Practice · Tools · Key of Solomon
Solomonic wand
A hazel rod, present in some witnesses and absent in others, prepared for directing addresses and touching ritual figures.
What the source describes
The wand belongs to the Key's unstable edge rather than its most consistent core. Book II's collated chapter gives it a construction and blessing, but the Hebrew Key and Additional MS 36674 omit it from their instrument lists. Lansdowne 1202 supplies a fuller use: the operator holds the wand aloft while addressing a spirit and touches the circle or characters with it.
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
Where the witness includes it, the wand directs an address, indicates inscribed figures, and forms part of the operator's prepared equipment. Wood does not make it a Fire tool in this source, and its Mercury timing should not be mistaken for a permanent planetary correspondence.
Form, materials and reconstruction
The Book II collation specifies a one-year hazel switch, cut at sunrise in one stroke on the day of Mercury and inscribed or engraved in Mercury's day and hour. After its blessing it is perfumed and stored cleanly. 'Virgin' is glossed differently by the manuscripts and editors—one year's growth, unbranched, or previously unused—so the entry preserves the uncertainty instead of choosing one definition silently.
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
Staff and wand can be interchangeable in the edited tradition, and neither appears in every witness. This is not the Golden Dawn Fire or Lotus Wand, whose construction, colours, and symbolic systems are much later and much more specific.
Primary account used here
Key of Solomon, Lansdowne 1202, Lansdowne 1202, Book III, wand instructions ↗
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.