Embossed Pink Pentacle Blank Leather Journal (5 x 7 in.)

Genuine leather with a pentacle embossed on the cover, 200 blank acid-free pages, five by seven inches. In pink, which is the whole point. Almost every book of shadows on the market is black or oxblood, and there is no reason a working book has to look severe to be taken seriously.

Since it is on the cover, the word is worth getting right. A pentacle and a pentagram are not the same thing, and the older meaning is the stranger one. In the grimoire tradition, in the Key of Solomon, a pentacle was the object: a disc of parchment or metal inscribed with a figure. It had nothing necessarily to do with five. Most of the pentacles in the Key are not five-pointed stars at all, and when a star does appear it is more often six-pointed than five. The pentagram is the shape. The pentacle was the thing you made.

The modern meaning, a pentagram inside a circle, comes largely through Gerald Gardner in the 1940s and 50s, and he took it in large part from the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot of 1909, where the suit of pentacles is drawn as gold discs with a five-pointed star on each. So the definition nearly everybody uses today is about a hundred years old and came out of a deck of cards. That is not a knock on it. It is just worth knowing that the symbol on your journal has a longer and looser history than the one sentence version.

Blank rather than lined, which is the right call for a book like this. Ruled pages ask you for sentences. A blank one takes the sigil, the spread you laid out, the pressed leaf and the sentences too.

Good to Know

5 by 7 inches, 200 blank pages, acid-free paper, genuine leather cover with an embossed pentacle. Takes most writing instruments. Handmade, so the emboss and the dye vary.

Try It With

sealing wax to close a page, a quill pen to write it with, and The Eclectic Witch’s Book of Shadows Companion if you want a structure to follow rather than a blank start. More in journals and journals and pens.