Short lance

What the source describes

Chapter VIII first names the short lance with the two knives as an instrument for tracing circles, characters, and other figures. It then groups the lance with the artavus and iron stylus in a shared preparation. Manuscript drawings label it lanceola—a little lance—and show why it should not be inflated into a full battlefield spear.

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

Its pointed form serves the same broad family of marking and tracing tasks as the other prepared iron instruments. The text does not give it the Golden Dawn's later Air attribution or a separate planetary identity beyond the election used for its making.

Form, materials and reconstruction

The shared paragraph appoints the day and hour of Mercury, a white-boxwood handle in several witnesses, characters traced on the tool, perfume, and silk storage. Its historical tempering recipe uses animal blood and dog's mercury; this page records that textual detail without presenting a hazardous historical recipe as modern practice.

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

French and Italian witnesses blur the names of stylus, dagger, sickle, and little lance, while the Latin and manuscript drawings preserve a more compact inventory. The resulting uncertainty belongs in the account rather than being hidden behind one modern label.

Primary account used here

Key of Solomon, Book II, Book II, chapter VIII, artavus, stylus, and lanceola ↗

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.