"Ritual Use" is the biggest load of bullshit said by people who don't know what they are talking about, and unfortunately, this superstition permeates the practices of the occult arts.

Often in the pursuit of archaeology, some enigmatic object is found of unknown purpose, and instead of any further investigation, the item is tagged as "for ritual use" and gets lost in some cabinet in the backroom of some museum. This is based on the premise that ancient people were some superstitious bumpkins, when we all know that isn't true, these people lived in cities, with highly sophisticated cultures, and built enormous structures that we still barely comprehend the engineering of.

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But I digress, those people did do rituals, just as we still do rituals ourselves in a highly advanced technological culture. There is a precedent for having tools of ritual use. I'm not saying there isn't.

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Again, though "ritual use" might be legitimate, you will notice how I used the word "tool," because in performing rituals, we may need tools, just because it is for a ritual, a tool wouldn't be there that wasn't practical for the performance of the ritual, as we well know, being people who do rituals.

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And this brings us to the topic at hand: The Magic wand, which has always bothered me. What is it for?

The other "4 magic weapons" have a clear purpose. The Cup holds water, the knife cuts things, and the plate appears to be a dish holding salt. But the wand seems to have no real practical purpose.

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Now, one could say that the wand is a pen, or a torch, or any other "phallic" object that might have a particular purpose for your ritual, but this is really us attempting to shoehorn the wand into that shape for our logic. If we really look at the depiction of the wand, it is not a pen or a torch, it is a straight pole, sometimes of varying length, but basically straight.

Many magical texts say that it is for drawing sigils in the air, like a scepter or the baton of an orchestra conductor, a purely symbolic use, but I am not convinced, I believe it must have some practical purpose.

You could say that it is possibly a lever, like a tool handle, perhaps it is a straight pole that can have different heads, but this is pure speculation on my part.

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If we consider how AE Waite and Crowley mythologize the 4 weapons, almost as if they are primordial. The 4 weapons are the basis of science that elevates us above animals, and if you think about it, the evidence is there, we know that humans have been making stone knives for at least 50,000 years, and we have pottery of cups and bowls and dishes that are extremely ancient. Knives cut things, cups hold liquids, and plates hold solids... but the wand?

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Well, the wand is a very primitive tool, probably the first, since we even see animals today evolving to use it, and it is the basic fundamental tool that is at the very core of scientific thought. The Poking stick.

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Wander Desert.

Find body... could be dead?

Could be a trap.

How to check if dead, but from relative safety?

The poking stick.

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The poking stick is used to determine things. It is a probe, a measuring stick, a thermometer, a mixing rod, and potentially a "divining rod." It is a tool for doing science. Testing things and seeing reactions.

In addition, everyone who's ever done a fire, either whilst camping, or in a fireplace, or for survival, unattended fires will often burn out very quickly. One needs to poke at the fire with a stick to keep it "stoked."

This is further evidence for the wand being a "poking stick" due to the wand's elemental fire attribution.

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Yet, I generally never find any mention of this in any of the occult literature, of the wand's purpose being to stoke the flame, like a fireplace poker, I basically had to invent this hypothesis myself.

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There is one more possibility, and that is that the wand is a tool involved somehow in making parchment, having something to do with the process of drying and stretching the material while covering it with salt and scraping away the undesirable layer of the material. I say this as most often the wand appears as a magic tool in grimoires that describe the process of making a magical book, so therefore it is very likely a tool used somehow in the process of parchment bookmaking.