Names are powerful things. We like to give powerful names to things that are important to us, and this is why "Book of Shadows" is so appealing. It sounds quite awe inspiring, and it's very mysterious, too! Ooh!
Clearly, I'm not into it. Look, what this book is, what it's supposed to be, is a working book. It's more akin to a cookbook than a holy book. Now, "workbook" is, I grant you, kind of lacking in grandeur, and "working book" is just awkward. So I hunted around and tracked down the etymology of grammar, which is thus:
- grammar
late 12c., gramarye, from O.Fr. grammaire "learning,"... M.E. gramarye also came to mean "learning in general, knowledge peculiar to the learned classes" (early 14c.), which included astrology and magic; hence the secondary meaning of "occult knowledge" (late 15c.), which evolved in Scottish into glamor (q.v.).
Thank you, Online Etymology Dictionary.
So "grammar" works really well. Of course, I insisted on putting my own little spin on it, so I tapped my Celtic ancestry and I call my book my "gramadach". I am going to be nice enough to share quite a bit of its contents with you. This is one area where, generally, the masses and I agree; typically, your "gramarye", to give you another option, is meant to be private.
From a practical point of view, if one hands out all one's secrets to success, one does an awfully nice thing for one's competition. There is competition, btw...men and women have been making a living off of magic for a very, very long time, and it is as much a business as anything else. Ignore the Susie Specials and their cries of how magic for profit is eville. I don't know about you, but I gotta eat, and so has every witch or wizard or mage or midwife since the dawn of time. So I really am being nice in sharing from my personal stash of valuable information.
From a cautionary point of view, one doesn't want some poor novice to mess about with bits of knowledge and accidentally harm themselves or others. So here's a disclaimer; don't do stuff if you don't know what you are doing and don't blame me if it all goes horribly wrong! This applies generally to everything I ever share here, okay? Good.
Now, here's what my gramadach has to say on names, at least right now, since these books are always growing and changing, just like us!
Names
In magic, people typically acquire at least one, often two names in addition to their birth names. These names come into play so that when one is working, one designates most clearly who is being worked upon/doing the working. Your private name (sometimes called “secret”, which gives it more cachet, but also, in my experience, makes it more tempting to reveal) should come to you at some point…during meditation or just popping into your head is fine. One way to know the name is the name is whether you’d want to share it with others…if you do, it isn’t. It’s quite likely a random assemblage of letters, “meck” for example. Now, your working or coven name is often (but not always…another part of my magical information, my specific skillset, turned out to be related to my private name, for example) derived from your private name…the idea being that someone who knows you has a faint chance of deducing your secret name in case of emergency. “Meck”, for example, might derive into “Mellow Creek” or “Merry Creek”. In working, you want to use all your names, and a working will work best on someone else if you know and use all of their names.
My working name is Wren Starling. Spiffy, isn't it? But you can just call me Jenny; it's what I answer to most often, after all...well, except for Mommy!
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