By far my favorite source of inspiration for my grimoire comes from the Wooden Books series published by Bloomsbury. I have the four-book set shown above, which I like to keep displayed out on a coffee table in our living room.

I reach for these books often and you’ll see why once you peek inside the page spreads. One of the questions I get asked the most is about my grimoire or personal book of methods/book of shadows.  I’ve given my thoughts into how you might structure and organize your grimoire here (How to Create Your Grimoire: Inspiration From One Approach) and you can check out a three-video series I did for the 2017 YouTube Pagan Challenge where I share the pages of my own private book.

Each one of these four books informs my grimoire work in a different and valuable way. You can click on the photos in this post for the enlarged 1200 pixel-side image file for a closer viewing. I’m hoping these few snapshots already start to generate amazing ideas and inspiration for you.

Designa I use to inspire decorative borders, ornamentation, and just the design elements in my grimoire pages. If you’ve ever seen a flip-through of my book and now see these page spreads from Designa, you’re going to see the influence for sure.

What I most love about using these books for inspiration is not just the design elements, but the explanatory entries as well. That way I’m informed about the design elements I’m using and I can use them with intention and significance. Everything in my grimoire is meaningful to me and symbolic, and much of that capacity comes from consulting these books.

I also like reading these texts for inspiring sigil designs and in sigil-crafting. Learning the science behind design elements and even the cultural or historic significance means I can be more informed. I also like to combine, blend, and fuse multiple principles together into one. That pushes my creativity and has helped generate some really cool work product.

Borders design is probably the big one here. I love the wealth of ideas for designing page borders. Not only do you get the design elements in this book, but you also get a lot of educational information about where those design elements came from and their significance throughout history.

Quadrivium is my favorite, I think. In terms of spell-crafting and thinking about the essential elements of craft, this book helps me blend science with craft design.

It’s actually a great tome on numerology, even though it’s not per se a book on numerology.

In my own book, I like to include explanatory material of the symbolic significance to what I’m doing, and I get a lot of that from this book series. Why am I going with this number of this thing for that process? I get a lot of my numerological inspiration from this book.

I’ll read these texts any moment I have free around the house and every single time I’ve read through the entries, I’ve come up with really cool new ideas for my grimoire. I love this book series that much for grimoire work.

I get inspiration for astrological considerations to incorporate into my craft. Quadrivium is the one out of the four that really breaks down essential elements in many different categories of cosmological principles. So it’s really the one that has helped shape the foundation of my craft.

Sciencia has also changed my life. It’s a well-written, concise resource for so many scientific principles that can inspire grimoire work, spell-crafting, and your own tables of metaphysical correspondences. It’s really given me much food for thought in my craft.

I used to gripe that I was a whole lot smarter at the age of 10 than I am today, and I think that may be the case for so many of us. It’s because at 10, we were constantly learning, constantly reading academic texts from a wide swath of subjects.

It didn’t matter whether or not you liked math and science. You had to take it. Didn’t matter if you weren’t artsy and did not like art class. You had to take it. In that way, this book series has been great as a grown-up, keeping my brain actively engaged and moving through all the core subjects, just like how we were in grade school when we were 10.

Plus, Sciencia has this really awesome appendix at the back of the book with a wealth of correspondence tables that the witchy-inclined is going to love.

For those with children, I would highly recommend getting this book series for the home. It’s just so expansive in terms of educational content. Also, as woo and insane as it may sound, just having these books in the home displayed somewhere I feel like has some positive feng shui energetic something. I dunno. I dunno what I’m talking about. Bottom line, I really love these books.

Trivium might not be as directly helpful to grimoire work as the other three I’ve talked about, but it has been immensely instructive when it comes to spell-crafting. Plus, it completes the four-book set. It’s a wealth of knowledge that we all should probably should have in our brain, so there’s that.

Trivium is the book that I use to consider the logical soundness of my spell-crafting. I know. Logic and spells don’t really go together. But hear me out. The principles in Trivium give me guidelines and a strong framework for thinking about spell-crafting in a more disciplined and methodical manner. In that way, it absolutely strengthens my craft.

There’s so much in Trivium to inspire metaphysical work. For instance, a lot of the entries on different categories of characters, personas, archetypes, etc. get me thinking about how these types might play out among the twelve zodiac signs, or life path numbers, and I add those considerations to my understanding of astrology or numerology. They get incorporated into my divinatory readings for people. I think about how these categories play out in the tarot and again, it augments my tarot studies.

Personally I’ve found investment in these books to be a great value and I’ve been eyeing the entire series collection here.

So if you’re asking me about sources of inspiration for grimoire work or intermediate to advanced texts on witchcraft and metaphysical studies, then I’d say get yourself these books or at least one of these four books to start.