We can learn a thing or two about witches and their grimoires. We can all stand to benefit in writing down the details of our day-to-day lives.

I was aware of grimoires and their association with magic users in history, lore, and popular culture, but I haven’t thought about what their contents could be. It felt like a journal— personal, a peek inside their mental processes. Reading it when you're an outsider felt like a taboo. However, I do enjoy the cover aesthetic: the patina on the well-loved leather skin, its tome-like weight, and its seemingly unruly pages. Something piqued my interest in them that I recently did some reading.

I’m now officially calling my notebooks, my grimoire.

I wrote extensively about my notebooks in this article but somehow glossed over the details of how I use them. As a writer, I write everything down immediately, wherever and whenever the thought comes to me— from thoughts while washing the dishes, in the middle of showering, and on the pavement while walking. If there's an idea, I have to write about it or it will escape me forever. Thus, I am constantly surrounded by scraps of paper. It can look somewhat inconvenient as a person living in the digital age where you can just type on note apps on the phone you’re constantly on or immediately post it on social media. However, I could never fully flesh out my idea whenever I wrote it digitally. It always has to be on paper so that I can shift from drawing maps to writing a long stream of consciousness, whatever feels intuitive at the time. And maybe, inconvenience is the point. Therefore, the early phases of my writing are almost always longhand. I sometimes draft it digitally so that I can print it for editing (markup) after. My writing would always exist in a physical form in more than one phase of its creation.

The process would often leave me with a bunch of unorganized slips of paper everywhere. How do I organize it? The way I think about it, the digital space serves as a catch-all, i.e. my Notion. It serves as a way to archive my writing and a place to put projects in while I work on something else. All ideas I have throughout the week get written down on whatever slip of paper I wrote it on and get to be stored in a small container which I sift through every Monday. The categories were: ideas I can work on later to be placed in Notion, ideas I can work on now for outlining, and general long ramblings I can post unedited on my website. Whenever I found myself looking for a project to work on, I just opened my Notion and read through to see what would stick.

Grimoire, for the uninitiated, is the witch's book of knowledge. Inside it, they stored potion ingredients and instructions, celestial body maps and meanings, observations of animals and their behavior, spells, charms, divination, summoning, incantations (prayers?), rituals, and the process of creation of magical objects. What makes the grimoire unique is that the information stored was always up to the witch's personal interpretation of their own personal experience, seen through mystical lens and knowledge. It is almost a diary, a place where all of the witch's personal thoughts and knowledge are recorded— all circumstances that were unique to them.

But before they were books, I have a hunch that they were the first bunch of notes, records of trial and error and what to improve, and a handful of random things that only made sense later down the line. Before you can store and collect any information that makes sense at all, you first have to make a lot of them.

Writing was— and still is the way we record, store, and reorganize information.

Why write things down? Simply because our brains are made better for thinking rather than remembering. Our brain's memory is like a computer's memory. Our short-term memory is our RAM (rapid access memory). From the name itself, it served as a storage for all running applications even if they were in the background. Too many apps running, or using an app that uses a lot of memory would lead to more data taking up space in the RAM. This results in apps lagging, or even crashing. Unfortunately, we can no longer retrieve any unsaved data once the app is closed and purged from our RAM. Our SSD or HDD is our long-term memory. While we can just navigate our file explorer to locate where we want to store our file, our long-term memory is a little bit more tricky. Although its main purpose is for storage and recall, our long-term memory is picky about which to store, and even pickier in recalling things that were stored. Some of its requirements were: repetitiveness (repeating certain information long enough), emotional attachment (including nostalgia and trauma), or association, among many. Everything else falls into the black pit that is the subconscious, which is a different creature in itself. TL; DR, our memory is not always trustworthy, so we use human technology to mitigate this weakness.

Speaking of human technology, writing was invented at the birth of an organized society or civilization. It had assisted its invention and growth and its transformative byproduct. Because of writing, we weren’t only able to remember, we also got to share and retell information. Sometimes, we wrote stuff for ourselves. Oftentimes, we write for the benefit of someone else. It often goes beyond having a legacy- it’s about solving an immediate problem, if possible, within their lifetime.

A large part of the population kept physical notes pre-smartphone era. They kept letters and postcards, diaries and journals, and even scrapbooked newspaper clippings and magazines. Writing has shared its space with other media like video and audio, but only recently was a large portion of the pie taken over by the internet. Now, almost everything is on the internet. Heck, even people's most personal thoughts were posted online when people from before had the precognition that it’s appropriate to write it down in their personal diary instead, it is kept hidden with a lock and key. Sharing information, although democratized, was also corrupted because of social media and AI.

Let's go back to grimoire. Grimoire had always been portrayed as the source of the witch's powers. This makes sense, as losing their copy meant someone else had an advantage over their lack of knowledge. Also, taking that knowledge in upgrades yours. In video games, skills were learned and upgraded using scrolls or tomes. Your stats were also improved using the same things (aside from experience). Writing and knowledge are important when you're going on an adventure, which is basically our daily life.

Am I making another case for the notebook and journal content creators? Maybe. But there is a grain of truth in the message. Whether they were promising better productivity, better memory recall, better mental health, decreased phone time, or anything else that is a byproduct of modern technology, the fact remained the same: writing long hand is good for us humans. We've been doing this for a long time and had often led us to good things (although there are some bad things that happened too). We have rushed to the gold mine that is social media and AI that promised us "life-changing" ad revenue, dopamine hits, and external validation.

Writing always felt like being grounded and being back to your roots when the present day felt too much like an unreality. So keep a grimoire, a codex, a journal, a diary, and write on it like you're making a second you. It was the second fire, the gift of Prometheus to mortals. It gives us the ability to create— a power only a god can do.

Go write.

Grimoires and books of knowledge: keeping notebooks like a witch.

6/9/2025