February 20: The Sword or the Wand
By Sophie Strand
Imagine that the great god Dionysus stands before you and rests his wand, thyrsus on your shoulder. The Thyrsus, wound with ivy, might be a woody stalk of fennel, unearthed from the ground, still dangling roots and a fine white threading of hyphae, dew-slick and perfumed with dirt. It erupts with leaves, fruit, and flowers. When Dionysus lowers his wand to touch you with it upon your shoulder, he will catalyze you into mystical ecstasy, and perhaps transform you into an animal or a plant. He is initiating you, not into a linear patriarchal narrative of knighthood, but into the gestalt consciousness of his chaotic, vegetal, polytemporal belief-sphere.
Do we want to hand the masculine a sword or a flowering wand?
The sword slices, divides, and subdues. Its tip drags imaginary borders across ecosystems. The sword does not embrace. It does not connect. It does not ask questions. It is not an instrument of intimacy. It either attacks or defends, affirming that every interaction is conflict, and every story is about domination and tragedy. The sword, perfected by the Romans as the spartha (or short sword) for the specific task of maiming and executing prisoners, quite literally cuts the mind off from the body. The sword proposes that we can wield our intellect without our somatic intuition and without our rooted existence in ecosystems. The sword encapsulates the material reductionist idea that we can “cut” something up into discrete parts and thus understand it as a whole—that we must kill the animal to study the animal; that if we dissect enough brains, we might find the secrets of consciousness.
The wand, on the other hand, creates connections.
Some of the earliest examples of wands are the apotropaic hippopotamus tusk wands or “birth tusks” used in Middle Kingdom Egypt (1900 BCE), which were carved with lions, snakes, and frogs and used to magically protect pregnant women and children. They are thought by some to have been used, specifically, to draw a circle of safety around a woman in labor. Inscriptions on these ancient wands tell us they are “the protector of night” and “the protector of day,” which may indicate a belief that they helped establish temporal order. We also have the snake staffs of Aaron and Moses in the Hebrew Bible, which were used in spiritual debate, to part the waters of the Red Sea, and to draw water from a stone. These magical staffs that flicker between the solid and the serpentine flow into the healing caduceus of Hermes, a single wand encircled by two snakes. Rhabdomancy, or dowsing, once used forked wooden wands to magically survey the land for water, a practice that may date back nearly eight thousand years, as evidenced by art in the Saharan Tassili caves. Homer makes numerous references to magical wands in both the Iliad and the Odyssey, putting them in the hands of Circe, Athena, and Hermes. Celtic mythology also features many wands, rods, and staffs; for example, in the famous legend of Fionn MacCumhaill, the hero uses hazel wands to transform people into animals, as a divination device, and to defend himself from harm.
The wand encircles us with protection during biological rites of passage from birth to marriage to death. It draws us to water. It enchants us into closer kinship with animals and plants and landscapes by literally transforming us into them. It mends broken bodies, knits wounds, and softens minds hardened by anthropocentrism.
While swords are made only by human hands, wands, it may be argued, predate human beings themselves. All it takes is a woody shoot bursting into blossom. A cedar branch. A sprig of hawthorn. A tree erupting in lichens. For that very reason, perhaps, wands have been central to magical and ritual practices since before human history began to be recorded.