I should have been more succinct. My son's mother is my *ex* wife. My current wife (to whom I was being handfasted at the time, but to whom I am now legally married as well) is a Wiccan High Priestess, so we tend to see eye to eye on most religious issues.
Ritual cutlery is extremely common in Wicca. A double-edged blade, preferably with a black handle, is referred to as an "athame" (pronunciations vary, but ah-thaa-may is fairly common), and is used in ritual to direct energy, basically the same as a wand. An athame is more appropriate when doing more difficult magickal work, whereas a wand might be preferable if you were doing something like, say, encouraging your plants to grow better, that sort of thing.
Athames are never used to cut *anything* except air. In fact, if you do draw blood, you must break and bury it. There are ritual uses for knives where cutting *is* involved (no, not cutting on any living beings, except possibly plants), and for that, you use a boline (bo lean), a single edged knife reserved for ritual purposes.
BTW, most athames aren't even sharpened, although they are pretty darn pointy.
To be honest, I don't really glean all that much info from the Web regarding Wicca, but there is plenty out there. Warning...not all of it is good, but I really haven't taken the time to evaluate it all. If you are into reading, see if you can locate a book called "The Truth About Witchcraft Today" by Scott Cunningham. Although it is becoming somewhat dated, it is really the standard for dispelling untruths about the modern practice of Wicca and witchcraft (further warning: not all witches are Wiccan, and therefore operate under different standards of ethics than we Wiccans do, so don't assume than any witch you meet is in fact Wiccan...they might not be). If you find anything online that you feel is informative, but you wonder about it, send me the link and I'll be happy to tell you just how flaky or reasonable it is, *from my point of view*. There's a lot of variety, even within Wicca, of practices and ideas.
Oh...and handfasting is an ancient coupling tradition in which a couple promises to be together for a year and a day. At the end of that time, they may either renew their vows, or go their separate ways. I chose to keep the lady I was handfasted with eight years ago, and actually married her outright five years ago. Not surprisingly, our anniversary is on October 31st. It is the highest of Wiccan holidays, and we call it Samhain. You probably know it as All Hallow's Eve, or Halloween.
