Practice · Tools · Key of Solomon
Black-hilt knife
The circle-making knife of the Key of Solomon's Book II, separately prepared and stored from its white-hilt counterpart.
What the source describes
Chapter VIII assigns the black-hilt knife to making the circle and describes it as an instrument for deterring spirits. Chapter IX then uses it, or a consecrated sword, to mark the measured circumference. This division of labour matters: colour names two different prepared knives in this witness; it does not create a general black-equals-banishing rule for every later tradition.
Historical setting
The Key of Solomon survives as a family of manuscripts rather than one authorial master copy. Instrument names, drawings, preparation details and even which tools appear can differ between witnesses, so this page follows the cited edition and records its variants.
Common uses
After a quill knife and cord establish the centre and radius, the black-hilt knife may mark the circle, its outer boundaries, and the ritual figures. Another passage has the operator place a knife upright in the ground at the feet during the conjuration. Nothing in these directions identifies the blade with elemental Air.
Form, materials and reconstruction
The text prepares it by the same broad process as the white-hilt knife but changes the appointed time to the day and hour of Saturn, specifies a black hilt, and gives a different set of names and characters running from point toward hilt. Its historical recipe includes animal blood and hemlock and ends by wrapping the knife in black silk. Those details are recorded here as features of the manuscript, not offered as modern instructions; hemlock is poisonous, and no reconstruction requires reproducing the dangerous recipe.
Element: No fixed element
This source does not assign this particular instrument a fixed element. Its materials or effects should not be turned into an elemental correspondence without a named source.
Sources and variations
The names, letter forms, ingredients, and even wording vary among the Latin, Italian, French, and English manuscripts collated by the editor. Calling this an 'athame' would import a much later name and obscure the Key's own distinction between its two knives.
Primary account used here
Key of Solomon, Book II, Book II, chapters VIII–IX ↗
Further references
- Key of Solomon: introduction and contents ↗Editorial history and an overview of the manuscript-based edition.
- Hebrew Key of Solomon ↗A different witness with its own section on magical instruments and requisites.