The Boline And Its Grimoire-Era Cousin, The Bolline

The Boline is the white-handled working knife of Wiccan practice, the tool set aside for every cutting task the black-handled Athame is forbidden: harvesting herbs, carving candles and wooden tools, cutting cords and inscribing symbols into wax or wood. Its name is close enough to bolline or bollen, terms recorded in earlier ceremonial and folk-magical sources for a curved, sickle-shaped harvesting knife, that most historians treat the Wiccan Boline as a direct continuation of that older working-knife tradition rather than a fresh invention, even though Gerald Gardner's version is typically a straight or crescent-bladed knife rather than the curved sickle some older folk-magic sources describe.

Owen Davies's history of grimoire literature situates the working knife, as distinct from the ceremonially consecrated blade, as a standing feature of European magical practice going back centuries, used for practical cutting a magician did not want to perform with an instrument reserved for symbolic or spirit work. Gardner's Book of Shadows lists the Boline beside the Athame as one of the primary tools, and Scott Cunningham and Raymond Buckland, writing for later solitary and Saxon-lineage practitioners respectively, both describe it as a standard, largely uncontroversial item of the working kit, in contrast to the disputed etymology and elemental attribution that surround the Athame.