the time it was framed just like what I described above, though over time more and more Llewellyn authors framed it as a personal, timeline-style journal...which I never quite agreed with.

Polyphanes over at The Digital Ambler recently finished filling up the moleskine notebook he kept as his personal, on-hand echiridion, and so it came time to condense the material and transfer it to a new notebook. This reminded me of a similar endeavor I had in June where I took my little ritual book and re-did it with better organization and formatting than what the previous version had.

What’s interesting and amusing here is that he reached that point with his handbook soon after I had finished the new version of mine. Though the purpose of our handbooks are the same, our methods differed vastly. To explain, I’ll give a short history of mine:

Back in 2013 I decided to make a new version of my handbook, as I was not satisfied with the previous version. The information was so disjointed and disorganized that I wanted something a bit more condensed. So I grabbed a blank, lined journal about 5.5” x 8 in size and transcribed most of the practical information of my magical practices by hand. It took me a month of writing in it for at least two hours every night. On the weekends, I spent most of the day on it. My wrist and hand absolutely hated me during that time.

Flash forward to late May or early June of this year, and that one had reached a similar point too. The memory of all the intense effort spent on it was somehow still fresh in my memory, and after I had completed it I had endeavored to find a faster way to put it all together.

For me, this left a few possible options:

1. Grab a small blank scrapbook and print pages to put in it. Pros: With sturdy clips and bindings, I likely wouldn’t get the punch-hole tear that plagued me back when I first started my Book of Shadows in a three-ring binder back in 1997. Cons: I would need to be able to lay it flat, but also I couldn’t find any blank scrapbooks small enough.
2. Writing my handbook out in a word processor and paying to have a company print, bind, and ship it to me as a paperback. Pros: Very little effort on my part. Cons: It would probably cost more than I was willing to pay, when I could do it myself. Thus...
3. Writing my handbook in a word processor, getting it printed myself, and binding it by hand. Pros: Complete control of the finished product, and less cost. Cons: More time spent learning related skills, possibly failing to result in a good product.

Given my still-existing artistic and design inclinations, if you guessed that I went with option #3, you’d be right!

So I took to a word processor on my computer (in this case, WPS Writer) and got all the information together. The upshot of this is that I had most of it already: I keep a much larger, fuller Grimoire on my Google Drive. Most of the book was a simple copy & paste operation followed by formatting...lots of formatting.

Then, I learned more about how to print and bind one’s own book. After doing that, I took PDF files of the whole project to a local FedEx office, printed it, took the print-outs home and bound the whole thing. In total, it probably cost me about $30.

Except for the cover I’d found at a vendor booth at a convention. That cost me $65...but that was more for artistic flair than anything else.

I'm very satisfied with the new organization, which runs something like this:

1. A few starting quotes and rhetoric lists.
2. A list of the basic forces I work with in magic (elemental, planetary) and the seals of spirits related to them.
3. Foundations of my practice of sorcery (meditation, offerings, purifications, subtle keys, gestures, poses)
4. Zone rites
5. Liturgy - Invocations, prayers, orphic hymns, etc.
6. General magical methods, such as consecrations, and ritual preparation.
7. Rituals and spells...a combination of theurgical and thaumaturgical workings.
8. A section of blank, lined pages for further additions to be handwritten in.

One thing I would like to point out about this, though, is that something like this should always be grounded in the practical. I paid for the leather cover because I liked it, not because I felt I needed it, per se. The book itself is bound with a simple black cardstock cover, which cost me…$0.50, I think? Overall the book was cheap to make and took way less time than its previous handwritten iterations. Don’t break your bank doing something like this. :-)

In my next two posts I will outline how I did this, and also provide my own response to Polyphanes’ post regarding the role of a handbook like this.

But in closing for now, here are some pictures of mine after I finished it!

Book Meme...Or, Revealing My Fluffy Roots

There is a meme going around where people are listing their Top 10 Occult Books From Way Back. Basically, you list the books most influential to you, especially when you were starting out. In my case, I’m also going to include a few that were highly influential in the reformation of my magical practice years ago. So without further ado:

1.) “The Necronomicon” by Simon - This is an odd one, because I never got a copy of it until about four or five years ago. What happened was that I went looking for it, found it...but also found #2, couldn’t get both, and decided for some reason to get #2 instead. But if it hadn’t been for my Lovecraft fandom at the time causing me to search for this one, I probably wouldn’t have ever gotten into magic.

2.) “Basic Magick” by Phillip Cooper - This was my de facto literary initiation into the practices of magic. The book basically teaches astral temple, sigil, and servitor work, including some secularized Golden Dawn techniques (a version of the Middle Pillar), and cosmo-self-centric/agnostic/psychological belief. It never took off that great for me, but it was my first.

3.) “Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner” by Scott Cunningham - Yeah, yeah, I know. But, a lot of us started this way. Aside from being one of the first I read, I always liked Cunningham’s philosophy that magic was something that the Magician/Witch themselves do, instead of placing all the focus on spirits.

4.) “To Ride a Silver Broomstick” & “To Stir a Magick Cauldron” by Silver Ravenwolf - *Sigh* Again, I know. What I’m saying is that I used to be a classic fluffy bunny, alright?

Don’t look at me like that...I got better.

But anyway, for years Silver Ravenwolf’s methods were very influential in my practices. While I came to drop her philosophies, I found some of her actual practical magical techniques of value (for example, there was a power-raising technique she taught involving cauldron imagery that I got some excellent results from using). And I’m only counting those two as one, because of reasons. :P

5.) “Buckland’s Complete Book of Witchcraft” by Raymond Buckland - Ah, Uncle Buck! Not bad for its time and such. I got some value out of this, and actually don’t regret it.

6.) “Making Magick” by Edain McCoy - Another from my Fluffy Files. McCoy taught some basic magical techniques that I based stuff off of for a while, and was my first big intro to divining before working magic. I came to hate it, though, honestly. It sucks, the techniques are confusing, and I didn’t get results from it. Additionally, I would spend HOURS tweaking my spells on the insistence of getting a reading to come up positive for the spell itself. This was the beginning of my current approach of Divination Moderation.

7.) “Summoning Spirits” by Konstantinos - Ok, I know what you’re thinking, and yes I did hit every Llewellyn/Fluffy branch on the way down. So sue me! :P Like I said, I got better. But this book is where I had my first success at summoning a spirit. I conjured the spirit Mepsitahl from it, and she taught me a technique for enhancing spirit vision.

So that covers my first 5 years. At this point I’m going to go into books that helped re-form my spirituality and my magical practices.

8.) “Evolutionary Witchcraft” by T. Thorn Coyle - Even after I gave away all my books on Wicca and Witchcraft, I kept this one, and for good reason. From a spirituality perspective, this one helped re-school me on several things. It brought me to a holistic view of the self, the world, and spirituality in general. Not in a hippy kind of way, but a realistic, grounded way. Magically, it gave me a taste of something outside of the fluffy-dom I had mired myself in. I still highly respect the Feri Tradition.

9.) “Postmodern Magic” by Patrick Dunn - This one was a real game-changer for me. It opened my eyes wide to a world beyond JUST spirits and energy, and into Informational Sorcery, and I still go back and read it now and then.

10.) “The Sorcerer’s Secrets” by Jason Miller - Because OF COURSE I’m going to list this one here! Its an eye-opening look at techniques that fall a little outside of the Western Magical Tradition by doing the same things but with different, simpler techniques. Of the most value is the look at working with magic and mundane circumstance in tandem and weaving the two together into success. Also of value is the illustrative way Jason shows you how you can break down your practice into its parts and get the most out of it. Also? Learning to do offerings in the way he teaches is one of my most-recommended practices. This book is gold.

I wish I could say I carry no shame about any of these, but that’s not the case. Frankly, with items #4 and #6...I wish I had never found them. Ravenwolf’s books teach a shitty, entitled attitude and philosophy that far outweighs the techniques, and McCoy’s book just teaches this ineffective, confused, and frustrating approach to practical magic.

It would have been nice to have some more of the classics, even the absurd ones, given by such folks as Jason, Skyllaros, or Brother Moloch on Facebook. But that’s one of the beauties of modern day! We have access to so many of these, and fewer people are restricted to whatever tripe the local mass-consumer bookstore carries (as I was). Man, if only Amazon had been as awesome in 1999 as they are now...