Also called ritual knife, black-handled knife, arthame
An athame is a double-edged, usually black-handled ritual knife used in Wicca and modern witchcraft to direct energy, cast and close a circle, and bless the chalice. It is a symbolic tool, traditionally never used to cut anything physical.
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Take care: Treat any athame as a real knife. Never carry it in public, in a vehicle or to festivals or schools; carrying laws for double-edged blades and daggers are strict in many US states, the UK and elsewhere, and a religious purpose is often not a defence. Store it locked away from children, and choose a dull, wooden or stone athame if in doubt.
Several versions of the Key of Solomon describe a black-handled knife used to trace the magician's circle, and some copies call it the arthame. The word is often traced to the medieval Latin artavus, a scribe's small knife, though that link is not firmly proven.
The Golden Dawn used daggers in banishing rituals and tied elemental weapons to the four suits of the tarot. Wicca borrowed much of this structure when it came to arrange its own altar tools.
Gardnerian practice links the athame to fire and the wand to air, while many other traditions swap them. Practitioners who need to actually cut herbs or carve candles use a separate white-handled knife, often called a boline, so the athame stays symbolic.
The athame's ancestry lies in the Solomonic grimoires, Renaissance manuals of ceremonial magic copied and recopied in Latin, Italian, French and English. Several versions of the Key of Solomon describe a black-handled knife for tracing the circle, and the word arthame turns up in some of them. Scholars suspect it comes from a garbled copy of the Latin artavus, a little knife scribes used to sharpen pens, though this is a reasonable theory rather than a settled fact.
Gerald Gardner, the retired civil servant who publicised Wicca in England, used the word in his 1949 novel High Magic's Aid and made the athame the witch's chief tool in the 1950s. Gardner collected Malay kris daggers and wrote about them, and some historians think this shaped his interest. In his tradition the athame commands spirits and casts the circle but is never used to cut. It is now one of the most recognisable tools in modern witchcraft, joined with the chalice in the symbolic Great Rite.
The pentagram is a five-pointed star drawn in one unbroken line; a pentacle is that star set inside a circle, or, in ritual magic and Wicca, a disc engraved with it. Used for thousands of years for health, protection and the five elements, it only gained its sinister reputation in the 19th century.
A ring of salt poured on the floor around a person or a working space to mark a protected area that harmful influences cannot cross, drawing on the much older magic circle of ritual magic.
Cakes and Ale is the part of a Wiccan ritual where food and drink are blessed, shared and partly offered back to the gods, usually near the end of an esbat or sabbat. It gives thanks and helps participants ground after magical work.
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