Tools of the Arcane: Wands, Staffs, Books, Familiars, and Symbols

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Updated 7 September 2026 · 11 min read

Tools of the Arcane: Wands, Staffs, Books, Familiars, and Symbols

The wand, the staff, the spellbook, the black-handled knife, the cat on the shoulder. Anyone could draw the kit blindfolded.

Which is exactly the problem. The standard wizard’s toolkit is so familiar that almost nobody checks which parts of it are ancient, which are early modern, and which were assembled in England in the 1950s. The answer is: some of each, and the pieces are not the ones you would guess.

This article sorts them. Where a tool can be traced, it is traced. Where it turns out to be recent, that is said plainly, because a tradition invented in living memory is not a lesser thing. It is just a different thing, and pretending otherwise is how a subject loses its credibility.

The wand is older than the wizard

The English word “wizard” is about six hundred years old. The wand is at least three thousand.

In the Odyssey, Circe turns Odysseus’s crew into pigs on her island of Aeaea by striking them with a rhabdos, a rod. That is the earliest famous wand in Western literature, and the detail matters: she does not gesture with it, she hits them. Hermes carries a rhabdos of his own, which he uses to put mortals to sleep and wake them again, and which becomes the herald’s staff twined with serpents. In Greek mythology the rod is a tool of transformation and of passage between states: sleep and waking, human and animal, living and dead.

The Hebrew Bible gives the same object a different job. Moses and Aaron carry rods that become serpents, split water and strike rock. The contest before Pharaoh in Exodus is explicitly a contest of rods against rods, Israelite against Egyptian, and the Egyptian magicians are assumed to be able to do the trick too. The text takes their competence for granted and disputes only the outcome.

And Egypt had literal wands, which you can go and look at. Middle Kingdom craftsmen carved curved wands from hippopotamus ivory, incised with rows of protective figures (knife-wielding demons, lions, frogs, serpents), and they are worn at the tips, apparently from being drawn along the ground to trace a protective boundary. They cluster around childbirth and infancy. They are not symbolic props. They are equipment, used until they wore out.

The staff you can dig out of the ground

Here is the strongest evidence in this article, and it comes from archaeology rather than literature.

Old Norse has the word völva for a female seer and practitioner of seiðr. It appears to derive from vǫlr, meaning a staff. The title is, in effect, “staff-bearer”.

And staffs turn up in the graves. The National Museum of Denmark records several iron staffs from Viking Age burials, most of them in the graves of wealthy women:

  • At Köpingsvik on the Swedish island of Öland, an 82-centimetre iron staff with bronze ornamentation and a small house modelled on top. The woman was buried in a stone ship, dressed in bear fur, with a jug from Central Asia and a bronze cauldron from Western Europe. Whatever she was, she was connected and she was rich.
  • At Fyrkat in Denmark, a woman buried with a staff, a silver amulet in the shape of a chair, and seeds of henbane: a plant that produces hallucination and delirium, and which has no ordinary domestic use.
  • At Oseberg in Norway, the great ship burial, a wooden staff or wand and cannabis seeds in a purse.
  • At Hagebyhöga in Sweden, a staff alongside horses, a carriage and Arabic bronze jugs.

The literary sources describe the völva arriving in a community, being seated on a raised platform, and answering questions about the coming year. The graves show women buried with an object matching the name of the role, sometimes with the means to induce an altered state, and consistently with wealth and imported goods.

That is a rare thing in this subject: the text and the ground agreeing. Compare the situation with almost every other magical tool discussed here, where the object survives only in descriptions written by people who disapproved of it.

Norse mythology assigns seiðr to Freyja, who teaches it to Odin, and Odin takes real reputational damage for practising it, because it was understood as women’s work. The god who gave an eye for knowledge is mocked for the one skill he had to be taught by a woman.

Gandalf’s name is a staff

Which sets up the joke that runs underneath modern fantasy.

Tolkien did not invent Gandalf’s name. He took it from the Dvergatal, the catalogue of dwarf-names in the Völuspá, where it appears in a list. The elements are usually read as gandr (a staff or wand, and by extension sorcery) plus álfr, elf.

So the wizard who defined the staff for every reader and viewer since 1954 is named, in the source Tolkien lifted him from, something close to “wand-elf”. The most familiar image in fantasy carries its own etymology, borrowed from the same Norse material that produced the staff-bearing völva.

Romania’s Solomonari carry a comparable prop, and Väinämöinen carries none at all, because his instrument is his voice. The staff is not universal. It is a north-western European specialism that fantasy made global.

Grimoires: the real ones, and the famous ones

A grimoire is a book of magical procedure, and the genre is much older and much scruffier than its reputation.

The oldest real spellbooks we have are the Greek Magical Papyri, a corpus recovered from Greco-Roman Egypt, written between roughly the second century BCE and the fifth century CE. They are not stately. They are working documents: recipes for dream-oracles, love spells, curses, methods for finding a thief, procedures for compelling a god to appear, with ingredients lists and drawings. They mix Greek, Egyptian and Jewish material without apology, and they are the single best window we have into what magic actually looked like on the ground in the ancient Mediterranean.

The Key of Solomon is the famous one, and its reputation outruns its age. Attributed to Solomon, its surviving manuscripts are largely sixteenth- to eighteenth-century, in Latin, Italian and French, descending from an earlier Greek tradition. It is a Renaissance and early modern text with a medieval pedigree, not an ancient one. It is also the direct source of a great deal of modern ritual practice, as the next section shows.

The Necronomicon does not exist, and the way it does not exist is genuinely interesting. H. P. Lovecraft invented it in the 1920s, gave it an author, a date, a translation history and a list of libraries holding copies, and other writers added to the apparatus. Readers began requesting it from libraries. Several books have since been published under the title. A fictional grimoire acquired a real bibliography, which is a fair description of how a good deal of occult tradition works.

The athame is about seventy years old

The double-edged black-handled ritual knife is now so standard that it reads as immemorial. It is not.

The athame belongs to modern Wicca, and it enters practice through Gerald Gardner and the tradition he founded in England in the late 1940s and 1950s. Its ancestor is real enough: the Key of Solomon specifies a black-hilted knife among the tools the operator must prepare, and the odd word “athame” descends from the forms found in manuscript and translation of that text. But the object as practised today, used to cast the circle and direct energy rather than to cut anything, is a twentieth-century construction assembled from an early modern grimoire.

One small correction while we are here, because it has been repeated in a great many places including an earlier version of this article: a double-edged knife has one blade with two edges. It does not have two blades. If the symbolism of duality is worth making, it is worth making accurately.

None of this is a debunking. Ronald Hutton’s The Triumph of the Moon is the standard history of exactly how modern pagan witchcraft was assembled and by whom, and the honest account is more interesting than the invented pedigree. The site’s own Witch page covers the same ground from ancient sorcerers through to modern Wicca.

The familiar is an English problem

This is the correction that matters most in this article.

The familiar, the imp in animal form who serves the witch and feeds on her blood from a concealed teat, is presented almost everywhere as a general feature of the European witch trials. It is not. It is overwhelmingly English and Scottish. Continental European trials, which produced far more executions, are dominated by other accusations entirely: the sabbath, the pact, night flight, the demonic gathering. The animal servant who suckles is a specialty of the British Isles.

Emma Wilby’s Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits is the book on this, and the detail she draws out is the one that makes it real: the familiar appears in the confessions of cunning folk (people who made a living finding stolen goods, healing cattle and lifting curses) as often as in the confessions of accused malefactors. It was frequently described as the source of the practitioner’s ability, and it was frequently described with affection.

The witch’s teat, meanwhile, was a searchable physical mark. It converted a spiritual accusation into something a court could examine a woman’s body for, which is precisely why it recurs in English records and why it should not be treated as folklore.

The site’s Familiar entry has this right already: British witch-lore, serving English witches and cunning folk. The article you are reading is the one that had it wrong.

The tools nobody draws

The standard kit is Western. Practitioners elsewhere carried equipment that was every bit as specific and considerably better documented in current use.

The Ifá diviner’s chain and palm nuts. A Yoruba babaláwo works with the ọ̀pẹ̀lẹ̀, a divining chain of eight half-seed pods, or with sixteen sacred palm nuts. Casting produces one of 256 odù, each attached to a body of verses the diviner must know by heart. This is not a mood-setting prop. It is a functioning information system with a memorised corpus behind it, and its deity is Orunmila.

Paper. Chinese Daoist practice uses fu (符) talismans: written charms in a specialised script, burned, swallowed in water, or pasted over doorways. The tool is the writing itself. In Japanese Onmyōdō, shikigami are spirit servants associated with paper forms, and are the equipment that made Abe no Seimei formidable. Compare the Japanese mythology tradition of the mountain ascetic, whose powers were popularly bracketed with those of the tengu.

The drum. Across Siberian traditions the drum is described not as an instrument but as a mount, the thing the practitioner rides to get somewhere. It is the single clearest case of a magical tool whose stated function has nothing to do with what the object obviously is.

The pentagram changed sides

Symbols are the part of the toolkit where invented history is thickest, so one worked example.

The five-pointed star appears on Mesopotamian tablets. The Pythagoreans used it as a token of recognition and associated it with health. Medieval Christian use is entirely respectable: in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the poet stops the narrative for roughly forty lines to explain the pentangle on Gawain’s shield as a symbol of five virtues, five wounds, five joys, and interlocking faultlessness. It is the badge of the most Christian knight in the poem.

The association with evil is nineteenth-century. Éliphas Lévi, in his Dogme et rituel de la haute magie in the 1850s, drew the distinction between the star with one point upward and the star with two points upward, and attached the inverted form to malign forces. The reading spread from there into occultism, then into popular culture, then into a moral panic that has outlived the books that started it.

A symbol that meant health to the Pythagoreans and knightly virtue to a fourteenth-century English poet was reassigned by a French occultist a hundred and seventy years ago. That is how symbols work. They do not carry meaning; they are assigned it, repeatedly, by whoever is currently holding them.

What the tools are actually for

Set the whole kit side by side and one thing is common to all of it. Every tool here converts something invisible into something with a location.

A curse becomes a lead sheet you can bury. Fate becomes eight seed pods on a mat. Protection becomes an ivory wand you can drag across the floor of a birthing room. A spirit becomes a piece of folded paper, or a cat with a name. Authority becomes an iron rod that goes into the grave with the woman who carried it.

That is the function, and it is why the tools survive when the beliefs do not. A staff can be dug up nine hundred years later. A belief cannot.

Further Reading

  • Neil Price, The Viking Way: Magic and Mind in Late Iron Age Scandinavia (2nd ed. 2019). The standard work on seiðr and the staff burials.
  • Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits (2005). The book that gets the familiar right.
  • Owen Davies, Grimoires: A History of Magic Books (2009). Exactly what it says, and excellent on the Key of Solomon‘s real dating.
  • Hans Dieter Betz (ed.), The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation (1986). The oldest working spellbooks we have.
  • Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (2nd ed. 2019). Where the athame actually comes from.
  • Geraldine Pinch, Magic in Ancient Egypt (1994). On the ivory wands and the rest of the household kit.
  • William Bascom, Ifa Divination: Communication between Gods and Men in West Africa (1969). The 256 odù, and how the system runs.

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