Ritual Reads

04/09/2026

So pleased to announce I'm officially a stockist for Witches Magazine !!
🍂Autumn🍁 issue available in store now ✨️

04/09/2026

📖 FOLKLORE FRIDAY: The Book of Shadows

The Book of Shadows sounds like it must be centuries old.

It isn't. The term was coined by Gerald Gardner, the founder of modern Wicca, in the 1940s and 1950s.

Gardner assembled his Book of Shadows from various sources — ceremonial magic texts, folk traditions, his own innovations — and presented it as an ancient tradition. This was, charitably, a fib. But the fib stuck.

Today, a Book of Shadows is a personal magical journal kept by many modern Wiccans and witches — and it's entirely their own.

The interesting thing is: it's become what Gardner only pretended it was. A living tradition, accumulated over decades, now genuinely ancient in the hands that hold it.

Fiction loves this idea. Many brilliant novels have a Book of Shadows at their heart.

Have you come across one in fiction that felt most real? 🔮

03/09/2026

Everyone's favourite day...delivery day!!

03/09/2026

🔍 AUTHOR SECRETS: Conan Doyle & Holmes

Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes in 1887. By 1893, he despised him.

He killed Holmes off at the Reichenbach Falls — plunging him to his death alongside Moriarty — because he felt the character was consuming his creative life and preventing him from pursuing the historical novels he truly wanted to write.

The public's reaction was extraordinary. They wore black armbands. They wrote furious letters. They demanded he come back.

Doyle resisted for ten years before eventually bringing Holmes back in 1903 under financial pressure.

Some characters are bigger than their creators. Holmes always knew it.

If you could bring back one fictional character who died, who would it be? 📚

30/08/2026

🕯️ CRAFT CORNER: The Unreliable Narrator

The trick isn't making your narrator lie.

It's making them believe they're telling the truth.

The best unreliable narrators don't know they're unreliable. Their blind spots, fears, and desires warp the story — and the reader only realises it in retrospect.

A few tools:
→ Gaps in memory (what they skip over)
→ Excessive justification (protesting too much)
→ Small contradictions that accumulate
→ Other characters who quietly tell a different story

The unreliable narrator isn't a trick. It's a mirror with a crack in it.

Who's your favourite unreliable narrator in fiction? 📚

28/08/2026

⚗️ FOLKLORE FRIDAY: Alchemy

Alchemy's reputation has suffered under centuries of ridicule.

But alchemists were not simply greedy fraudsters attempting to make gold from lead. They were philosophers, scientists, and mystics who asked the most fundamental question: what is matter, and can it be transformed?

The Philosopher's Stone was not just a goldmaking device. In alchemical philosophy, it was a metaphor for spiritual transformation — the purification of the self through systematic trial.

Isaac Newton spent more time on alchemy than on physics. Paracelsus pioneered medicine through alchemical thinking.

Alchemy was proto-chemistry, proto-psychology, and a rich symbolic tradition all at once.

J.K. Rowling's Philosopher's Stone is the most famous modern reference. But the tradition it draws on is far stranger and richer than the book suggests.

What fictional use of alchemy is your favourite? 🌙

27/08/2026

And anyone who is a regular in my shop knows this.

27/08/2026

25/08/2026

🌿 GENRE EVOLUTION: Southern Gothic

Southern Gothic is horror that knows exactly what it's about.

Flannery O'Connor. William Faulkner. Carson McCullers. Toni Morrison. A tradition of American fiction set in the decaying South, populated by damaged characters, twisted family histories, and a landscape that seems to remember things it shouldn't.

O'Connor called her grotesque characters people who had experienced some violent grace — forced to confront truths they'd been avoiding.

The horror in Southern Gothic is never supernatural at its core. It's social. It's historical. It's the violence and injustice buried under the grand old house, coming up through the floorboards.

What Southern Gothic novel would you most recommend? 🌙

24/08/2026

🌸 MYTHOLOGY MONDAY: Izanami & Izanagi

In Japanese myth, the god Izanagi and goddess Izanami created the Japanese islands together, stirring the ocean with a jewelled spear.

Then Izanami died in childbirth.

Izanagi descended into the underworld, Yomi, to bring her back — a story that echoes Orpheus and Eurydice across centuries and oceans.

She asked him not to look at her in the darkness. He looked.

What he saw was the body of his beloved already in decay — and the demons she had become.

Fleeing, he sealed the entrance to Yomi with a great boulder. Izanami swore vengeance: she would kill a thousand of his people each day.

He replied he would create fifteen hundred new lives.

And that, the myth says, is why death and birth continue in an endless cycle.

What creation myth do you find most philosophically compelling? 🌙