Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft (also affectionately known as the "Big Blue Book," or simply, "Big Blue") was first published in the fall of 1986, and quickly became a best seller in the Witchcraft world. As of 2025, Big Blue has sold over 600,000 copies, making it one of the best-selling Witchcraft books of all time. Even today, nearly forty years after its initial publication, it remains a perennial best-seller, and perhaps the most recognizable book in the history of Witch-publishing. And while similar titles have gone through several changes in cover art, Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraftstill looks much like it did in 1986: it remains blue, oversized, and with a big pentagram on its cover.

One of the most rewarding experiences that came from working on my book High Priest: Raymond Buckland, the Father of American Witchcraft was exploring the origins of Big Blue. Books don't just fall out of the ether fully formed, and the creation of we know today as Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft evolved over nearly ten years! Despite being rather ubiquitous today, the history of Big Blue is full of starts, stops, and even some rather unexpected critiques! Here are five things you might not have known about Raymond Buckland's most famous book...

1. Big Blue's origins lie in a home-study course put together by Buckland.
In 1973 Raymond Buckland founded the Seax-Wica tradition and a year later published The Tree: The Complete Book of Saxon Witchcraft (Samuel Weiser) outlining his new tradition. But The Tree was mostly a collection of rituals and lacked the context found in true "101" books. Instead of writing another book to remedy this deficiency, Buckland chose to offer a home-study course for practitioners of Seax-WIca instead.

Buckland began working on his correspondence course in the mid-1970s, but it would be several more years before he was in a position to launch the project. When Buckland did finally release his “"ome Study Course in Saxon Witchcraft," it was an instant hit. Unlike other Witchcraft correspondence courses popular at the time, Buckland hand-graded every assignment sent it to him, and gave personal advice and suggestions.

After a few years, Buckland found the work involved with hand-grading everything his students sent it to him too much to keep up with it (at the time Buckland was working a full-time job and also writing books) so he decided to turn the study course into a book. Much of what is in Big Blue today comes directly from Buckland's Seax-Wica course, oftentimes word for word. But to turn the study course into a successful book, Buckland knew he would have to remove a lot of the jargon specific to his new tradition, which led Buckland to purchase a green notebook from K-Mart to sketch out some new ideas...

2. We can sort of thank K-Mart for Big Blue. When Buckland set out to transform his Seax-Wica home study course into a non-denominational Witchcraft book, he knew exactly how he would go about it. And that transformation is documented in a green notebook (purchased at the now defunct retailer K-Mart) containing Buckland's handwritten additions and changes. (Today that notebook can be seen at the Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magick in Cleveland, Ohio.) In that notebook are new rituals for what would become Big Blue, and those handwritten rituals would later appear verbatim in Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft.

In addition to material from his home-study course, Buckland would add bits and pieces from his 1970 work Witchcraft from the Inside (which had last been updated in 1974) to what would become Big Blue. Throughout his spiral-bound notebook, Buckland added little notes indicating just where excerpts from Inside would be added to the text he was working on. What might be most surprising about Buckland's "sketchbook" is just how organized his mind was during this process. There are very few passages crossed out; Buckland had a very clear vision of just what he wanted to do.

3. Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft was almost called something else. When Ray first proposed what is now officially Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft, he did so with the proposed title of Ray Buckland's Witchcraft Workbook. Other early names for the project include The Witch's Workbook and Complete Witchcraft Workbook, but despite the frequency of the term "workbook" in these early proposed titles, Llewellyn (Buckland's publisher) had serious reservations about using the word "workbook" to describe Ray's tome. This led to some rather out-there proposed titles, such as Creating Your Own Reality: The Book of Witchcraft, which sounds like an entirely different project.

One of the book's other proposed titles was Wicca: Ray Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft, which would have been rather momentous if chosen. In 1986, the word "Wicca" was not yet in common usage, and Llewellyn would not use Wicca in a book title until 1989 when Scott Cunningham's Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner was released. Buckland himself was on board with calling Big Blue Wicca, and in a letter to Llewellyn's publisher Carl Weschcke he called that proposed book title "the best."

Speaking of Carl Weschcke, it was Weschcke who decided on the book's final official title. After several months of indecision at Llewellyn, the publisher sent out an office memo proclaiming that, "An executive decision has been made by our fearless leader" and that Buckland's book would henceforth be known as Ray Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft. Weschcke eventually decided that the title was just a little too wordy and remedied that perceived problem by dropping "Ray" from the book's title.

4. Not everyone at Llewellyn thought Big Blue would be a hit. While Weschcke was firmly in Buckland's camp during the development of Big Blue, not everyone at Llewellyn felt the same way. Many staffers at the company disliked Buckland's use of examination questions at the end of every chapter, with one commenting the questions were "no fun." (The examination questions were also deemed "silly" and even "offensive" by the same staffer.)

One Llewellyn employee knew exactly where most of Big Blue came from, too, calling Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft "nothing more than Buckland's old self-study course—blah!" (To his credit, Buckland was always very upfront about Big Blue being adapted from earlier materials.) These of critiques of Big Blue were made by just two employees at Llewellyn, and early in the process of putting the book together, most of the company was solidly behind the project. But now, decades later, and after the book's runaway success, I find the critiques of Buckland's opus rather amusing.

5. Despite Big Blue being a best-seller, Buckland never wrote a sequel. Most incredibly successful Witchcraft books spawn a sequel or two¹, but Buckland never did release a sequel to Big Blue. Not surprisingly, he wrote more Witchcraft books after Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft, but none of those books were meant to be companion pieces to the Big Blue Book. But Buckland was part of a project that expanded on Big Blue, and even had a similar cover (blue with a pentagram, of course), but that project was a video production and not a book.

Released on VHS in 1990, Witchcraft: Yesterday and Today was a one-hour video starring Raymond Buckland along with several local Witches from Buckland's then-home of San Diego acting as a coven and performing rituals. The video covers much of what was in Buckland's book and features some history along with some dramatic Witchcraft rites. The video is especially notable for being one of the first Witchcraft videos produced and directed by actual Witches and released through a major publisher of Witchcraft-books. In 2005, a DVD version was released (with additional material) and retitled Witchcraft: Yesterday and Today.

Another sort-of sequel to Big Blue was what came to be known as "Big Red," only this time Buckland was not writing about Witchcraft. Big Red began its life as 1993's Doors to Other Worlds: A Practical Guide to Communicating with Spirits. Doors was extremely practical, and, like all of Buckland's books, well-written and thought out, but it looked much like every other Llewellyn book printed in the 1990s. This would change when a second edition of the work was published in 2004 and as rechristened Buckland's Book of Spirit Communications.

This new edition reorganized the book's contents and added additional material, including examination questions at the end of every chapter. Buckland's Book of Spirit Communications also adopted the over-sized dimensions of Big Blue and the latter's workbook-like format. Spirit Communications also now sported a striking red cover (hence, "Big Red") and a prominently placed heptagram (seven-pointed star). Despite the content in the two books being radically different, when displayed side by side together they certainly look like a matched pair!

¹After the success of To Ride a Silver Broomstick, Silver Ravenwolf released both To Stir a Magic Cauldron and To Light a Sacred Flame. Scott Cunningham's sequel to Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner was Living Wicca.