I build websites for a living. I have also spent something over a hundred evenings copying a book by hand with a fountain pen, and I would not have had it any other way.
My working day consists of making text appear in front of people as fast as possible. I can put ten thousand words on a screen on the other side of the world in less time than it takes to read this sentence. So I was not, on the face of it, the ideal candidate for a tradition that hands you a fountain pen and a blank book and says: start at the beginning, and mind your spelling.
I was initiated at Candlemas 2022. It should have been a year sooner, but for most of the two years before it the coven could not meet under one roof, and I waited with everyone else. The week after, Elowen told me to buy a book. It was to be bound, not spiral, with plain unlined pages, and big enough to last. I asked whether there was a recommended supplier, and was given a look. I found one in an art shop: black cloth, a hundred and ninety-two leaves, the paper heavy enough that ink does not show through. It cost less than a round of drinks. It is the most valuable thing I own.
Tuesday evenings
The Book does not leave the house of the person it belongs to. So every Tuesday for most of that year I drove over after work, and sat at Elowen's kitchen table with her Book open on a stand in front of me and mine beside it, and copied. She would be doing something else in the room: marking up rotas, shelling peas, on one occasion worming the dog. If I had a question she answered it. If I made a mistake she generally knew before I did, from the noise I made.
You may not tear out a page. If you go wrong, you rule a single line through the error and carry on, and the error stays in your Book for the rest of your life as a monument to the evening you were thinking about something else. I have eleven. I know where every one of them is.
The first degree took me from February to the following January. Most people are quicker. I write slowly, and I had not held a pen for longer than it takes to sign a delivery note since I left school. For the first month my hand ached. By the summer I had a callus on my second finger that I was secretly proud of.
What copying teaches
I had assumed that the point of the exercise was to end up with a copy. It is not. If the point were a copy, there are quicker ways, and I know all of them.
The first thing it teaches is the words themselves. I did not set out to memorise anything. But you cannot write a sentence out by hand, at the speed of handwriting, without saying it to yourself, and by the time I had finished I found that I knew long passages by heart without ever having tried to learn them. They had gone in through the hand.
The second thing is that you start to hear the joins. A text that you read at reading speed sounds like one voice. A text that you copy at a line or two a minute does not. There are passages in the Book that are stiff and antique and full of thee and thou in the wrong places, and you can tell that somebody assembled them from older books with more enthusiasm than ear. And then you turn a page and the language lifts. The sentences start to balance. The stresses fall where they should. I did not need a footnote to tell me that I had reached something of Doreen Valiente's. I could feel it in my wrist.
That did more to teach me the history of the Craft than anything I have read. The Book is not a seamless ancient scripture, and nobody who has copied it could think so. It is a made thing, with a maker's marks all over it. I find that I trust it more for that, in the same way that I trust a wall more when I can see how the stones were laid.
The third thing is harder to say. Elowen's Book is copied from Hesper's. Hesper's is copied from that of her own High Priestess, in the Midlands, in 1974. In the margins of Elowen's Book there are a few notes in Elowen's hand, and those I was told to leave out, since they are hers. But here and there is a correction or a small addition that she copied from Hesper, who had copied it from someone before. I copied those. So there are now four lines in my Book that came into the tradition as a note in the margin of the Book of a woman I never met, who has been dead for thirty years, and whose Craft name I hear read once a year on November Eve. I cannot tell you which lines. I can tell you that I think about her when I reach them.
The coven's leaves, and after
When the first degree was done, I was given the coven's own leaves to copy: the part of our Book that is ours and not the tradition's. It begins with a section that Hesper wrote out when the coven was founded, and it is the only part of the whole that made me laugh aloud, because among the chants and the seasonal lore is a recipe for cakes, with a stern note about oven temperatures. That took me a second winter.
A third spell of copying came after my second degree, in 2025, when there was more to copy. I am not going to say anything about that except that I was quicker, and that I made only one mistake.
Why not just scan it?
I am asked this by the only people I can discuss it with, who are the other members of the coven, and who ask it to annoy me. But it is a fair question, and it deserves a professional answer.
Everything I make at work is infinitely copyable, and for that reason none of it is anyone's in particular. The same file is on a million screens. No copy is the original, and no copy has a history. If one is lost, nothing is lost.
My Book is the opposite of that in every respect. There is exactly one of it. It was made by one person, slowly, an evening at a time, from another book that was made the same way. It has my mistakes in it. If it were destroyed, it could not be restored from a backup. It could only be made again, by hand, from the beginning. It exists nowhere but on a shelf in my house, it has never been photographed, and on the day I die it goes back to the coven.
I do not think the people who started this custom were thinking about any of that. The reason they gave was fear of the hangman. But they stumbled on something that I, of all people, am in a position to appreciate. In a world where every text is everywhere, the only way left to make a text matter is to make it scarce, and the only honest way to make it scarce is to make it cost something. Mine cost me something over a hundred evenings. I know what is in it.
I built this website, and I am pleased with it, and I would not put one line of that Book on it for any money. There is no contradiction. The website is for telling people that the door exists. The Book is what is on the other side.