D is for Disc of Shadows or DOS
Yes, I’m a punny witch if you hadn’t figured that out long ago and I’m also a techno-pagan who embraced computers back in the 80’s at work and in the early 90’s when I could afford one at home. Hard to believe my first computer had a much smaller memory than my smart phone does and was such a huge monster compared to my laptop now. For the record my first computer was top of the HP line and had 152mb.
Before converting to a DoS I had had to have a new paper Bos every year. I filled it up in a year. The picture has just a few of them because the shelf below contains the old composition books that I used for many years.
The opening of the world of technology meant I could write faster and at a closer rate to what my mind was moving at. And for those who sneer at a DoS remember that a BoS was once new technology too. One of the reasons there isn’t a lot of written practice around was that reading and writing were often not open to people and that paper was made of sheep skins or other highly expensive or difficult to obtain materials. They also scraped off the writing and used them again and again. So before you cling to your BoS because it’s allegedly “traditional” remember it was new once too and your ancestors jumped at the chance to have this “new” tech.
My books/discs of shadows contain anything I find memorable and might want to have a record of in the future. And in fact, this blog and my blog that I kept for many years over on LJ perform a lot of the same functions with the added advantage of being able to search by keyword. Try that in a multitude of books covering many years. I’ve had a BoS/DoS since 1984. That’s a lot of words, drawings and spaces.
So what’s in them? Rituals, reading, chants I’ve written, herbs and things growing in my garden and status of that, spells, results of the rituals, songs, poems, drawings, ideas, prayers, recipes for food, incense and oils, books I’ve liked and books I thought were dreck, journal entries, ghosts encounters, when family members showed up who are no longer corporeal, dreams and if they came true, basically anything I felt I needed to remember.
Because I now have a smart phone and a digital camera I can add photos and ideas to the DoS from anywhere and don’t need to scurry for a piece of paper. This was problem in the car when story ideas would assault me and demand to be written when stopped at a stop light. It’s much easier to pull out my phone and open note/word processing app and make a quick note and not worry I’ll forget it. It’s also sits by my bed at night in case I need to note something down or record a dream.
So the only thing I fear is a power failure or the charger not working and if that fails I still have paper to fall back on. Electrons are just as magical to me as any piece of paper and they take up a lot less room.
