What Is The Origin Of (161)?…

Gin o’Clock – Part Thirty Three Old Codgers Of The Week – Part Eight

What Is The Origin Of (161)?…

Abracadabra

The Christmas season is the time for parties, games and pantomimes. Inevitably, someone will attempt some form of magic trick, wave a magician’s wand and mutter Abracadabra as a precursor to summoning whatever ethereal powers are required to make the trick work. Invariably, in my experience, the spirits invoked have imbibed too much of another kind of spirit and the trick falls flat. The popular usage of the word as a form of magic spell raises the question of where precisely has the word come from.

The starting point of our investigation is a book from the 3rd century CE written by Emperor Caracalla’s medic, Quintus Serenus Sammonicus, called De Medicina Praecepta Saluberrima or Liber Medicinalis. In chapter 51 when describing a possible treatment for hemitritaeos, a form of malaria, he advises, “On a piece of parchment, write the so-called ‘abracadabra’ several times, repeating it on the line below; but take off the end, so that gradually individual letters, which you will take away each time, are missing from the word. Continue until the (last) letter makes the apex of a cone. Remember to wind this with linen and hang it around the neck.” Alternatively, you could use the lard from a lion, if you had any to hand.

It is unlikely that Sammonicus had invented this supposed cure and so the hunt is on for the provenance of the word. Alas, there is no definitive answer but there are three theories that have some substance. The first is that it is derived from the word Abraxas, popularised by the Gnostics. Its power derived from the fact that in Greek numerology the letters added up to the number of days in the year, 365. Another theory is that it comes from an amalgam of the Hebrew words for father, son and holy spirit, ab, ben and ruach hakodesh. A third theory is that it owes its origin to an Aramaic phrase, avra kadavra, recently revived by J K Rowling in her Harry Potter books. My denarii, for what it’s worth, is on abraxas.

What is more certain, though, is that the habit of wearing a pendant with the triangular representation of the word abracadabra was rife in medieval times. The theory went that the disease or fever was siphoned out of the person and expelled out of the bottom A of the abracadabra triangle. In the Troublesome Voyage of Captain Edward Fenton, 1582-83 we find, “Banester sayth yt he healed 200 in one yer by hanging abracadabra about their necks.”

The practice had its critics. The Puritan preacher from Massachusetts, Ignatius Mather, claimed that the word had no power. Daniel Defoe was particularly scathing of the practice in the Plague Journals, published in 1722, his account of Great Plague of London of 1665. He wrote, “as if the Plague was but a kind of a Possession of an evil Spirit, and that it was to be kept off with Crossings, Signs of the Zodiac, Papers tied up with so many Knots; and certain words, or figures written on them, as particularly the word Abracadabra from’d in Triangle, or Pyramid… How the poor People found the insufficiency of those things, and how many of them were afterwards carried away in the Dead-Carts.”

The realisation that the charms didn’t work together with the development of medical knowledge and the age of the Enlightenment led to the use of an Abracadabra charm to ward off evil fell into disuse in the 18th century.

However, the word lingered on in the collective subconscious to be resurrected by the Victorian music hall magicians who needed something to suggest that they were in the process of summoning some magical spirit. It is in this sense that it is used today.