The Recipe Book vs. The Lab Notebook
What your approach to knowledge management might mean for your magical practice
Among the most fascinating tools in a witch's arsenal will be their grimoire. What exactly IS a grimoire, you ask? Historically they are viewed as books that contain teachings about witchcraft -- spells to cast, instructions for dealing with magical entities. On another level it can be a witch's personal spell book, where a witch keeps their records of workings they have performed, potions they have concocted, things they have learned. Put most simply, "grimoire" is really just a fancy word for a witchcraft manual.
How a witch chooses to organize the things they are learning is highly personal. Some witches keep shelves full of notebooks in which they keep handwritten notes, drawings and diagrams. Other witches keep their knowledge in digital files and use organizing programs like Evernote or Trello. Often it's a combination of both analog and digital tools. Some witches have everything indexed and tagged and all you have to do is name a thing and the witch can rifle through their records and quickly find exactly the thing required. Others stubbornly tap their noggin and say, "it's all up here," and if you ask them to produce a thing it might take a day or more for them to find it, but it's there. And if they can't find it, they can create a replica fairly readily based on a cobbling together of what they can scrounge up from their records and their recollection.
None of these methods is right or wrong. It is more a question of what works for the witch involved. But one of the things that is very true about a life in the Craft is that what makes that life vibrant and exciting is the fact that you are always, always learning. And because you are spending a lifetime learning, the question of how you store all that knowledge you are acquiring will become relevant to you at some point. And it is very true that when it comes to the issue of "knowledge management," different people are going to find different tools effective for different reasons.
But that is not really the issue I am on about today. How we choose to organize the ephemera of our magical life is in some ways a function of how our brains process information more readily, and how we interact with knowledge on a more basic level. There is no "one size fits all" prescription for that, and I would be disingenuous if I tried to offer one to you.
What I'm on about today is slightly different (and goes deeper) than merely focusing on the mechanics of how you organize your personal grimoire. It's a question I recently had the opportunity to ask a student when I got a look at her grimoire:
"Do you treat your grimoire as you would a recipe book or more like a lab notebook?"
What do I mean by that?
Think for a moment about how you use a recipe book. Let's just say for a minute that you're having a dinner party, and you've decided to serve a cheese soufflé. Unless you're a professional chef or a particularly ambitious home cook, you probably don't know how to make something like that from scratch. You'll need to reference a recipe, a text that will give you a list of ingredients and specific steps to follow, the end result of which will be a soufflé. And while it is certainly possible to cook things without a recipe, for most complicated dishes, particularly baked goods, you'll need to follow that recipe pretty much to the letter in order to get the results you want. With recipes, you don't deviate overmuch. To do so is to invite things to taste different or go badly. Once you have a recipe that works, you stick with it. The goal is to use the tried and true method to replicate the flavors and results. Consistency and reliability is what's important. You record things in the recipe book so that you can replicate the recipes down to the last detail, every time.
Contrast that with how one uses a lab notebook. A lab notebook is part of the process of scientific discovery. The process of scientific discovery includes experiments. Experiments are similar to recipes, in that they often require the documentation of ingredients and processes down to the last detail so that they may be replicated. The idea being that if you can do an experiment the same way each time and reach the same result, there is an inherent truth available from looking more closely at that experiment that can be considered scientific in nature.
For example, let's say I am trying to prove the scientific principle of how water moves between different states -- solid to liquid to gas. And so I create an experiment where I take water and put it in a refrigeration chamber that is set at 32 degrees Fahrenheit. And every time I put a cup of water in the chamber and leave it there for an hour the water becomes solid. And in a similar experiment I heat water in pot to 212 degrees and let it boil for an hour, and trap the steam that boils off. These are experiments that will yield the same results every time, no matter how many times I do them. And thus we know, with scientific certainty, that water will move from liquid to solid at 32 degrees and will transition from liquid to gas at 212 degrees.
But here is where a lab notebook begins to diverge from a recipe book. Because with a lab notebook, we don't stop with just the scientific principles that we already know and which are easy to prove. The goal is to expand our knowledge, discover things we do not know. For example, I know that water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit. What happens when I add salt to the water? How does that impact the freezing point? So I would design a new experiment and record it in my lab book, one that would help me answer that question. In order to make sure that the answer was as exact as possible, I would create an experiment testing the issue, and control all the factors involved. How much water? How much salt? How long at the 32 degree temperature? Do I change the temperature and make it colder or hotter?
To make sure that we refine our learning as much as possible, we might try different amounts of salt in the same amount of water. Or the same amount of salt in differing amounts of water. And we would keep careful records of what happens in each variation of the experiment, so that in the end, we have the most precise understanding of the answer to the question as possible. Being able to replicate the experiment, and control the variables, is an important part of the process, but that isn't the final goal of the endeavor. The goal is to understand more about how the dynamic of how salt affects the freezing point of water really works and why, so you tinker with the experiment, and record the results, to see if your theory about the dynamic you are testing is "true" or not. You do enough experiments with enough variations, and replicate the results with enough consistency, and you can effectively answer the question of when salt water will freeze. (Answer: salt water usually freezes at a lower temperature than water, how much depends on the amount of salt in the water.)
Both a recipe book and a lab notebook record the ingredients and steps in a process in an attempt to create something that is replicable, something that you can repeat on demand. But the reason for creating that replicable result differs. In a recipe book, the ability to replicate the result is the end in and of itself. Once I have a recipe for delicious corn muffins, I can make corn muffins over and over again, using the recipe, knowing that if I follow the recipe correctly the corn muffins I make after the 200th time will be just as delicious as the first batch.
The purpose of a lab notebook is to record the ingredients and steps in a process in part so that it may be replicated at will, but also that you know what you've already tried. The idea is that this is a step in what will become an iterative process of discovery where you will make changes and discover what happens as a result of those changes. This gives you knowledge that you may continue to apply in other scenarios. To go back to our water and salt experiment, now that I have shown through the process of scientific experimentation that salt makes water freeze at a lower temperature, the next question would be can I use salt to lower the freezing temperature of other liquids? Or, alternatively, are there other variants of salts that I could use that would lower the freezing point of water even further? And as I experiment with each of these variations, and test the theory of how this all works, I record each experiment in my lab notebook, so that I can decide what variant I need to try next to test the next idea.
How you approach your grimoire, recipe book or lab notebook, will tell me a lot about your approach to magic more generally. The recipe book approach aims at finding a spell for every category of need, and faithfully setting down that spell so that you may execute it flawlessly and achieve the end for which the spell was designed. You have a spell that helps you get a job. You have a spell that helps you find money to pay a bill when your bank account is a little low. You have a spell that helps you find a parking space. You have a spell that wards your house from baneful magic. If you have a new need, you go forth and research to find a new spell. And any time you have a need that is recurring (like that monthly bill problem) you have a tried and true spell recorded in your grimoire that you can do.
The upside of that approach is that your magic can become a dependable part of your life and your routine. And if you take the time and do the research, you can find a wide range of amazing spells from very knowledgable magicians and witches, and you don't need to reinvent the wheel. If I know that I can use the Tower of Light shielding practice from Melita Denning and Osborne Phillips with great success, why do I need to bother with other shielding practices? I can devote time and energy to researching and solving other problems with other magic. Very efficient. And there's a high degree of trust that the magic you're doing will actually work. And that makes magic feel a little bit safer and more reliable.
The downside of the recipe book approach is that life doesn't come at us with problems that fit in neat little boxes. And even problems that look the same on the surface have nuances to them that go unaddressed if you use the same, generic spell for both. Let's say I want to sell my house, but for some reason I'm not getting any buyers. Sure, i could cast a very generic house selling spell, and it would likely help. But that spell might not address the real issue.
The most effective spell to cast might look vastly different depending on why my house isn't selling. If I am in a buyer's market where there's high inventory in my neighborhood and my house is competing against several others that have similar floorplans, I might cast a very different spell than if my house has some very specific issues around its condition and architecture style that make it a harder sell to the average buyer. In the first case, I might want the magic to make my home's unique features stand out so that a buyer will see a difference between my home and the others on the market. In the latter case, I want the buyer to see past the features that are turning out to be deal-breakers to prospective buyers.
Then there's the fact that limiting yourself to a specific spell weds you to the ingredients and the process it requires, whether or not it works in your circumstance. How many times have you seen a spell call for an ingredient that is hard to get, dangerous to handle, or very expensive? Orris root, for instance, can cost about $5 an ounce at present, if you can find someone who's carrying it. Pink peppercorns are about $10 an ounce. Spells can often call for certain tools -- a wand made from a certain species of tree, or a mason jar, or a specific kind of cloth. A spell with as little as 3 ingredients and a couple of specific tools can cost well over $30 pretty quickly. Now, that doesn't seem like much to a lot of people, but for others even that sum can be prohibitive on a regular basis.
But there's more to think of than money. Do you have the right space to do the spell? Privacy? Does the spell need to be done at a specific phase of the moon or with specially prepared ingredients (say, water that has been collected from the first snowfall...) Sometimes time is of the essence and you don't have the time to wait for the ingredients to be in stock or for the moon to be in the right place or for your Uncle Joe who's visiting from Cleveland to get out of your guest room which doubles as your altar space. What happens then?
A recipe book will give you a catalog of spells that only work if you can do them precisely as written. But if you're working a lab notebook approach, then you are on an iterative journey where you are learning how magic works, and you can adapt your spell work to fit your budget, your circumstances, and tailor-make a spell at will to fit whatever situation you might find yourself in. The lab notebook approach empowers your Craft so that you can do magic anytime, anyplace, whether you have tools or not. The lab notebook approach is how I found myself able to set up a fully functional altar that could be used to perform a blessing ceremony for my friend's new business, a diner, using only material that I could find in said diner.
No chalice? Well, we've got a coffee mug. That will do. No athame? We can use this butter knife. Representations of the four elements? It took some doing, but we made it work. When you know how an object, an herb, a rune or any other magical tool or item works, what its correspondences are and how it works with other magical tools or items, then you have the means to make any kind of magic you want, for whatever purpose you need.
It means that you can take existing spells, the ones that might otherwise be more like recipes, and make them work for your particular needs. Can't afford an herb or they are out of your favorite essential oil? Do the research and place a substitute that works in a similar way. Don't have enough time to source water that has been left outside during a full moon? Do a pre-blessing on water from the tap to instill in it the qualities that would result from being charged with moonlight. Don't have enough space to do a full spiral dance? Improvise something. And in each of these cases, keeping a record of what you change and why, and what happens when you do, grows your knowledge and gives you the ability to do magic on the fly.
Sure, the lab notebook makes you more flexible and grows your knowledge. You become more able to integrate magic into your everyday life because you can craft spells wherever you are whenever you need them, without necessarily needing a lot of preparation. The downside of this kind of approach is that it can be hard to keep up with. Keeping track of all the permutations, all the things that you try, can be difficult. And informing yourself of all the possible permutations can be time consuming. The ability be able to adapt your spells with substitutions is only possible if you've first done the research, which means that the promise of being able to readily adapt your magic might not always be delivered upon. Your ability to be adaptive will only be as good as the amount of knowledge and research you've managed to do in advance.
And then there's the fact that when you tamper with an existing spell, one that's been tried and vetted, you are giving up a little bit of that reliability when you mess with it. Results might differ. And while that is an opportunity to learn, when what you really need is results, the promise of knowledge might not be an adequate substitute.
As much as I want to say that the lab notebook approach is unequivocally better than the recipe book approach in every single way, that would be a bit dishonest. But the way in which it IS superior is that it takes you from being a witch who casts spells to being a witch who crafts spells. And it is when you fully understand how to craft spells, you can begin to build your own spells from scratch. And that's when things truly get fun and interesting.
On the flipside, it's important as a witch as you start to adapt and build your own spells, that you recognize the value of the discipline of recording your work. What were you trying to accomplish? Did it in fact work? How does the substitution you made make the work feel different from the process you used before? Witches are often eager to become crafters who make spells on the fly, but then lose the discipline needed to track their progress. And in doing so, they lose the ability to grow the community of craft beyond themselves.
Because the other thing a recipe book does is spread knowledge beyond yourself. A lab notebook is not meant to be published. It's for private use, usually. But a recipe book is meant to preserve knowledge on a generational level. Anyone who has ever received their grandmother's box of recipe cards, or has cherished the family recipe for a certain cake or Thanksgiving stuffing will attest to the value of a recipe book for sustaining a family's traditions. Growing the Craft, teaching the next generation of witches, is important. And to do that we do in fact need records of the work we know works
In fact, it turns out, a grimoire needs a little bit of both approaches -- recipe book and lab notebook -- to really be an effective tool to grow both the witch and the Craft.