Charaktêres: the ring signs of the Greek magical papyri

Anyone leafing through an edition of the Greek magical papyri finds, beside formulas and prayers, rows of strange signs: stars, crossed lines, distorted letters, all ending in small circles. The ancients called them charaktêres, impressed signs, and modern scholars have coined a curious name for them, spectacle letters or ring signs, because those little circles at the ends recall the lenses of a pair of glasses. They are one of the oldest forms of esoteric writing in the West.

A magical library from Egypt

The Greek magical papyri, known by the abbreviation PGM, are a body of texts on papyrus written in Egypt between the second century BC and the fifth century AD, in Greek but also in Demotic and Coptic. An important part comes from a collection bought in the early nineteenth century by the diplomat Giovanni Anastasi, who sold them to several European museums, from Leiden to London, from Paris to Berlin. Many of these rolls are thought to come from a single library, perhaps from Egyptian Thebes.

The standard edition was prepared by the German philologist Karl Preisendanz and published in two volumes between 1928 and 1931 under the title Papyri Graecae Magicae. Since then the papyri have been studied as a precious source on the everyday religion of Roman Egypt, where Egyptian, Greek, Jewish and Persian deities lived side by side in the same invocations.

Signs that are not pronounced

The charaktêres are not an alphabet in the strict sense. They do not correspond to sounds and are not read: they are traced. In the papyri they appear in sequences, often beside the so-called barbarous names, long words with no apparent meaning such as ablanathanalba, which reads the same in both directions. Together with geometric figures, palindromes and Greek vowels arranged in triangles, they formed the visual language of late antique magic.

Many charaktêres seem to derive from Greek letters or modified astrological signs, to which circles, strokes and crosses were added. Their value lay precisely in being foreign to ordinary writing: they were thought of as signs understood by divine or demonic powers, not by humans. Some texts describe them as the secret names of the gods themselves. Their precise meaning, if they ever had a fixed one, has been lost, and the ancient sources offer no key to reading them.

Gems, metal sheets and tablets

The charaktêres did not remain confined to the papyri. They are found engraved on magical gems, small hardstones worked in the imperial period, on rolled sheets of gold and silver worn around the neck, and on the lead tablets used for curses, the so-called defixiones. This spread shows that they were not the invention of a few specialists, but a repertory shared throughout the Roman Mediterranean.

The ring signs also survived the end of the ancient world. They are found in Jewish magical texts of late antiquity and the Middle Ages, in Coptic manuscripts, in Arabic magic and, through translations and adaptations, in the Latin grimoires. Saint Augustine, in the De doctrina christiana, already condemned them among superstitious practices, a sign that they were widespread among the Christians of his time.

Following the path of the charaktêres means travelling through more than a thousand years of history: from Egyptian rolls to the metal sheets of Roman soldiers, from medieval codices to the pages of modern grimoires. Few signs have had such a long life without anyone, perhaps, truly knowing what they meant. This very opacity, after all, was part of their power: a sign understood by everyone would not have needed to be traced with such care, nor to be hidden in an amulet.