Every Gardnerian initiate keeps a Book of Shadows, copied by hand from the book of the one who initiated them. It is a working book of rites, not a scripture, and it has a history that can be told.
People who know only one thing about Wicca generally know that it has a Book of Shadows, and imagine it as a book of spells. It is not, or not mainly. It is closer to a service book: the words and actions of the rites, with such instruction as is needed to perform them.
What the Book contains
Without disclosing its text, the contents of the Gardnerian Book can be described in general terms, because Gerald Gardner and Doreen Valiente both described them in print. It holds the rite for casting and closing the circle. It holds the rites of the three initiations. It holds the rites for the Sabbats, the consecration of the working tools, and the blessing of the cakes and wine. It holds a number of chants and invocations, among them the Charge of the Goddess. And it holds passages of instruction on such matters as the raising of power, the conduct of a coven and the duties of a witch.
The Book is arranged by degree. A first-degree witch copies what belongs to the first degree and receives more as they advance.
Where it came from
The oldest ritual manuscript in Gardner's hand is a large volume that he compiled in the 1940s, written in an ornate script and bearing an antique title. It contains passages copied from published books on ceremonial magic, alongside early drafts of the witch rites. By about 1950 he had begun to use the name Book of Shadows. The best guess is that he took it from a magazine article of 1949 about an Indian manual of divination by the measurement of a person's shadow, which happened to be printed beside a notice of his own novel.
The rites in Gardner's early drafts drew heavily on the Key of Solomon, an old handbook of ceremonial magic, and on the writings of Aleister Crowley. Between 1953 and 1957 Doreen Valiente revised them, removing much of the borrowed material and supplying text of her own. Gardner went on adding and amending until the end of his life.
What this means is that there is no single original Book. The High Priestesses whom Gardner initiated in the early 1950s received one state of the text, and those whom he initiated around 1960 received another. Each then handed on what she had been given. The books of the different Gardnerian lines therefore differ a little from one another, and scholars within the Craft can often tell from a coven's wording roughly when and from whom its line descends.
The core and the leaves
Gardnerians distinguish between the core of the Book, which is the body of rites that came down from Gardner's covens and is common to the tradition, and the additional material that each line and each coven has gathered around it. A working Book will usually contain both: the core, and after it the chants, recipes, seasonal rites and notes that a particular coven has found good and kept.
The core is handed on unaltered. The rest is the coven's own. It is the difference between the trunk of a tree and its leaves.
Copied by hand
The Book is not printed, photocopied or sent as a file. Each initiate borrows the Book of their High Priestess or High Priest and copies it out by hand, a section at a time, usually under supervision. A passage that Gardner printed in Witchcraft Today, written in the voice of a time of persecution, instructs the witch to keep the Book in their own handwriting, so that if it is found it can incriminate nobody else.
The reason that still holds good is a different one. Copying is slow, and slowness is the point. A witch who has written out every word of a rite knows it in a way that no reader does. One of our members has written about the experience in the Journal, in an essay called Copying the Book by Hand.
By the custom of most covens, a witch's Book is returned to the coven or destroyed at their death.
Published versions
It would be idle to pretend that none of this material has ever reached print. A hostile pamphlet published extracts in 1964. An American edition claiming to be the Book appeared in 1971. In the early 1980s Doreen Valiente, weary of seeing her own compositions circulate in corrupt copies, helped two Alexandrian authors to publish the texts that she had written, with an account of how they came to be. A good deal else is to be found online.
We neither confirm nor deny any of it, and we do not think it matters much. What has been published is partial, varies from one version to the next, and corresponds to no coven's actual Book. And a rite on the page is a script, not a performance. The mysteries of the Craft are not in the wording. They are in what happens when the words are spoken, by the right people, in the right place, to someone who has waited a long time to hear them.
Other books of shadows
In the wider Wiccan world the phrase has come to mean any witch's personal book of rites, spells, dreams and observations. Solitary witches are encouraged to keep one, and it is an excellent habit. When this site refers to the Book of Shadows with capital letters, it means the Gardnerian book in particular.
In our coven
A new initiate of the Coven of Cythrawl buys a plain bound book with unlined pages and copies the first-degree Book from the High Priestess's own copy, at her house, over as many evenings as it takes. Most people take the better part of a year. Our coven's additions begin with a section in the hand of our founding High Priestess, Hesper, which each of us copies in turn.