athame

Meaning

Noun

• A ceremonial pointed knife or dagger, used especially in Wicca and other neopagan traditions and having a black handle with magical symbols on it.

Origin

• From the non-word arthame from a French manuscript. Arthame is either from a misreading of handwritten Italian arctrave, which is a variant of architrave, or from corruptions of the Medieval Latin word artavus. Artavus was also mistranslated into the non-word artauo in an Italian manuscript. The arthame was conflated with the cortel nero ("black knife") by the author Grillot de Givry in 1931, and that conflation was passed on to Gerald Gardner (the creator of Wicca).