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Laurie Cabot's Book of Spells & Enchantments
Laurie Cabot, the Official Witch of Salem, Massachusetts, opens up her Book of Shadows, the Witch's tome of spells, recipes, and secrets, to share them with the world. Here you will find everything from the essentials of how to create and cast your own spells to detailed recipes and rituals from Laurie's years of experience as a high priestess and Witch.
440 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
September 12, 2018
***Full Disclosure: I have admired Laurie Cabot's work for years, and a few years ago had the amazing opportunity to study with this remarkable woman. Whether you agree with her practices and beliefs or not, there is no denying the power of this Witch.***
Laurie Cabot's Book of Spells & Enchantments is filled with helpful guides and wisdom for anyone interested in the practice of Witchcraft. Her advice is sound and offers incredible opportunities for both novice and more seasoned practitioners. This book moves beyond the standard "Wicca 101" book that is so prevalent on shelves theses days and moves into a more in-depth study of a still largely misunderstood spiritual practice.
From teaching the rudiments of spell work to the most complicated of rituals, Laurie addresses the subject with clear authority gained through years of practice. She offers information on the Crystal Countdown--a means to achieve an altered mindset in which to work majick--and the importance of having clear intentions and respecting the law of karma. She discusses altar tools and the setting up of the altar, but the information goes so much deeper than the basics.
Perhaps the most interesting and valuable material gathered in this book is the vast amount of information on Laurie's on Cabot Tradition. Until now, much of the knowledge passed along to the reader here could only be gained by attending workshops in Salem, MA with Laurie herself. Although there is no true substitute for the experience of the workshops, if you've ever been curious about the Cabot Tradition and its practices, Laurie Cabot's Book of Spells & Enchantments is the book for you.
Laurie Cabot's Book of Spells & Enchantments is filled with helpful guides and wisdom for anyone interested in the practice of Witchcraft. Her advice is sound and offers incredible opportunities for both novice and more seasoned practitioners. This book moves beyond the standard "Wicca 101" book that is so prevalent on shelves theses days and moves into a more in-depth study of a still largely misunderstood spiritual practice.
From teaching the rudiments of spell work to the most complicated of rituals, Laurie addresses the subject with clear authority gained through years of practice. She offers information on the Crystal Countdown--a means to achieve an altered mindset in which to work majick--and the importance of having clear intentions and respecting the law of karma. She discusses altar tools and the setting up of the altar, but the information goes so much deeper than the basics.
Perhaps the most interesting and valuable material gathered in this book is the vast amount of information on Laurie's on Cabot Tradition. Until now, much of the knowledge passed along to the reader here could only be gained by attending workshops in Salem, MA with Laurie herself. Although there is no true substitute for the experience of the workshops, if you've ever been curious about the Cabot Tradition and its practices, Laurie Cabot's Book of Spells & Enchantments is the book for you.
November 11, 2014
Absolutely wonderful book. A wealth of information and the recipes alone make it worth owning. The stories and insights are invaluable and the spells represent a wide variety of goals and intentions.
A wise book of practical magic. Highly recommended.
A wise book of practical magic. Highly recommended.
August 17, 2026
There are spell books, and then there is getting a glimpse inside the Book of Shadows of someone who has been practicing witchcraft for more than half a century. Laurie Cabot's Book of Spells & Enchantments feels like the latter. Laurie Cabot isn't simply an author writing about witchcraft. She is one of the people who helped shape modern American witchcraft as we know it, and having this much of her practical magical knowledge gathered into one volume feels like being handed a piece of living Craft history.
What I love about this book is that the spells don't feel invented to fill pages. There is a sense of accumulated practice behind them. These are recipes, rituals, techniques, correspondences, and methods emerging from decades of actually being a witch, teaching witches, serving a community, and figuring out what works. That gives the book a completely different feeling from a generic collection of spells assembled around familiar topics.
And there is a tremendous amount here. Herbs, trees, plants, gums, resins, essential oils, spell construction, magical recipes, divine powers, love, protection, healing, home, hearth, and travel all find their way into the work. But the most useful material may actually be the instruction surrounding the spells. Laurie doesn't just give you things to copy. She teaches principles that help you understand how to construct magical workings of your own.
That's something I've always appreciated about the Cabot approach to witchcraft. Magic isn't supposed to be performed mechanically. The witch's consciousness, intention, psychic ability, and ability to direct power matter. Ingredients support the work, but they're not substitutes for the witch actually knowing how to do magic. Once you understand that, a spell book becomes much more useful because you're no longer dependent upon finding a prewritten ritual for every situation life throws at you.
The sections on magical materia are wonderful for the same reason. Herbs, resins, oils, and plants aren't just decorative additions to ritual. Understanding their qualities gives you a vocabulary from which spells can be constructed. Eventually you begin seeing why certain ingredients belong together and how substitutions or entirely new combinations might work.
I also love the inclusion of work with gods and goddesses. The divine isn't treated as something completely separate from practical spellcraft. Relationship with deity can become part of how magical power is approached and directed, adding another dimension to workings that might otherwise remain purely mechanical.
Christopher Penczak and Penny Cabot's involvement makes the book even more meaningful to me because it places Laurie's teachings within an actual continuum. This isn't simply preserving material from an important elder after the fact. It represents knowledge moving through family, students, community, and successive generations of witches. That's how living magical traditions survive.
And Laurie Cabot is genuinely an elder in the fullest sense of the word. Her influence on Salem alone would secure her place in modern witchcraft history, but her influence reaches much further through her students, books, teachings, and the generations of practitioners inspired by them. When someone with that much experience opens her Book of Shadows and says, essentially, “Here, let me show you some of what I've learned,” I pay attention.
Laurie Cabot's Book of Spells & Enchantments is practical enough to use immediately but historically significant enough that I'm simply glad it exists. It's a working spell book, a magical reference, and a piece of modern witchcraft lineage preserved on paper.
An easy five stars. This belongs in the library of anyone interested in spellcraft, the Cabot Tradition, or the history and practice of modern American witchcraft.
What I love about this book is that the spells don't feel invented to fill pages. There is a sense of accumulated practice behind them. These are recipes, rituals, techniques, correspondences, and methods emerging from decades of actually being a witch, teaching witches, serving a community, and figuring out what works. That gives the book a completely different feeling from a generic collection of spells assembled around familiar topics.
And there is a tremendous amount here. Herbs, trees, plants, gums, resins, essential oils, spell construction, magical recipes, divine powers, love, protection, healing, home, hearth, and travel all find their way into the work. But the most useful material may actually be the instruction surrounding the spells. Laurie doesn't just give you things to copy. She teaches principles that help you understand how to construct magical workings of your own.
That's something I've always appreciated about the Cabot approach to witchcraft. Magic isn't supposed to be performed mechanically. The witch's consciousness, intention, psychic ability, and ability to direct power matter. Ingredients support the work, but they're not substitutes for the witch actually knowing how to do magic. Once you understand that, a spell book becomes much more useful because you're no longer dependent upon finding a prewritten ritual for every situation life throws at you.
The sections on magical materia are wonderful for the same reason. Herbs, resins, oils, and plants aren't just decorative additions to ritual. Understanding their qualities gives you a vocabulary from which spells can be constructed. Eventually you begin seeing why certain ingredients belong together and how substitutions or entirely new combinations might work.
I also love the inclusion of work with gods and goddesses. The divine isn't treated as something completely separate from practical spellcraft. Relationship with deity can become part of how magical power is approached and directed, adding another dimension to workings that might otherwise remain purely mechanical.
Christopher Penczak and Penny Cabot's involvement makes the book even more meaningful to me because it places Laurie's teachings within an actual continuum. This isn't simply preserving material from an important elder after the fact. It represents knowledge moving through family, students, community, and successive generations of witches. That's how living magical traditions survive.
And Laurie Cabot is genuinely an elder in the fullest sense of the word. Her influence on Salem alone would secure her place in modern witchcraft history, but her influence reaches much further through her students, books, teachings, and the generations of practitioners inspired by them. When someone with that much experience opens her Book of Shadows and says, essentially, “Here, let me show you some of what I've learned,” I pay attention.
Laurie Cabot's Book of Spells & Enchantments is practical enough to use immediately but historically significant enough that I'm simply glad it exists. It's a working spell book, a magical reference, and a piece of modern witchcraft lineage preserved on paper.
An easy five stars. This belongs in the library of anyone interested in spellcraft, the Cabot Tradition, or the history and practice of modern American witchcraft.
August 29, 2026
Some spellbooks feel like collections. This one feels like accumulation, the kind of material that gathers over years because a practitioner keeps discovering recipes, techniques, correspondences, and little pieces of magical knowledge worth saving.
That quality is what made Laurie Cabot's Book of Spells & Enchantments so enjoyable for me. There is an enormous amount here, but it rarely feels as though spells were invented simply to fill out categories in a book.
The range alone is impressive. Love, protection, healing, home, hearth, and travel are joined by extensive material on herbs, trees, gums, resins, essential oils, incenses, magical recipes, divine powers, and the actual mechanics of constructing and casting spells.
I could easily use this purely as a reference book. There are enough correspondences, recipes, and practical bits of lore that I kept finding myself marking things I knew I would want to locate again later.
The deeper value, though, is the teaching surrounding the recipes. Cabot's approach continually brings attention back to the witch performing the spell: consciousness, intention, psychic focus, altered states, and the ability to direct power all matter alongside whatever physical ingredients are being used.
The Crystal Countdown is a perfect example. Rather than treating spellcraft as arranging magically appropriate objects and hoping something happens, Cabot teaches a method for deliberately entering the state of consciousness from which the magical work is performed.
That changes how I read the recipes.
An incense formula stops being a magical prescription and becomes a combination of forces chosen for a purpose. Once you begin understanding why particular herbs, oils, resins, colors, or divine powers are being combined, you can adapt the work intelligently and eventually construct something of your own.
There is also a wonderful practicality to many of the ingredients. One reviewer specifically praised the everyday enchantments for using things that do not require searching across the world to obtain, and that accessibility fits the larger spirit of the book beautifully.
I particularly enjoyed the material involving gods and goddesses because it prevents practical magic from becoming entirely mechanical. Divine relationship and spellcraft can overlap, adding another dimension to work that might otherwise be reduced to correspondences and ingredients.
The Cabot Tradition material is another major reason this book stands apart. One reviewer noted that some of these teachings had previously been much more closely associated with studying directly with Laurie Cabot in Salem, so having portions of that knowledge preserved in book form gives the volume significance beyond the individual spells.
That may ultimately be what I value most about it.
Experienced witches accumulate enormous amounts of knowledge that never necessarily become formal teachings. A particular incense gets adjusted over the years, an ingredient proves especially effective for an unexpected purpose, a ritual evolves through repetition, and eventually decades of practice exist in notebooks, recipes, stories, and memory.
Laurie Cabot's Book of Spells & Enchantments gives the feeling of opening one of those cupboards and being invited to look around.
I came for the spells, but I will keep returning for the accumulated knowledge surrounding them. This is the kind of magical reference that becomes more useful the longer it lives on your shelf.
That quality is what made Laurie Cabot's Book of Spells & Enchantments so enjoyable for me. There is an enormous amount here, but it rarely feels as though spells were invented simply to fill out categories in a book.
The range alone is impressive. Love, protection, healing, home, hearth, and travel are joined by extensive material on herbs, trees, gums, resins, essential oils, incenses, magical recipes, divine powers, and the actual mechanics of constructing and casting spells.
I could easily use this purely as a reference book. There are enough correspondences, recipes, and practical bits of lore that I kept finding myself marking things I knew I would want to locate again later.
The deeper value, though, is the teaching surrounding the recipes. Cabot's approach continually brings attention back to the witch performing the spell: consciousness, intention, psychic focus, altered states, and the ability to direct power all matter alongside whatever physical ingredients are being used.
The Crystal Countdown is a perfect example. Rather than treating spellcraft as arranging magically appropriate objects and hoping something happens, Cabot teaches a method for deliberately entering the state of consciousness from which the magical work is performed.
That changes how I read the recipes.
An incense formula stops being a magical prescription and becomes a combination of forces chosen for a purpose. Once you begin understanding why particular herbs, oils, resins, colors, or divine powers are being combined, you can adapt the work intelligently and eventually construct something of your own.
There is also a wonderful practicality to many of the ingredients. One reviewer specifically praised the everyday enchantments for using things that do not require searching across the world to obtain, and that accessibility fits the larger spirit of the book beautifully.
I particularly enjoyed the material involving gods and goddesses because it prevents practical magic from becoming entirely mechanical. Divine relationship and spellcraft can overlap, adding another dimension to work that might otherwise be reduced to correspondences and ingredients.
The Cabot Tradition material is another major reason this book stands apart. One reviewer noted that some of these teachings had previously been much more closely associated with studying directly with Laurie Cabot in Salem, so having portions of that knowledge preserved in book form gives the volume significance beyond the individual spells.
That may ultimately be what I value most about it.
Experienced witches accumulate enormous amounts of knowledge that never necessarily become formal teachings. A particular incense gets adjusted over the years, an ingredient proves especially effective for an unexpected purpose, a ritual evolves through repetition, and eventually decades of practice exist in notebooks, recipes, stories, and memory.
Laurie Cabot's Book of Spells & Enchantments gives the feeling of opening one of those cupboards and being invited to look around.
I came for the spells, but I will keep returning for the accumulated knowledge surrounding them. This is the kind of magical reference that becomes more useful the longer it lives on your shelf.
September 6, 2026
A great many spellbooks seem designed for people who like the idea of casting spells more than they like actually practicing witchcraft. This is not one of them. Laurie Cabot has spent decades accumulating recipes, rituals, magical ingredients, and little pieces of working knowledge, and much of that material has the appealingly specific quality of something that existed before anyone decided to turn it into a book. There is a difference between a spell invented because an author needed another chapter and one that feels as though somebody has actually had reason to perform it.
The apothecary material alone could keep me occupied for months. Herbs, trees, gums, resins, oils, and other substances are not simply dumped into alphabetical lists with one-word correspondences attached. They belong to a broader approach to building magical work, and that is where the book becomes useful to someone who has moved beyond copying spells exactly as written. Cabot has always understood spellcasting as a manipulation of consciousness and energy as much as a collection of physical ingredients, so even very traditional-looking workings sit inside a larger magical theory. The book moves through practical spellcraft for love, protection, healing, hearth, home, travel, and deity work without losing that underlying sense of method.
There is also something historically interesting about having this much material from Laurie Cabot gathered in one place. Whatever disagreements one may have with portions of her older historical or scientific explanations, she is one of the people who helped create the public face of American Witchcraft as many of us encountered it. Here I am less interested in whether every correspondence can be traced to some ancient source than in seeing what decades of actual practice caused one witch to keep. A working Book of Shadows is necessarily idiosyncratic. It contains the things that proved useful enough to survive.
Christopher Penczak’s involvement also feels appropriate because there is such an obvious line running from Cabot’s emphasis on psychic consciousness and magical technique into the kind of Witchcraft he later developed. The result feels less like a monument to an elder and more like material being deliberately passed forward. That may be what I value most about it. Traditions survive when people eventually open the book, show someone else what they have been doing, and trust the next generation to make something living from it.
The apothecary material alone could keep me occupied for months. Herbs, trees, gums, resins, oils, and other substances are not simply dumped into alphabetical lists with one-word correspondences attached. They belong to a broader approach to building magical work, and that is where the book becomes useful to someone who has moved beyond copying spells exactly as written. Cabot has always understood spellcasting as a manipulation of consciousness and energy as much as a collection of physical ingredients, so even very traditional-looking workings sit inside a larger magical theory. The book moves through practical spellcraft for love, protection, healing, hearth, home, travel, and deity work without losing that underlying sense of method.
There is also something historically interesting about having this much material from Laurie Cabot gathered in one place. Whatever disagreements one may have with portions of her older historical or scientific explanations, she is one of the people who helped create the public face of American Witchcraft as many of us encountered it. Here I am less interested in whether every correspondence can be traced to some ancient source than in seeing what decades of actual practice caused one witch to keep. A working Book of Shadows is necessarily idiosyncratic. It contains the things that proved useful enough to survive.
Christopher Penczak’s involvement also feels appropriate because there is such an obvious line running from Cabot’s emphasis on psychic consciousness and magical technique into the kind of Witchcraft he later developed. The result feels less like a monument to an elder and more like material being deliberately passed forward. That may be what I value most about it. Traditions survive when people eventually open the book, show someone else what they have been doing, and trust the next generation to make something living from it.
May 14, 2019
I have been a solitary eclectic since 1992 but with my new work schedule I haven’t had the time to practice as I used to. Which means in my old age, Ive forgotten some of the basics and even lost my own Grimoire (it’s somewhere in my house). Anyway. Laurie Cabot is my favorite author out of them all.
This is a great, simple to follow book for both a novice and seasoned witch to brush up on the craft.
The book contains everyday enchantments that you don’t have to go across the globe to find ingredients for. It’s a great, easy read
This is a great, simple to follow book for both a novice and seasoned witch to brush up on the craft.
The book contains everyday enchantments that you don’t have to go across the globe to find ingredients for. It’s a great, easy read
January 1, 2018
Excellent substance from a true master
I learn so much from Laurie. She is an amazing teacher. Highly recommend this and all of her other books.
I learn so much from Laurie. She is an amazing teacher. Highly recommend this and all of her other books.
July 4, 2020
Mais um da Laurie Cabot para a minha lista de favoritos.
August 27, 2026
It’s great at building a foundation
July 3, 2016
This starts out very disjointed but it soon moves into lots of wonderful information.
The lists of stones, herbs, etc. are great. Lots of spells, incense ingredients, etc. given.
A valuable reference book.
The lists of stones, herbs, etc. are great. Lots of spells, incense ingredients, etc. given.
A valuable reference book.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews