#nd witch

I remember when I was first starting out with building a grimoire and getting frustrated with how few resources there are on what a grimoire is supposed to be. I wanted clear directions and examples of what to include, but I mostly found YouTubers giving vague descriptions and repeating over and over again that it's extremely personal and private so they wouldn't say anything specific. As a neurodivergent person, it was very frustrating to try to figure out what to do from that. It took me a while to figure out what my own specifics were, so for any beginner witches out there, here are some specific ideas for starting off! Once you get more used to it, it'll get easier and easier to figure out what you do and don't want to include.

I'd recommend researching sigils and creating one to protect your grimoire; I placed mine on the second page after I dedicated the notebook for it, but you can put it wherever you feel like

Dates of moon cycles/information on how they affect your practice

Wheel of the year/sabbats if you celebrate them

Record rituals for sabbats if you choose to do anything for them, that way you have a reference for next year

Information on the elements- earth, air, fire, water, and/or spirit depending on your practice

Information on herbs or crystals you have- I like to print out pictures to include with the correspondences and leave space to write down specific things I use them for

Also, a quick reference list of ways you can care for individual crystals will be very helpful if you use them! Pay extra attention to which ones are sensitive to sun or water, it'll save you crystals later on

Basics of tarot, runes, or other divination methods

Color correspondences!

Information on zodiac signs; I printed out my star chart and put it in

When you do spellwork, write down everything you did and date it. Later you can come back and update whether it worked, what the effects were, and tweak it if necessary- basically treat it like a magic recipe book

A grimoire is not the same as a journal- if you want to write down personal reflections on meditation or your emotional experiences, I would suggest using a separate notebook for those things.

While I understand why people are so hesitant to show their grimoires, I have no qualms with showing a few pages for example purposes. However, I would suggest that you don't share anything that is personalized to your craft to others unless you can 100% guarantee that they won't cause you harm with it.

The only reason I'm ok with putting pictures on here is because they're full of basic information that anyone with Google could find and nothing that's specific to me.

With that being said, here are a few examples from my own grimoire as a reference!

Some history first. When I was about six I had an egyptology special interest (typical lol) so I wanted desperately to work with Bast. She turned me down cold. I tried an Abrahamic god after that but he never responded, so from there although I researched greek and roman gods extensively I gave up on response. When I was about 18, starting college, that changed.

I began working closely with the greek gods, through dream and prayer. Hades and Charon, Hermes, Athena, and Aphrodite were some of the main ones. Since then, Hades has adopted me as his child. Hermes is something of a mentor or older cousin to me. And many other of the pantheon are some form of extended family.

At that time, I also believed myself to be working with Thanatos and never questioned why he appeared to me as a tall black man in ancient egyptian dress. I'm sure you can see the blindingly obvious result: It was Anubis all along, colluding with Thanatos to get to know me since he was aware of my trepidation regarding his pantheon. Absolute fucking bitch move, and it worked. The doggy ass bitch is now effectively my brother. What an ass. (I love him.)

Recently, I have also been recieving dreams from a norse god I believe may be Odin. The dreams are extraordinarily vague and woo-y, which apparently is just Odin's style. I must say I'm not a fan, really wish he'd just TELL me what he's on about. I'm not as familiar with the norse gods so if anyone knows good resources, hit me up!

Also, very gently, I have had some talks with dearest Luci-Lu. He seems to think I'm some kind of funny little creacher he likes to watch for entertainment and like.... listen. He's not wrong. And he's also really not bothering me so I'm not gonna spurn him for no reason.

As for other beings, I do work a little with the local fair folk and with other such naturey spirits. I also get a lot of ghostly walk-ins because, well-- I'm a witch, my sister is a witch, my dad comes from a long line of mediums, my parents are ghost hunters-- you get the picture. My mother attracts spiritual nasties like a damned magnet. They don't really bother me, because my room is warded Literally to hell and back, and our family has a reputation among both living and dead as being neutral ground. But it's a thing, so.

like, i believe in spirits and ghosts, but I’m not about to delve into spirit work and further developing my Sight, because I know from experience that the awareness of spirits exacerbates my anxiety. I become hyperaware and can’t feel at rest. so i interact with spirits sometimes, but I also compartmentalize. which is okay!!!

do what you can do, push your limits on occasion. but if you find that you are losing yourself in a certain practice, it’s okay to take a step back.

You can draw as a devotion to a deity even if you're not an artist

You can write poetry even if you're not a poet

You can cook offerings even if you're not a great cook

You can tie knots, you can knit, you can crochet, you can sew, you can color, you can trace, you can make word documents

You can even dedicate your self care to your deities! Brigid has helped me stay hydrated as a devotional act for her in the past.

Previously I had been trying to “awaken” my astral form overlapping with my physical one, which did result in my entering an astral plane but it was very distinctly nowhere near my mindscape. However, based on their response I instead tried simply following the tie to my astral form; not necessarily inhabiting it and waking it up, just taking a peak at where it was. VERY interesting result: not only did I find it suspended in a completely empty astral void which I can only assume is my little baby mindspace, but since it wasn’t “awake” so to speak and I wasn’t trying to see what it was from an inside perspective, I actually got a better idea of what it looks like! ......I still have no earthly clue what sort of thingy it is, it’s not like any mythical beast or spiritual being I’m familiar with, but at least I kind of have a visual now!

So that’s good! That’s progress! I figure it’s not a bad idea to practice keeping a view of my astral form and mindspace open even if I’m not doing anything over there. I’m fairly good at bilocation already (yay plurality and ADHD lol) so it’s not hard for me, and I may actually be able to gently feed either the form or the space energy whilst researching with my physical body. I figure if I go slowly this way, I’ll have a better time getting a grasp on why my astral body was ending up yanked out of my mindspace when I tried to activate it the other way.

Okay, I found a topic for me to talk about.

So I have DID. I’m not going to explain what that is right now, because it’s not a magically based thing and multiplicity is not unfamiliar to these communities. But I have DID. With that comes a nonmagical headspace-- as near as I can tell, a representation of all of our individual minds tied together by our singular life energy. It’s a whole planet, with planes just like the outerworld.

Now, I’ve been trying to get into astral travel. I would like to start small, in our mindspace, where we can get a grip on being in the astral while still being protected. The problem with this is, I can’t find anything on how to actually do this. I’m sure people not versed in DID would tell us that our headspace is also our mindspace, and that is just false. Our headspace is not connected to astral at all, it’s not demi-astral, we can’t add a door from there into an astral plane. It’s just fundamentally not the same sort of thing. But everything I can find was presumably written by singlets, or at least not medical plurals, and as far as I can tell for them their “headspace” and mindscape are one and the same.

I don’t have any fucking idea how to work around this. I don’t have any experienced friends in this area-- I don’t have any experienced friends period. And despite knowing of a lot of experienced people here on tumblr who are definitely skilled enough to at least point me in the right direction, I am too autistic to know if it’s appropriate to ask any of them for help. A lot of them have very big blogs and aren’t welcoming of tutoring requests without pay, and I am dirt poor. I could go on a rant about how paywalls only affect poor people and keep us uneducated and unable to access the opportunities that higher class people have but that’s not relevant to the topic.

There’s also the problem of our astral body being.... sort of big. and bright. Sort of a raging beacon of light that draws dark things like moths. And because we experience paranoid delusions, I Cannot Tell if those dark things are actual threats or just my own fears fucking with me. Again, I’m sure an experienced astral traveler could give me some good pointers on this but I don’t have anyone I can ask. So I don’t know if we even need to bother with the safety precaution of mindscape before free travel. 

There’s also the other problem of us being some kind of energy leech, but we’ve never been able to explore it and so we’re always at very very very low energy levels, physically and magically. For small spells we’re good enough at energy work to not use our own unless we have to, but astral stuff requires more. I don’t have anyone to feed off of, and because of quarantine and being high risk we don’t have the advantage of leaving the house and getting at least a little bit of a charge off ambient energy. Basically, as always with me, I have a lot of problems and no solutions.

If anyone knows good posts or articles, if you could be so kind, PLEASE point us to them. If you have experience circumventing any of these problems yourself please contact me. I’m not going to be bullied out of learning because I’m “too sick” and I’m not stupid enough to put myself in danger by winging it, so don’t just tell me to figure it out on my own. 

So update for those who saw that I intended to post about my job (I worked in an occult shop). Obviously with the pandemic that's not happening right now. My boss has been very generous in not firing me and keeping a spot open for me when it's safe to return to work, but that could be a while.

However, I do really miss talking to other witches. I loved helping people, teaching and learning about magic. That was my biggest draw to that job. So! Any of my followers, please talk to me! Ask me questions or tell me things about your practice!!! I don't care what.

I'm fairly decent at gemstone ID (still a noob) so if you have rocks you've forgotten the name of, I can probably point you in the right direction. Just send a picture and a description. If you need help figuring out good components for a spell or ritual, I can give you basic ideas (colors, tools, stones, plants). If you're curious about any baby level stuff like what it feels like to talk to a god or spirit, how to tell if something is a sign, etc, hit me up!!!

I'm not an expert by any means but if something is beyond my expertise I'll tell you so. And if I give you incomplete or incorrect information by accident, I would love to be corrected! I want to learn too.