Abracadabra: from Roman medicine to the stage

Today abracadabra is the word that accompanies conjuring tricks, but its history begins in a medical treatise. The first certain attestation is in the Liber medicinalis, a didactic poem in Latin hexameters attributed to Quintus Serenus Sammonicus, an author who probably lived between the second and third centuries AD. The exact authorship and dating of the work are still debated by scholars, but the text was widely read and copied throughout the Middle Ages.

The triangle against fever

In the chapter devoted to a type of fever that ancient physicians called hemitritaeus, the poem describes the word written over several lines, removing one letter each time, until a triangle narrowing downwards is obtained, and worn around the neck as an amulet. According to the mentality of the time, the illness was supposed to diminish together with the word, like the figure that thins out until it disappears.

The Liber medicinalis mixes remedies largely derived from Pliny's Natural History with formulas of this kind, and shows how closely writing and healing were linked in Roman popular medicine. There can of course be no talk of efficacy: this is a documented belief, valuable to the historian because it reveals how the ancients thought about the relation between word and body, not a remedy.

An uncertain etymology

Many hypotheses have been put forward about the origin of the word. One of the most often repeated links it to an Aramaic expression supposedly meaning “I create as I speak”, but it finds no confirmation in ancient sources. Others have compared it with Abrasax, the Gnostic name engraved on so many magical gems, or with the Hebrew words for father, son and spirit. None of these explanations is proven, and the etymology remains, in all likelihood, unknown.

It should also be remembered that in medieval manuscripts the word appears in different spellings, and that the same diminishing triangle was applied to other formulas. For copyists the figure mattered more than the meaning: the word, which no one could translate, was valued precisely for its mysterious character. This is also why the word could be copied from one language to another without ever being translated.

Plague, almanacs and conjurors

The word's modern fortune was considerable. In A Journal of the Plague Year, published in 1722, Daniel Defoe relates that during the London epidemic of 1665 many people wore amulets with the word abracadabra arranged in a triangle, and he speaks of it with evident scepticism, alongside other signs and charms sold to frightened citizens. The remark confirms how widespread the formula still was in seventeenth-century England.

During the nineteenth century, with the rise of stage conjuring, the word lost almost all connection with medicine and became an element of entertainment, a synonym for the magic formula par excellence. In many European languages it now also denotes obscure talk, full of difficult and incomprehensible words. The shift from remedy to show is one of the clearest examples of how a belief can turn into play.

Abracadabra is a rare example of a magic word that has survived for almost two millennia without changing its form. It has passed through ancient medicine, popular devotion, epidemics and the theatre, gradually losing its original function. What remains is the sound, and with it the ancient idea that certain words, simply by being spoken or written, can act upon the world.