Wiccan Mysteries: Athame and Boline (or Bolline)

[fearn]

Again, thanks for the info Alam and Nechesh. That's the EASY part.

The HARD part, and the reason I asked the question, is that if you ask a Wiccan where the terms "Athame" and "Boline" came from, you turn up a blank.

Similarly, "Athame" could be pronounced "Ath-ame" "A-tham-ee" or "A-tharm-ey" that I've heard (boline is either "bollin" or "bow-line").

A number of people know about Grave's derivation of athame (Arabic Adh-dhame), I wanted to check that, but since I don't speak Arabic, my attempts to transliterate this into Arabic script and to compare it to an online English-to-Arabic dictionary failed miserably.

Also, I don't know why a Muslim would call a knife a "blood-letter" as opposed to, say, a jambiya or some other term. Since the Athame's symbolic, "Blood-letter" doesn't make a lot of functional sense (unless Gardner was being romantic, which is possible).

So, any Arabic speakers out there who can at least answer whether Graves was right?

F