• [i] update after reading Praying with Jane Eyre and rereading Create Your Personal Sacred Text

The Well-Worn Scripture: Rereading as Devotional Practice

For the eclectic, the witchy, the secular, and the spiritually untethered

There's a specific kind of magic that happens around the third or fourth time you read a book you love. The plot stops being a surprise. The sentences slow down. You notice the word repeated in chapter one that blooms into meaning by the end. You stop reading and start listening.

This is not an accident. This is practice.

The Problem with Canons (and Why It's Actually a Gift)

Most of the world's major religions come packaged with a central sacred text — a fixed point to return to, argue with, memorize, and be held by. Witchcraft, for the most part, has no equivalent. There is no Bible of witchcraft, no Quran of witchcraft — nothing that embodies every single aspect of the craft that practitioners can go to and read. Most witches see this not as a flaw but as a defining feature of a practice built on personal sovereignty.

The absence of a canon is an invitation. It means the task of finding your sacred texts falls entirely to you, and that the choosing itself becomes a spiritual act.

Bobbi Parish, psychologist and author of Create Your Personal Sacred Text (1999), arrived at this idea through necessity rather than ideology. After surviving a crisis that left her hungry for spiritual grounding, she found that no single religious text addressed the particular shape of her inner life. So she reversed the process — writing and gathering text that reflected her unique beliefs and creating what she called her Personal Sacred Text. Her framework is simple and radical: a River of Truth flows underneath every possible source, from the sacred texts of the world's religions to secular sources such as comic strips and screenplays.

Every book you've ever loved has been carrying sacred water. You just haven't been drinking from it deliberately

Sacredness Is an Act

Vanessa Zoltan — atheist chaplain, Harvard Divinity School graduate, and host of the podcast Harry Potter and the Sacred Text — offers the cleanest possible definition for what we're doing here. Sacredness is an act, not a thing.

She knows this from experience. As a divinity school student, she wanted to learn how to pray, how to reflect and be vulnerable — and she didn't think the fact that she didn't believe in God or the Bible should hold her back. What she carried through hospital wards and difficult seasons was not scripture. It was Charlotte Brontë. Secular novels are my scripture, she writes plainly.

Her approach to sacred reading involves something she calls rigor: you keep at it even when your heart isn't in it. You have to be slow and deliberate. It is a commitment, not a hobby. She compares it to the way you reread a text message from someone you're falling for, convinced there's a truer meaning beneath the surface if you just look long enough — the faith that a real meaning exists, and that finding it will help you navigate your own emotions. Extended toward a beloved book, that faith is what makes reading sacred.

The operative word is rereading. A first reading is consumption. A second reading is relationship. A third is devotion.

What the Witchy World Already Knows

Kelly-Ann Maddox, in Rebel Witchy, describes exactly this kind of relationship with her own sacred texts — the Chronicles of Narnia, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Dylan Thomas's poetry, and artists' manifestos. She doesn't merely enjoy these books; she has inscribed passages into her grimoires, used quotes in spells and prayers, worked with characters as spiritual guides, and kept returning to these texts as living, breathing parts of her practice.

The witchy YouTuber who works with The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle goes further in articulating what the relationship actually feels like across time. When she opens a random part of the book, she remembers something from when she last read it in a specific mental state. It's like tarot, she says — the way that if you pulled the Seven of Wands at a pivotal moment, you'll carry that memory every time you draw it again, not in a limiting way, just as a felt sense, a returning. The text accumulates your own history inside it.

Crucially, both Maddox and this approach distinguish between texts that serve a season and texts that are constants. Some archetypes, some stories, companion you through a particular phase and then release you. Others — like The Last Unicorn for its reader, or Alice for Maddox — are always relevant, no matter what part of life you're in. Knowing the difference is part of the practice.

Maddox also makes room for texts to be graduated. "You might study a text to the bone, embrace it as a daily part of your practice, and then finally reach the sense that you've extracted what was required from it." The text is not used up; it is honoured and set down. You can always return. But the relationship has its seasons, like everything else in a nature-based practice.

This is a profoundly ecological model of spiritual reading. The same book read at 19, at 34, and at 52 is not the same book — because you are not the same reader. Your annotations from different years are a kind of archaeological record of your becoming.

A Practice Without a Pedigree Problem

One of the genuine difficulties facing eclectic and pagan practitioners who want to work with older spiritual reading traditions is that most of them come pre-loaded with theology that doesn't fit. Lectio divina — the ancient Christian practice of slow, meditative scripture reading — is exquisitely suited to devotional reading of any text, but for many it carries too much baggage to enter comfortably. There are a lot of Christians who read the Bible every day, and this close, intimate interaction with a text is something genuinely potent — worth learning from, even while rejecting the container.

Zoltan arrived at the same crossing point from the Jewish side. In her tradition, prayers are prewritten and always in Hebrew. Adapting that inheritance to a secular practice required building something that was rooted in ancient methods but belonged entirely to her.

One practice she inherited and made her own is the florilegium 🌸. Collecting florilegia — "a gathering of flowers" in Latin — involves reading through a text and writing down the sentences that catch at something (what Zoltan's teacher called "sparklets"), without noting where they come from. When the whole text has been worked through, you read the sparklets back as their own new text. This folds bibliomancy, devotion, and creative writing practice into a single act.

It also works well for those of us with limited energy, inconsistent memory, or chronic illness. You don't need a long session. You need a pen, your book, and five minutes. A single sparklet, written out and contemplated, is a complete devotional act.

The Author Doesn't Have to Matter

One liberating note that the Last Unicorn practitioner raises is worth dwelling on: the death of the author.

Working with a text as sacred doesn't require knowing anything about its creator. You don't have to endorse the author's biography, politics, or spiritual views to find the text useful. What the text does to you is yours. What it means in your life is yours. Roland Barthes argued in 1967 that the death of the author is the birth of the reader — and in devotional practice, this becomes literal. The book stops being a record of someone else's intentions and becomes a mirror for your own becoming.

This is especially important for practitioners navigating complicated author relationships. A text can be reclaimed. What you've made of it already belongs to you.

The Political Dimension of Choosing Your Text

It would be incomplete to talk about personal sacred texts without acknowledging the politics of canon — because who has historically been permitted a sacred text, and whose books have been treated as literature rather than scripture, is not a neutral question.

When Toni Morrison wrote Beloved (1987), she was, among other things, returning spiritual gravity to a story that American history had tried to make unspeakable. For many Black readers, Beloved functions as sacred text in the most complete sense: it demands rereading, resists easy resolution, holds grief that cannot be reduced, and provides a language for survival. Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) operates similarly for many Chicana and queer readers — a text written to be lived with, returned to, and worked through across a lifetime. Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and Kindred have sustained entire communities through political darkness, functioning less like novels than like field guides to resilience.

The post-colonial and marginalized world has always known something that dominant religious traditions tried to monopolize: that the sacred is found in the stories your own people tell about survival, transformation, and being seen. When practitioners from outside the Western canon choose their sacred texts, they are also — quietly or loudly — making a claim about whose words have weight.

On Working Copies and Precious Editions

There's a practical detail in Maddox's approach worth stealing: the distinction between the precious copy and the working copy.

Friends over the years have gifted her beautiful hardback editions of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. She cherishes them. But when she works with the text devotionally, she uses a battered paperback — one that can be highlighted, annotated, dog-eared, and loved hard. The book that serves as your sacred text needs to be touchable, markable, and willing to be a little destroyed.

This is actually good theology. The scrolls in a Jewish synagogue are handled with reverence precisely because they are used. The Book of Kells looks the way it does because monks worked with it for lifetimes. A devotional text that stays pristine is a text that hasn't been prayed with.

If buying a second copy feels like too much: sticky notes, pencil annotations, a reading journal kept alongside the book, or a voice memo recorded after each session are all legitimate alternatives. The practice adapts to the practitioner.

How to Begin

A few threads drawn together from all of these teachers:

Start with childhood. Think about which stories, mythologies, and narratives you were drawn to before you knew why. Your sacred text could be a children's book, a young adult novel, something from the literary canon, or a film that led you to the source text. Write them down without judging the list.

Play before you commit. You don't have to call anything sacred right away. Start with bibliomancy — open a book at random when you need guidance or a different perspective, read a paragraph, and write your thoughts about it. See how it feels. Over time, a genuine connection will distinguish itself from ordinary affection.

Establish a routine when it feels right. Morning and evening reading, even just a paragraph, can quickly deepen a relationship with a text. But the spot matters too: some practitioners open at random and ask for guidance; others work by date numerology (today is the seventh, so read page seven); others start at the back and read backwards. Invent your own.

The florilegium practice. As you read, collect sparklets — lines, phrases, images that catch at something — in a separate notebook, without noting their source. After accumulating a collection, read it back as its own text and see what it says.

Bibliomancy as low-effort divination. When you don't have the energy for tarot or other practices that require a meditative state and sustained attention, a sacred text is often accessible where tarot isn't. The story is already there. The words are already there. You just have to relate what you read to your current life — which is a much lower bar than generating meaning from scratch.

Seasonal return and release. Consider working with a text for a lunar cycle, a season, or a year — then consciously setting it aside, noting what it gave you, and allowing it to rest. Some texts will be constants. Others will complete their work with you and wait on the shelf for when you need them again.

A Note on Low-Energy Practice

All of this can be done in five minutes. A single sentence, read slowly and sat with, is a complete devotional act. If you are ill, exhausted, or in a difficult period: the bar is one sparklet. One passage read aloud. One question asked of an open page.

Sacred reading is not about volume. It is about quality of attention. A practitioner who reads one sentence with genuine presence has done more devotional work than one who reads thirty pages on autopilot.

And if you feel like you've fallen off your practice entirely, this is the gentlest re-entry: find any book you love, read a paragraph, and write your thoughts. That's it. That's the practice recovering itself.

A Final Word on Meaning

Zoltan's deepest claim about this practice is that it extends outward. The point of treating any text as sacred is to learn how to treat one another as sacred. Reading toward a book with attention, patience, and the willingness to be changed by it is practice for doing the same thing with people — including yourself.

For those of us working outside inherited religious structures, this is not a lesser form of spirituality. It is a harder and possibly more honest one. You choose what is sacred. You show up to it again and again. You let it change you.

That is the whole practice. Everything else is decoration.

Sources

Sources: Bobbi Parish, Create Your Personal Sacred Text (1999); Vanessa Zoltan, Praying with Jane Eyre: Reflections on Reading as a Sacred Practice (2021); Kelly-Ann Maddox, Rebel Witchy; YouTube transcript: "Sacred Texts in Witchcraft" (channel unattributed in transcript); Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author" (1967).