Here at Damigeron’s Dungeon, we are interested in tools. Tools for writers. Tools that help writers tell their stories, convey character, and engage their audience. These tools provide incredible utility across numerous fronts.
The tools we’ll be talking about today are, conveniently, literal tools.
The magician’s tools.
What are the Magician’s Tools?
The magician’s tools are a standardized set of tools employed in Western magical practice, which correspond to the four elements: the pentacle (earth), the cup (water), the wand (air), and the sword (fire).
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| Ripped from a .pdf scan of the 2004 Indian publication of Nevill Drury’s The Dictionary of the Esoteric. This compiler has the 2004 UK edition in hard copy. |
The Standard Set
Before we get into the virtues of the magician’s tools individually, we want to sell you what the tools are to you as a storyteller: a standard set.
A standard set is a consistent set of expected components. Any audience, in prose or visual media, will recognize a standard set, and with familiarity comes engagement. Once they start picking up on these recurrent features, be it in story structure or in diegetic articles (things within the story's world), the audience is rewarded for paying attention with a sense of understanding. When the storyteller takes advantage of this understanding, they can exploit it for foreshadowing or subverting audience expectations. You can only deliver a compelling twist if you've mastered the audience's expectations.
We see standard sets employed for character design in media all the time: from the four elements (Avatar: The Last Airbender) to the four humors (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), the zodiac (Saint Seiya), the Major Arcana of the Tarot (Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders). These devices give you a set number of roles to fill, themes and motifs to work with, and expectations to realize, subvert, or subvert through novel realization. The limited nature of these sets helps to provide a consistent aesthetic while also providing room for some incredibly creative interpretation and reinterpretation.
In the case of the magician’s tools, all four are physical objects that any single character can carry and interact with, and each is an avenue for characterization. Suppose the toolset is, in fact, standard across multiple characters. In that case, the contrast in behavior between characters can be isolated along these avenues, allowing the audience to compare and contrast the characters through direct parallels.
A standard set of tools is even more valuable in visual media as it creates a shared visual language. The standard set becomes a reference point for meaning, providing the audience with a manual for interpreting character design choices.
Using standard sets gives the storyteller an easy tool for building characters and worlds and a tool for the audience to engage in the work more actively. The more actively engaged your audience is, the better!
Why the Magician’s Tools?
So, I’ve made a quick case for standard sets as a category and even touched on standardized sets of tools, but that hasn’t said anything about the value of the magician’s tools in particular. There are several practical reasons, but let’s examine why the magician’s tools are the magician’s tools.
Pentacle: This is often a medallion, a disk, or may be drawn upon the ground. The pentacle is just another name for a pentagram, which represents the universe (the circle) and all the phenomenology of the five elements (the unicursal, five-pointed star). The pentacle, therefore, represents the universe as a stage on which all the elements interact. This is the passive feminine.
Cup: The cup is the partitioning of matter from general to particular, the first measure, from water to this water. It is a womb, a receptacle where the previously chaotic potential is put to ordered purpose by an active will. With the instruction of the shaping will, the generating potential is realized, and something new is brought into the world. This is the active feminine.
Wand: Also, the rod or club. The emblem of authority, the wand directs the attention of man, spirit, and element, manifesting the magician's will by direction. This is the passive masculine, like the king on his throne (Major Arcana: The Emperor).
Sword: The magician wields the sword, performing his will actively in the world. It is a device of direct, aggressive action. This is the active masculine (Major Arcana: The Charioteer).
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| Image of the Aces shamelessly ripped from http://overthemoon-oraclecards.blogspot.com/ , original source A. E. Waite's Tarot deck from The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910). |
Practical Considerations
Stepping away from the mystical qualities of these tools, depending on the kind of story you might be trying to tell, there are practical concerns.
Diegetic concerns involve the practicability of the tools themselves. In your more typical medieval fantasy narrative, all of these tools are readily available and fall into the realm of basic traveler’s gear. Could you imagine your hero going on a journey without a cup (or waterskin, drinking horn, or a bowl)? What about a walking stick? It would be perfectly normal for someone traveling a great distance to carry a hanger or other weapon to defend themselves. These are all things your magician would have with them even if they weren’t a magician! It also encourages them to be resourceful if they get separated from their belongings.
Pentacles are trickier. What if the practice of magic is illegal? Jewelry can be hidden under clothes or hidden in pouches or pockets. If their magic requires a more literal stage, they may draw it in the dirt with their shoe or use powder on hard surfaces.
A Step Further
We can now move past the traditional tools themselves and back into something more meta: the abstractions that govern the magician’s tools:
- The Stage
- The Vessel
- The Instrument
- The Tool
The Stage: The place of magical action, either literally in a platform or demarcated space or in more representative form, in the medallion, the disc, the coin, the shield ring, the combat shield, the roundel, etc.
Magic is an abstract notion, so particular actions performed must be elevated out of their material particularity and then operate on the abstract plane of ideas to achieve action-at-a-distance effects. On or before the stage, he may thrust his sword in the direction of his target in malice and thus wound their spirit (which may be creatively interpreted a million different ways). Alternately, the magician might create a potion of reagents whose literal chemical contents may be poisonous but perform an offering of the concoction from the magical stage, pouring out the brew from his cup to the patient and thus confer the symbolic associations of the reagents to the patient’s spirit.
The magical stage indicates, clarifies, and elevates activity into the dimension of magical phenomena.
The Vessel: The vessel is a womb in which creative potential is generated and the particular conceived. This may be the standard cup of water, chalice, goblet, or bowl, but it may also be the crucible, oven, or the furnace as womb. Unshaped matter or broken/dis-purposed material goes in with an ordering intent, and what comes out is a new, realized thing. Chaos to order, order to chaos, or from one order to another.
Alternately, it can deny action by indefinite holding, as King Solomon imprisoned the demon Kunopaston in a phial.
The Instrument: The instrument is any device that directs, be it by authority in the case of the wand or rod by directing attention, or physically, in the case of the fan or the oar. Musical instruments, too, can serve this function, altering the space in range of hearing and exciting the audience. The tool governs relationships between things and passively shapes the space of magical action by changing those relationships indirectly.
The Tool: The sword is a tool that performs a direct action. In the case of a literal sword, that direct action is to cut and destroy.
Deliberate destruction can directly shape the world by removing the undesirable or more carefully employed to create something new. In the hands of Marduk, the sword was a creative tool used to split the dragon Tiamat in two. He used Tiamat's halves to make the dome of the heavens above and the land of the earth below. Similarly, the sculptor takes his chisel and destroys the stone medium until it is an acceptable shape, and the stone becomes a particular thing, such as a statue, a frieze, or a block. Carpenters do the same, deliberately destroying wood until it is the desired shape, and it ceases to be just material and becomes a purposed object.
With the tool, the magician performs the desired magical action, personally removing or transforming something in the world as the direct agent of change.
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| Taken from the 2001 Benjamin Rowe digitization of Eliphas Levi’s The Dogma and Ritual of Transcendental Magic: Part I. On top of numerous other symbols in this pentagram, you can see the four tools of the magician: the disc, the cup, the wand, and the sword. Additionally, you can see two ritual daggers. |
Can the Magician’s Tools be Substituted?
Of course!
In the previous section, I mentioned a handful of substitutes that fit the function of the relevant abstraction. Each of these substitutions suggests a wildly different relationship between the magician and the universal phenomena of the elements. Not only are the traditional tools subject to near-infinite permutation but there are a nearly infinite number of opportunities for substitution, which expands the creative possibilities for magical expression in your narrative and a more excellent vocabulary for the language of your character design!
In the future, we will do an in-depth analysis of each tool for the meaningful qualities of permutation and a detailed analysis of a host of substitutions.
What About Substituting Elements?
Substituting one elemental association for another is perfectly fine, too. Historically, there has been some argument over the associations between wand and sword, with the leader of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, MacGregor Mathers, stating that the wand is the instrument of fire (with the wand as a torch) and the sword the instrument of air. This is especially present in matters concerning the minor arcana of the Tarot.
There has been some suggestion that Mathers was lying to obfuscate arcane knowledge from the uninitiated with his own deck (I can't cite an exact source, but I've seen it in multiple places). However, we cannot ignore that the minor arcana of the Tarot leans into a subordinate-active and dominant-passive masculine dynamic in the treatment of the Knight and the King cards for each suit. This dynamic is definitely worthy of exploration, as it adds another layer of complexity.
Some of our substitution examples violate elemental prescriptions, treating the crucible and the oven, both associated with fire, as being in the same category as the cup, the water instrument.
This can have far-reaching consequences on your characters’ magical practice. Resourceful characters will mix and match in a pinch. Still, characters whose magical style is typified by these altered elemental associations should hold a worldview reflected in such substitutions.
What About Other Tools?
We have limited this list to the four elemental tools for brevity. Some of you reading may have done your own research already and know that often other tools are involved in ritual magical practice. First, as shown in Levi’s pentagram in the “Why the Magician’s Tools” section, is the dagger (often called the “athame”), which is employed in numerous activities in the ritual, both for magical and strictly utilitarian reasons. Usually, such daggers have unique qualities, such as the color of their handle.
Additionally, if you’re familiar with the Wiccan practice, the witch's tools, which can further include the thurible/censer, the candelabra, the scourge, altar cloth, ritual cords, the besom/broomstick, and the cauldron.
Those familiar with the Key of Solomon will know that it calls for "the knife, sword, sickle, poniard, dagger, lance, wand, staff, and other instruments of magical art.” That is, in fact, the entire title of a chapter of the work. According to Joseph H. Peterson, some of these are repeated misidentification of the same tool, conflating synonymous terms, or misunderstanding obscure Latin.
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| Clavicula Salomonis, Mathers translation, Plate XIII. |
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| Clavicula Salomonis, Mathers translation, Plate XIV. |
We have opted not to explore these expanded toolsets too deeply, as they’re particular to specific practices and not as broadly applicable, and they do map on neatly to the elements. While new tools can increase the sophistication of a practiced system in your story, larger sets are cumbersome and unwieldy and diminish opportunities for novel action compared to a more straightforward standard set.
Putting it All Together
The suggested rules of our standard set sound fine and dandy, but we have yet to see the above suggestions adequately implemented. To this end, we will provide four example characters: three with the standard set and one with substitution.
DONAR THE CRUEL
Donar the Cruel is a sorcerer tyrant, an aged but active man who believes all his eyes fall upon is subject to his will. His pentacle is a medallion on a string of beads wrapped around his left hand (the hand that takes), conveying that the whole world is in his sinister possession. His cup is a goblet of jewel-encrusted gold made from the tributes he has extracted from the noble houses he has brought to heel. His rod terminates in a dominating hand, index finger extended in command. His sword is short and narrow, its blade acid-etched with the infernal pact granting him his sorcerous powers.
EURIC THE KING’S MAN
Euric is one of the king’s men, a knight, and the king’s own cupbearer. He serves as an investigator of the royal house, cunning in magic. His pentacle is a signet ring bearing the mark of the royal house, which grants him authority in all the kingdom, secular and mystical. His cup is the badge of his office, given to him when he was appointed cupbearer. His sword is a straight, double-edged arming sword, the same sword he wears in travel and war: simple, straightforward, functional, the emblem of his subordination to his liege. He bears a processional mace for his wand, used during coronation ceremonies, with its gilt bronze head cast in the shape of the sun. Where Euric goes, he roots out threats to the kingdom, his investigations the shining, revelatory light of royal attention.
LEANNÁN THE TRAVELER
Leannán is a young man with some magical wit, off to seek his fortune. He sleeps under the stars wrapped in his cloak and only stands out from other men on the road by his bright eyes and broad smile. He uses his dirk to draw a pentacle in the dirt or carve it in a tree, if necessary. He keeps a small wooden drinking cup in his kit, in the same pouch as his horn spoons, flint, and iron. He never goes anywhere without his shillelagh, which he uses as a walking stick but can use to ward off troublemakers in a pinch. A short hanger (side sword) at his hip is curved with enough of a sharpened back edge to be useful both ways in a fight.
ULYSSES THE BLACK
Ulysses is one of the worst pirates around, named “the Black” for his all-consuming maliciousness. Not simply a pirate, he’s a magician even fouler than Donar the Cruel. He is a nihilist and acts only in the interests of satisfying his most basic and vulgar appetites. His pentacle is etched upon a whale's tooth, in line with his belief that all that exists is only to be devoured by an all-consuming void. Instead of a cup, he drapes a cape of net over his left side, unfurling it to snare whatever spirits he commands to do his bidding. His wand is a stolen telescope, which he uses to sight his prey and direct his crew, men, and spirit alike. He has a hanger at his hip, but for magic, he uses a harpoon, his every magical act in service of pulling in his prey. He cannot create; he can only destroy.
Conclusion
Any standard set provides a host of options for any storyteller, and any author of the fantastic would do well to consider the opportunities provided by severe exploration of these possibilities.
To that end, we will explore these tools in their dedicated articles, their general symbolism, their permutations, their alternative associations, and the same for their substitutions.
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See Also:
Clear Cosmology
Intriguing Instruments
Instrument of Earth - The Pentagram [Pending]
Instrument of Water - The Cup [Pending]
Instrument of Air - The Wand [Pending]
Instrument of Fire - The Sword [Pending]
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
-Academy, OTM. “The Role of Tarot Suit Emblems.” Over The Moon Oracle Cards, 14 Jan. 2016, http://overthemoon-oraclecards.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-role-of-tarot-suit-emblems.html. Primary image source A. E. Waite's The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910).
-Drury, Nevill. The Dictionary of the Esoteric: More than 3,000 Entries on the Mystical & Occult Traditions. First Indian Edition ed., Motilal Banarsidass, 2004. Original Publisher Watkins Publishing Limited, London.
https://www.amazon.com/Dictionary-Esoteric-Nevill-Drury/dp/8120819896
https://www.amazon.com/Dictionary-Esoteric-Nevill-Drury/dp/1842930419
-Levi, Eliphas. Dogma Et Rituel De La Haute Magie, Part I: The Doctrine of Transcendental Magic. Translated by Arthur Edward Waite, vol. 1, Rider & Company. Transcribed and converted to Adobe Acrobat format by Benjamin Rowe, June, 2001. Page 25.
https://darkbooks.org/pp.php?v=1693947022
-Mathers, Samuel Liddell MacGregor. The Key of Solomon the King, “Chapter VIII - Of the Knife, Sword, Sickle, Poniard, Dagger, Lance, Wand, Staff, and Other Instruments of Magical Art.” Www.sacred-Texts.com, 2003, https://www.sacred-texts.com/grim/kos/kos44.htm. Scanned at sacred-texts.com, July 2000. J. B. Hare, redactor. Reformatted August 2003. Plates XIII and XIV.
-Peterson, Joseph H., and Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers. The Key of Solomon the King, “Foreword”, Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC., Newburyport, MA, 2016, p. xiii.
https://www.amazon.com/Key-Solomon-King-Clavicula-Salomonis/dp/1578636086
