Okay, here’s my dilemma: why write your own spells when there are already good ones in books and all over the internet?
I first read The Wiccan Handbook many years ago and ever since then I’m always reading “fill your Book of Shadows with original work” but nobody has ever explained why.
I borrow recipes from a cookbook… I know it feels different but I don’t know why.
If I wanted to do a prosperity spell tomorrow, would it matter if I used one Scott Cunningham wrote in 1988 instead of writing my own at 2 a.m.? I keep picturing myself standing over a candle muttering, “coins come, money grow, please ignore that I got this from page 47.”
Does the intent matter more than the wording? I also wonder if older spells might carry something from being used and passed around for years, kind of like sourdough starter.
At the same time, I can see how writing your own spell could make it feel more personal. I’m not against learning how to write spells eventually. I just don’t want to feel like I have to be a poet to practice.
For those of you who’ve been doing this longer, do your own spells feel stronger in practice, or does a borrowed spell work just as well if you cast it with focus? The books make it sound like original work is required, but my gut says that might not be the whole story.
But it’s kind of like staying in an AirBnB vs your own home or a rental car vs your car. It’s… functional. Sometimes nice even, but you are more intimately familiar with your own, so you’re going to get more from it when you need to.
You can absolutely copy spells, and some will work, but you’ll get better results (and learn far more) by writing your own. You don’t need to jump into the deep end though; the best first step is to take spells you find (and resonate with) and adapt them into your own Book of Shadows.
Writing spells in my own words feels like sending a tiny petition straight to the universe. There’s something grounding about scrawling your true intention in your own messy handwriting, the way they did in old Hoodoo charms or medieval scrolls, and it just locks the whole thing in.
By the time the candle is lit, the magic feels like it’s already underway, because my voice and my intent are smeared all over those words. I do agree that you can start by taking spells and modifying them to make them personal.
The middle ground is where most of us actually live.
I used Cunningham almost exclusively for a long time because writing my own felt fraudulent. Who was I to think my words mattered when his were right there on the page, tested, pretty, and already working for thousands of people.
But somewhere along the way I started swapping things. One word here, a different herb there. Until the spell wasn’t really his anymore, it was a conversation between us. I never sat down and consciously decided to ‘write my own’ the way people talk about it on here. It just happened, the way you start finishing a friend’s sentences after years of knowing them.
The pressure to be original from scratch is what kept me stuck for so long. Probably what keeps a lot of people stuck, actually.
I think a lot of the more experienced people I’ve ever seen practicing just write a ritual without even thinking about it but that didn’t happen overnight and they all started the same way.
Borrowed spells are like borrowed jackets. Fine until you need one cut to your actual shape.
I used a borrowed protection spell from a Silver RavenWolf book for about three years and it worked great. Then I moved into an apartment with a really weird vibe and the same words just felt flat and hollow. So I ended up scribbling something on the back of an envelope (kitchen table by myself at midnight with packing boxes everywhere, very glamorous) about my front door being a ‘closed mouth’ because that’s how the apartment felt to me. And that one worked.
Your sourdough comparison is pretty good. Spells that have been spoken thousands of times by thousands of practitioners build up a kind of groove. They’re easier to slip into because the path is already worn.
I lean on old ones when I’m emotionally fried and can’t muster the focus to build something from scratch.
Have you ever taken a favorite old spell and rewritten just one line in your own words? I wonder if the energy shifts at all when the words become truly yours.
I’ve started treating spells like little performances. Sometimes a borrowed spell looks perfect on the page but feels clunky when I say it out loud, so I’ll pace around my room and test the rhythm first. If my breath catches in weird places or I feel silly on a line, I swap that part out. It’s kind of fun, like finding the version my body wants to cast.
One tiny thing you can do with any borrowed spell is add a single sentence at the beginning that defines success for you.
For a prosperity spell, that might be “bring stable income through honest work, without crisis or harm” You’re just giving the spell better directions and sometimes that’s all it takes to make your own.
Writing your own spells comes down to handwriting. I keep a Cunningham prosperity spell in my BoS that I copied from somewhere else. I’ve used it for 15 years because I wrote it out by candlelight and made it mine through repetition. It’s ownership, not invention.
The “write your own” advice gets taken the wrong way, like you have to invent everything from scratch. It’s really just about claiming the spell as yours. Don’t let the poetry part hold you back either. Half my best workings rhyme worse than a kindergartener’s birthday card.
Honestly I just rewrite them. The old ones carry history but they also carry whatever the writer was wrestling with back in 1988, you know? Their landlord or heartbreak or whatever. Not mine.
So I tweak the wording until it fits my actual bills.
A song you sing yourself feels different than one you hum along to on the radio. When you write a spell, you’re translating something internal into language your subconscious already speaks.
When you read Cunningham’s prosperity spell, your body might not know exactly what ‘prosperity’ means to you and might just default to his definition instead. Those aren’t the same thing. That’s the only reason I still bother writing my own. The specificity matters, not the poetry.
agree that you can start by taking spells and modifying them to make them personal.