Witchcraft was originally an oral tradition; all of its rites and beliefs were passed on by word of mouth, with nothing written down. It was not until the persecutions of the Middle Ages, when Witches had to meet in secret and, consequently, were unable to maintain contact with one another, that any of the rituals were set down. Since Witches were having to meet "in the shadows," as it were, the book acquired that name.

To be found in possession of such a book meant certain death; therefore, only one was kept for each group of Witches, whether the group comprised a single family or a coven formed of different families and individuals. If an individual Witch did keep a Book of Shadows, it would be burned at his or her death.

Later, as the persecutions eased, many of the surviving Witches who still practiced began to keep copies of the Book for themselves, supplementing the rituals with material that appealed to them as individuals. One might have a large section on herbal lore, another on divination, yet another on astrology. Where covens met, there was still a main Book of Shadows, kept by the High Priest or High Priestess, that was used at the coven rituals, whether or not the individual coven members also had their own books. This coven book contained all the rituals for Initiation, Esbats, Sabbats, Handfasting and Handparting, healing, divination, spells, chants, dances, and songs. It also contained what was known of the history of the particular coven, together with Witchcraft laws and ethics, the Wiccan Rede, and any necessary coven by-laws.

A Book of Shadows should be handwritten. It is regarded as a sacred book and, therefore, a book of power. By writing out all that it contains, some of this power is transferred to the writer. The title page of the book usually bears the legend "The Book of Shadows of the Witch (Rowena, for example), in her own hand of write."

Some books are written in a very elaborate style; some are even written in one of the magical alphabets. This is fine for a personal book, used mainly for reference, but for a book that is actually used for performing rituals one that is placed beside or on the altar and read from it can make the reading of it very difficult, if not impossible. Some of the coven books used by degree-system covens have the higher degree material in one of the magical alphabets, with the bulk of the book in normal script.

Now in this Digital Age, some practitioners choose to write their BoS in a digital format possibly as a series of Text Documents for later editing or PDF or Image files for permanent unchangeable content. This "Digi-Tome" is an interactive web format of a BoS. Me, personally being a web developer by trade, I have chosen to commit my words to the digital, leaving it in the protection of the Spirits of Plasma. This particular medium allows me to access my Tome anywhere I have Internet access. I designed this Tome to be secure, using user level restrictions and data encryption, and dynamic, as content can be easily added or updated as needed. Formats like this allow all sources and references to be easily linked to, any multimedia can be consolidated in one place as well. This, of course, may not be the perfect solution for everyone, but just another example of the uniqueness and flexibility of the craft.

This project was initally conceived August 2006. At that time it was just a collection of independent HTML files and stored on a flash drive. This first incarnation was not easy to update as a new files needed to be created and the table of contents had to be updated manually.

In September 2016 I started the redesign to a web hosted PHP format linked to a database. This new incarnation allows for a hand full of hard coded template pages with the bulk of the data dynamically stored in a database. This makes adding, and editing content extremely easy. This format allowed for additional security by use of user accounts and logins. This also allows for the inclusion of a Journal. The Journal uses two hard coded template files, and the entries are then encrypted, access is restricted to the creating user id, and is stored securely in the database.

The building of this Digital Book of Shadows framework took over 100 hours of work. The migrating of content from the old individual files to database entries took another 30 hours. Since completing the project in November 2016, I have made a number of tweaks and additions, including the ability to share pages on social media without the need for visitors to log in.

If you are interested in your own version of a Digital Book of Shadows, feel free to contact me or fill out the request form for more information about the Digi-Tome Framework.