The Magical Diary

Every witch we know keeps a diary of their practice. The good ones keep it honestly, which is harder than it sounds and worth a great deal more.

The magical diary is the plainest tool of the Craft and probably the most useful. It costs the price of a notebook. It needs no consecration. And over the years it becomes the one book that can answer the questions a witch most needs answered: what did I actually do, and what actually happened?

The diary and the Book

A Gardnerian initiate keeps two books, and it helps to keep them distinct. The Book of Shadows is the book of rites, copied by hand from the High Priestess's own, and it holds what the tradition has handed down. The diary holds what the witch has done with it.

In the wider Craft the phrase book of shadows is often used for a personal book of spells, recipes and rites that have worked, and many solitary witches keep one. That is an excellent habit, and the diary feeds it. A rite that has been tried, recorded and found good several times over has earned its place in the more permanent book. One that was tried once and felt wonderful has not, yet.

What to write

For any working, rite, meditation or exercise, the essentials are these:

• When. The date and the time, and the phase of the moon.
• Where, and in what conditions. The place, the weather, who else was there, and how you were feeling beforehand: tired, anxious, cheerful, unwell.
• What you intended. The purpose, in one sentence, written before you began.
• What you did. Briefly but exactly, so that you could do it again.
• What you noticed. During and immediately after. Images, feelings, distractions, anything odd.
• What happened. Added later, a week or a month on, with the date. Leave a space for it.

Beyond the workings, the diary is a good home for dreams, written down on waking before they fade; for the cards drawn each morning, if you are learning them; and for what the year is doing where you live: the first swallow, the first frost, the day the blackthorn flowered. Over several years these notes become a private almanac, and they teach the Wheel of the Year better than anything we could write about it.

An entry

This is the kind of entry we hope to see in an outer court diary. It is invented, but not by much.

14 October. Moon waxing, two days off full. Cold and clear, wind from the north. Tired after work.

Ten minutes' stillness at the altar. Lost count of the breath at four, then at seven, then three times more. Better than last week.

Candle for J., who has asked, for her interview the day after tomorrow. Red candle, her name cut in it. Saw her coming out of the building smiling. Image held well for about two minutes and then I started thinking about the gas bill.

Later: 17 October. J. rang. Second interview offered.

Notice what it does not say. It does not claim that the candle got J. the interview, and it does not pretend the attention held when it did not. A year of entries like that is worth having.

Why it matters

For honesty. Memory flatters. Without a record, the workings that seemed to succeed are remembered and the ones that came to nothing are forgotten, and in a year a person can come to believe almost anything about their own powers. The page on magic asks the sceptic to try the Craft honestly and judge by the results. The diary is how anyone can do that.

For the solitary above all. A witch in a coven has other people to say, kindly or otherwise, that something is not working. A witch alone has nobody, and the diary has to do the job. Read back over a season, it will tell you things no friend would dare to.

For the patterns. Some of what the diary shows is about the Craft, and some is about oneself. Many people find that their meditation goes to pieces every February, that they always quarrel with someone in the week before Samhain, or that their best work is done at the waning moon although the books say otherwise. None of that can be seen without a record, and all of it is worth knowing.

For later. A diary kept for ten years is a document of a life in the Craft, and there are not many of them.

Practical matters

• Paper, and a pen. A plain notebook that lies flat. Writing by hand is slower than typing, and slowness suits the work, as one of our members explains in Copying the Book by Hand.
• Every day, if only a line. The habit matters more than the length. A line written daily is better than a page written when you remember.
• Private. It is yours, and it should be somewhere others will not read it. Use initials for anyone you write about, as the entry above does.
• Kept. Do not tear out the embarrassing pages. They are the useful ones.