The Athame
Adapted from D. Valiente and Amalthea

The typical weapon of witchcraft is the athame or ritual knife, pronounced ath-ay-me. Old books on the Craft give several variations of this word, such as arthamy, arthame and so on.

The origin of this word is at present unknown, though some present day exponents of Near Eastern Sufism have attributed it to the Arabic adh-dhame, meaning " Blood letter" in the sense of it being a shedder of blood, which is just what the witches athame is not. Hence this derivation does not seem very convincing to those of Celtic background.

Traditionally the athame should have a black hilt, a circumstance that led Gerald Gardner to think it might be related to the Scottish Highlander's skean-dhu, which literally means " Black knife." The idea of using of a black hilted magical knife to banish evil /bane is very old. The Romans knew of it, as attested to by the writer Pliny who wrote of it.

Like the hand of glory, the athame sometimes appears in old paintings of witchcraft scenes by such masters as Francken and Teniers. In David Teniers' picture, The departure for the Sabbat, the black hilted knife may be seen at the edge of the magical circle, while an old witch and a demon confer over a magical brew, and a young witch is being anointed ready to fly up the capacious chimney on the broomstick.

Gerald Gardner has been accused by various superficial critics of taking the idea of the witches athame straight from " The Key of Solomon." However, the reverse argument has at least as much evidence to sustain it, and probably more; namely, that it was " The Key Of Solomon" and similar books which were written by ceremonial magicians who borrowed from primitive practices of witches and presented them in a more sophisticated form.

The athame is used to create the circle and magical space, to banish and to will or project magical energy.

A magical weapon is, after all, an expression of someone's will and their capacity to carry out that will. A conductor's batons, a bishop's crozier, a chairman's gravel, are all in a sense magical implements. In ancient times, we had processions of Bacchants or religious revellers carrying the " thyrsus", or ivy -wreathed wand. Today we have processions of demonstrators carrying placards and banners as emblematic expressions of their will and purpose.

At the solemnities of the Queens coronation, magnificent symbolic swords were part of the ceremony, as well as the royal sceptre itself, a magical wand of Empire. The Mace which lies on the Speakers table in the Houses of Parliament has a purely symbolic significance; and, in spite of Cromwell's command " to take away that bauble", it still remains. What Cromwell and his Puritans did not understand was that such " baubles " have a significance, which speaks to the unconscious mind of humanity, which naturally thinks in symbols.