Magical Weapons
Lamp / Lantern
Citation Formats
General Reference
APA Style
BibTeX
Origin 1200 to 1700
The Lamp, or Lantern, is the implement of Spirit, the fifth element or quintessence that unites and transcends the four. It is the light of the higher Self and of divine guidance, held above the four elemental weapons as their source and crown. Where each elemental tool governs one quarter and one power, the Lamp represents the presiding spirit that harmonizes them all, the inner light by which the whole of the work is directed.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period1200 to 1700 1Tradition: The grimoire tradition Origin PeriodSourced to the subject's own account1888 to 1900 2Tradition: Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn: the elemental weapons and their consecration rituals Origin PeriodSourced to the subject's own accountAssembled as part of the Golden Dawn's set of elemental weapons in London from 1888, incorporating instruments drawn from the earlier grimoire tradition reaching back to around 1200. 2 Place of Origin Attributed Author / CompilerDrawn from grimoire, Rosicrucian and Kabbalistic material 3 Attributed Author / CompilerGolden Dawn's elemental weapon set compiled by S. L. MacGregor Mathers 3 Attributed Author / CompilerIndividual implements are far older; the set itself is his 3 Attributions
TraditionHermetic Order of the Golden Dawn 3 Learn More
The Magical Weapon: The Lamp / Lantern
The Lamp / Lantern is one of the magical weapons, or elemental tools, of Western ceremonial magic, the set of implements the magician consecrates and uses in ritual. It stands for the higher self or divine light presiding over the four; it is not one of the four elemental tools but the fifth, quintessential principle.
Tool and element
Where the four elemental weapons answer to Fire, Water, Air and Earth, the Lamp answers to Spirit, the fifth element (quintessence) that crowns and unites them. The four elemental weapons, Wand, Cup, Sword and Pentacle, correspond to the four suits of the tarot's Minor Arcana and to the four points of the ritual circle, a scheme drawn together in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn from 1888 out of older Solomonic and grimoire material.
The weapon is described here as an element of that documented tradition of ceremonial magic, a body of practice studied historically rather than endorsed.
The Lamp: The Implement That Is Not One of the Four
The Lamp sits apart from the elemental weapons and is easy to misfile beside them. The four implements, Wand, Cup, Dagger and Pentacle, each carry one element and each attach to one grade. The Lamp carries none of the four. It is assigned to Spirit, the fifth term that the Western scheme adds above the elements, and it does not belong to a grade in the same way.
Its ancestry is in the grimoires rather than in the grade system. The Key of Solomon and its relatives require a light in the working place and give instructions for it, and there the lamp is a practical necessity that has acquired a meaning, which is the usual direction of travel for ritual objects. What it came to mean is constant across the later literature: the light that is not the magician's own, whether that is named as divine, as the higher self, or as the Holy Guardian Angel in the vocabulary Crowley made standard.
Two things follow. Because the Lamp represents what is received rather than what is wielded, it is generally the one implement not consecrated to the operator's will, and several treatments say so explicitly. And because it is a light rather than a tool, it is the implement present throughout a working rather than taken up for a part of it. A list of four elemental weapons that adds the Lamp as a fifth is not wrong so much as flattening a difference the sources keep.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Disciplines That Use This
The elemental weapons of the ceremonial temple.
Sources
1. Grimoires: A History of Magic Books
Owen Davies, Oxford University Press, 2009chs. on the medieval and early-modern grimoires and their required instrumentsView the Source 2. The Golden Dawn: The Original Account of the Teachings, Rites, and Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, 6th edition
Israel Regardie, Llewellyn, 1989the Inner Order papers on the elemental weapons and their consecrationView the Source 3. The Magicians of the Golden Dawn: A Documentary History of a Magical Order 1887-1923
Ellic Howe, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and its elemental ritual implementsView the Source Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture
Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Cambridge University Press, 2012The doctrine of correspondences underlying the elemental-weapon attributions
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.
View At A Past Year
Choose a year to see this entry's facts and connections as the atlas records them at that moment: what it held then, what it held instead, and what it had not yet adopted. Choose Present for the current record.