What will happen to your BOS when you die?

[sharpchick]

There was another thread I just replied to where we are describing how we keep our Book of Shadows. Part of mine has my personal journal in it, and I'm not keen on having that survive me in this incarnation.

I'm a solitaire, so my BOS will not likely pass to another member of a coven. I've not yet decided how to handle this issue - decree that it be destroyed by someone I can trust, or passed along to another witch I have yet to meet, etc.

Thoughts?

 

[redflash]

I hadn't even thought about it ! I suppose I would like it to go to my son, don't know what he would do with it though ! My private journal is seperate, wouldn't want anyone to read that.

 

[Ilithiya]

I don't know. My kids might chuck it, they might keep it, they might sell it, they might publish it. Don't particularly care, either - I'll be dead and won't need it!

Illy

 

[Red Emma]

Bos

Last week was my 80th birthday, so I think about these things now and again.

As for my BOS, there's not much in it but my tries at manifestation, and I can see a couple of my grandchildren using it.

As for my personal journals, I do two things to make them hard to read so anyone who wants to read them will have to work at it.

First of all I use a #2 pencil, which, in a spiral notebook, is not easy to make out. Further, in college I devised my own personal shorthand to take class notes using only consonants, no vowels. Now and again I re-read parts of the journals to see if reading them at all is possible. And it mostly is.

A few years ago the journals of one of my grandmothers was given me by a cousin. I didn't know this grandmother very well, and I was really excited to have it. Unfortunately it was of the variety, "Tom and Edith took me for a ride this afternoon. We went to Grey's Lake. Barbara and Betty were along." So I still didn't know her very well.

As Ilithiya said, "I'll be dead. I won't care."

Blessings.

 

[Milfoil]

My diaries don't contain anything that would grieve or harm anyone by being read by a third party. If they survive me, I have no problem with others reading them. They, like most other diaries are a social, historic and personal comment on the 20th/21st century. Someone may find them interesting but they will most likely end up as landfil - either way its not a problem for me personally.

My other writings however, I don't know about. My dream journals are pretty personal and if I were ever to write anything which might come close to a BOS and which contained information which could be considered as potentially harmful if in the wrong hands then I guess I'd make it part of my will to be either buried or cremated with me.

Seems a shame to destroy a lifes work though. I wonder if my feelings on this are more ego centred than they need to be? As others have said, I'll be dead so I guess I won't be worried about them anyway. Certainly encoding potentially dangerous stuff is an age old way of overcoming this sort of problem.

 

[Webwitch]

Should one of my children follow in my steps, then it will be passed on, otherwise it will be buried with me.

That said, my journal and my "book" are two different things.

 

[Shadow Wolf]

Since I'm at the very beginning of this path, and just know I want to start a
BOS, not sure which particular tradition I'll choose to follow, I'm sort of just seeing where all this takes me and take it from there.

I think if I can't pass it on to someone who would value it and use it, I would want it to be buried with me.

 

[Red Emma]

The BOS

I've been thinking about this overnight, as both a writer of fiction and a lover of history.

Such journals and/or books-of-shadows, as these are gold mines for historians and writers. They give a real, down-to-earth, view of the writer's times and culture and how that one person fit into it. Her struggles, her victories, her not-victories. As I think of these things, I think I'd like my writings to be of use in this tradition.

I know a woman who knew her grandmother only as a very strict, narrow-minded, religious person. At the grandmother's death, they discovered in her trunk, journals which depicted her life as a telegrapher of one of the Mexican generals during the Mexican revolution.

As a writer I wonder if the journal has any clues to explain the woman's apparently complete change of personality and value system. I'd really love to read and study them. Maybe write a historical romance novel or mystery.

I know it's not lady-like, but I'm drooling at the potential.

 

[ravenest]

Good question Sharpchick. I've been thinking about that for some time and gone thru lots of different solutions. And its not just BOS, there is a whole lot of other stuff, ritual research, original ritual, 6 years records of group workings Rites of Eleusis. Years of magazine articles. Not to mention tools and regalia, also initiation rituals, membership records etc etc etc....
What's gonna happen to it all? I liked the time capsule idea for a while. Then there was the, who cares anyway, I'll destroy it all its ALL WORTHLESS!!!
Then I thought I'd have it intered or burnt, with me.

No successor, no one interested, I guess like many traditions it will just fade away and cease to exist ...

But really I like the idea of a time capsule, wouldn't you like to find something like that? Juicy!

Oh I forgot, first choice involves money I dont have ... but if I did, The Ravenest Museum of Magic ... it'd have everything from Tibetan Phurbas , dorjes and tankas and Athames to GD ritual stuff, old masonic regalia (for laughs), Artwork, Enochian tablets ...Peoples abandond magical stuff (why do they leave it with me?) and all the old necklaces and one earings that have been left behind (why do women do that?) ...

 

[AJ]

Last week was my 80th birthday, so I think about these things now and again.

A few years ago the journals of one of my grandmothers was given me by a cousin. I didn't know this grandmother very well, and I was really excited to have it. Unfortunately it was of the variety, "Tom and Edith took me for a ride this afternoon. We went to Grey's Lake. Barbara and Betty were along." So I still didn't know her very well.

As Ilithiya said, "I'll be dead. I won't care."

Blessings.

Every few years I have a clean out and burn stuff. I've changed so much over the years that by the time I'm ready to pitch something, what was once deeply reverent and personal, is now irrelevant. I guess I'm a movin' on sort of person.

My mother in law has kept the journal type Red Emma mentions above. Now at 86+ there is a double closet in the guest room with one side stacked to the ceiling with them. Each day starts with what time she got up, what the weather and temp were, and progress through her mid morning snack, her pills and what they were, who called, who wrote, who she called who she wrote, what she watched on tv and read. usually several pages worth. I think they started out as an escape, and now are a habitual addiction. But none of them say anything about what she thought about, what she dreamed of doing, real pleasures or sorrows.

Does anyone know what has become of Red Emma?