Blood, Soil, and Steel: Crafting a Dagger for Solomonic Evocation

I am writing this article right in the middle of working with the demon Sitri, about whom you might have read in a previous post. Many of you have already seen my tools in my posts and videos, including my dagger, which I made from a hardened steel strip about 10 years ago. It has served me faithfully, so why did I make another one?  

To answer this question, one must first understand why a magician needs a sword at all, what its function is, and why the great Eliphas Levi (also known as Alphonse Louis Constant) states in his book that for a true adept, even a nail driven into a wooden block will serve as the most powerful sword.So, if we start from the "surface," we can recall that in most versions of the Key of Solomon, we are told to make three bladed items: one for gathering herbs, another for sacrifices, and the third is the magician's sword itself, which is used to threaten spirits. They all differ in symbols, sizes, handles, etc. It seems like the topic could be closed right there, but no. How exactly is this sword, so terrifying to spirits, actually wielded? In the absolute majority of texts, its use comes down to raising it upward and reciting incantations, which clearly does not reveal the tool's full potential.However, if we turn to 'peripheral' texts, and often to simple folk magic, we will find a massive number of its other functions, such as "pinning down" a spirit. Stephen Skinner writes about this in his book Techniques of Solomonic Magic, where he describes a Greek wedding tradition of 'binding a couple' by plunging a special knife (often inscribed with love poems) into wood or elsewhere. Obviously, this technique is very close to love magic, and I have conducted similar experiments myself.

Right there, the author notes that considering such phenomena, it is no wonder people believed knives were capable of pinning down a spirit during evocation. At the exact moment of its first appearance, the magician plunges the knife into the ground, the floor, or a special 'evocation table,' thereby keeping the spirit imprisoned until it agrees to fulfill the conjurer's will. It is precisely for this technique that I made this new dagger. Many sources state that for such purposes, a magician must find a blade that has already been 'used for its intended purpose.' This is why I chose a Mosin-Nagant rifle bayonet from the World War I and World War II eras as my base. The area where it was found saw extraordinarily bloody battles during both world wars, near the Stokhid River in Volyn, Ukraine. During the First World War, there was a horrific slaughter where hundreds of thousands of people perished. The Russian army advanced directly into machine guns, and according to eyewitnesses of those events, the waters of the Stokhid River were red with blood even far downstream. The bayonet was found in that exact area, in a swamp, a few years ago by a friend of mine and given to me as a gift. I immediately realized what it was meant to become, but everything has its time, and that time has come now. Some of you have probably seen these symbols for the dagger from the Key of Solomon: