Magic palindromes: words that read both ways

A palindrome is a word or phrase that stays the same whether read from left to right or from right to left. The term comes from the Greek palin, “again, backwards”, and dromos, “running”. In antiquity these verbal games were not mere pastimes: their symmetry seemed to confer stability and completeness, and so many palindromes ended up engraved on gems, amulets, baptismal fonts and church walls, next to sacred formulas and invocations.

The formulas of the magical papyri

The Greek magical papyri from Egypt, mostly datable between the second century BC and the fifth century AD, contain numerous words built in mirror fashion. The best known is ablanathanalba, which reads the same both ways and also appears on engraved gems, often next to Abrasax. Other sequences, dozens of letters long, follow the same principle and end exactly as they began.

For the compilers of those texts reversibility made the name perfect and closed upon itself, like a circle. Modern scholars recognise in them a mixture of Greek, Egyptian and Hebrew elements, recombined according to criteria more acoustic and visual than linguistic. These words were often also written in the shape of a triangle or a wing, removing one letter on each line, following a graphic taste found in other ancient formulas.

The verse on the baptismal font

One of the most famous palindromes is in Greek: Nipson anomemata me monan opsin, “wash your sins, not only your face”. The symmetry works because the sound ps is rendered in Greek by a single letter, psi. According to tradition the verse was inscribed on a font at the basilica of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, and was later copied onto baptismal fonts and holy-water stoups in many European churches. The attribution to Gregory of Nazianzus, sometimes repeated, is not certain.

Latin recurrent verses

The Romans called such compositions versus recurrentes. Sidonius Apollinaris, bishop of Clermont and man of letters of the fifth century, quotes in one of his letters the example Roma tibi subito motibus ibit amor, which reads the same letter by letter in both directions. The Middle Ages loved these exercises, and one of the most famous is In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, “we go round in the night and are consumed by fire”, by an unknown author, often taken to refer to moths drawn to the flame.

A medieval tradition links to Saint Martin of Tours and an encounter with the devil the palindrome Signa te signa, temere me tangis et angis, “cross yourself: in vain you touch and torment me”. The story is legendary and circulates in different versions, but it bears witness to the belief that a reversible phrase had a special power against evil, precisely because it could not be turned around.

From the Egyptian papyrus to the Byzantine font, from the Latin verse to the legend of the saint, the palindrome kept a special aura for centuries. Its closed form, returning upon itself, suggested the idea of a complete, unassailable word capable of protection: an idea that belongs to the history of beliefs rather than of language, but which explains the presence of these games in such solemn places.