(10-28-2023, 05:35 PM)BodhisattvaStyle Wrote: Has anyone read "The Book of Shadows?" I need this explained to me. I have found several different versions, but can't seem to find what I'm looking for, essentially, spell books with guides to rituals.
I wanted to look at actual rituals to learn how to identify signs of them. What they actually look like and all that. That was the hardest to find.
What's funny is, after spending all day on this thread yesterday I sat down and watched "Ghoulies" for the first time. It was all about conjuring spirits. A guy performs a conjuring ritual and I could tell they were (loosley) falling along with The Key of Solomon. So, Hollywood has gotten a lot of their ideas from that text.
I have not. I've seen them, but never read one. There isn't any one "The Book of Shadows". They re a record of witches experiences, incantations, spells, and rituals, and there is one for each lineage of witches. They are hand-written, and passed down from generation to generation, each one adding their own experiences to be passed on to future generations. Witches are pretty secretive with them, and guard them jealously.
There are "The Book of Shadows" available in print, at bookstores, but they are all, every one of them, fake. They are written by what I call "Barnes and Noble Witches", for other Barnes and Noble Witches, and are all, every one, made-up BS just to make a buck. Because of that, they are very, very dangerous to place any credence in.
My step-daughter, the daughter of my third wife, was a "Barnes and Noble Witch". She put her faith in bookstore incantations, and would frequently bring "things" forth that she could not then get rid of, because all of her knowledge was faulty, coming as it did from bookstore incantations. Her mother was a "real witch", a hereditary witch, but she has rejected it years ago and did not fool with it. Nor did she pass on her knowledge, such that it was, to the next generation, which is why her daughter became a Barnes and Noble Witch. That was her only available source of supposed knowledge, and it was completely faulty.
So the step-daughter used to do crazy stuff that brought forth "things" that she could not deal with. The first few times, I got rid of the negatives myself, and warned her not to fool with such things any more, but she would not heed the warnings, and then just kept doing it. SO I stopped getting rid of the "things", and let them do as the would.
Havoc ensued. She got herself completely surrounded by negatives. I actually have audio and video recordings she made of some of it, in an effort to elicit my sympathy so that I'd get rid of it for her, but I steadfastly refused, and told her the only way she would learn it seemed was to live it, so live it she would. Talking to her and warning her did no good. Experience can be the best teacher.
Oddly, perhaps, the "things" she brought forth never, ever, bothered me. I've seen some of it in passing, but they would never approach me nor bother me. I eventually left that toxic environment when it got too crazy, but I never would get rid of or "banish" stuff for her any more. She had to learn the hard way.
I don't know if she ever learned or not, because I bailed out of it. Her mother died around 5 or 6 years after I bailed, and I don't know what of. Her health appears to have just gone downhill fast until she was no more. Never dug deep enough to find out why, because when I'm done, I'm done. If that's what they wanted to live in, it wasn't for me to keep rescuing them. Too bad, so sad.
So, while there are actual "Books of Shadows", the ones you can actually get your hands on don't contain anything useful, only harmful things that will bite you in the ass if fooled around with.
As an end note, the mountain witches we have around here, in dwindling numbers these days since the new generations are relying more and more on technology, do not keep Books of Shadows to the best of my knowledge. Everything they know is passed down orally, by word of mouth, and never written down anywhere.
I guess that's one way to keep what they know or think they know out of Barnes and Nobles stores.
.