The Wand 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 will and the creative, outgoing force; it is used to direct energy in ritual.
Tool and element
In the four-fold scheme it is attributed to the element of Fire. 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.
Older sources and a live disagreement
Instructions for cutting, carving and consecrating a magical rod or wand appear already in the medieval and early modern grimoire tradition, including the Key of Solomon (Clavicula Salomonis), which S. L. MacGregor Mathers, credited with compiling the Golden Dawn's elemental weapon set, had himself translated and published in English in 1889, the year after the order's founding, putting the grimoire's own instructions for these older tools directly in his hands as source material. The Fire attribution given here is the Golden Dawn's own, and it is not universal: some earlier and parallel strands of the Western esoteric tradition instead give the Wand to Air and the Sword to Fire, a genuine and long-running disagreement among occult writers rather than a settled fact, and readers moving between systems should expect to see both pairings in circulation. The weapon is described here as an element of that documented tradition of ceremonial magic, a body of practice studied historically rather than endorsed.
Sources The Magicians of the Golden Dawn: A Documentary History of a Magical Order 1887-1923Ellic Howe with Grimoires: A History of Magic BooksOwen Davies