FOLK MAGIC & CHARMS · LESSON 1 OF 6 · 13 MIN · FREE
ABRACADABRA written away in a triangle, the SATOR square from Pompeii to Pennsylvania, and AGLA, the four letters that stood against fire and fever.
Some of the most widespread magic in the world is not a ritual at all but a word — written, worn, swallowed or spoken. This lesson follows three of the oldest.
Some of the most widespread magic in the world is not a ritual at all but a word — written, worn, swallowed or spoken. This lesson follows three of the oldest.
The word first appears in the Liber Medicinalis of Serenus Sammonicus, physician to the Roman emperor Caracalla in the early 3rd century. In chapter 52, against a dangerous fever, he tells the sick to wear an amulet with the word written so that each line drops a letter:
A B R A C A D A B R A
A B R A C A D A B R
A B R A C A D A B
A B R A C A D A
A B R A C A D
A B R A C A
A B R A C
A B R A
A B R
A B
A
As the word dwindles to nothing, so does the fever. No one knows where the word comes from; the Oxford English Dictionary finds no evidence for any of the many guesses, including the popular "I create as I speak" in Aramaic. It reappears in the Middle Ages on amulets and, in a 16th-century Italian Jewish book of spells, as a "cure from heaven" for fevers, consumption and fire — long before stage magicians took it up.
The Sator square is a five-line Latin palindrome that reads the same forwards, backwards, up and down:
S A T O R
A R E P O
T E N E T
O P E R A
R O T A S
"The sower Arepo holds the wheels with care" is the usual rendering, though AREPO appears nowhere else in Latin. The oldest examples are in the reverse, ROTAS form: two at Pompeii, one scratched in the house of Paquius Proculus and one on a column of the gymnasium dated before the earthquake of AD 62; others at Dura-Europos in Syria, about AD 200; and one on a plaster wall at Cirencester in Roman Britain, found in 1868.
In the 1920s three scholars noticed independently that the 25 letters can be rearranged as PATERNOSTER — "Our Father" — twice, crossing at the N, with two A's and two O's left over for Alpha and Omega. For a while everyone agreed the square was an early Christian password; then the Pompeii finds, older than any Christian community there likely to write in Latin, put that in doubt. Its origin is still argued.
What is certain is its magical career. The square was carved, painted and written against fire, illness and witchcraft across Europe for 1,500 years — and in John George Hohman's Long Lost Friend, the Pennsylvania German charm book, it is "to be given to Cattle, against Witchcraft": written on paper and fed to the cattle in their fodder.
AGLA is four Hebrew letters, אגלא, found on charms, rings and seals from the Middle Ages on — even in at least 31 runic inscriptions. It is usually explained as a notarikon, an acronym, of Atah gibor le-olam Adonai, "Thou art mighty for ever, O Lord", a line of the Amidah prayer. The historian Katelyn Mesler warns that no source gives that explanation until the late 14th or 15th century, centuries after AGLA was in use. In Germany it was read as Allmächtiger Gott, Lösche Aus, "Almighty God, put out the fire"; on English silver crosses it guarded against fever. Its many meanings show how a word of power gathers stories.
In the Word Charms tool, write ABRACADABRA as Serenus did, then a word of your own — the name of something you want to dwindle away. Then rearrange the SATOR square into the PATERNOSTER cross and back. Write a paragraph on what each charm does to its words: shrinking, mirroring, hiding.
4 questions — choose an answer to check it.
1.How did Serenus Sammonicus tell fever sufferers to write ABRACADABRA?
2.Where is the oldest known SATOR square?
3.What can the 25 letters of the SATOR square be rearranged to spell?
4.What phrase is AGLA said to abbreviate?
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