Posted on Tuesday 27 April 2004

The word Abracadabra was originally a magic incantation which was used to cure fevers and to protect against disease.

The word was transcribed onto an amulet which was worn around the neck of the patient in eleven successive lines arranged as an inverted triangle. Each line eliminated one letter of the incantation until only the letter A remained at the very bottom of the triangle. This gradual reduction in the number of letters symbolised the reduction and eventual elimination of illness.

The earliest citation for this word comes from the Liber Medicinalis , a book written in the late second or early third centuries by Quintus Serenus Sammonicus, physician to the Emperor Caracalla and a follower of the Alexandrian Gnostic teacher Basilides.

Inscribes chartae quod dicitur abracadabra
saepius et subter repetes, sed detrahe summam
et magis atque magis desint elementa figuris
singula, quae semper rapies, et cetera figes,
donec in angustum redigatur littera conum:
his lino nexis collum redimire memento.

Which English antiquarian John Aubrey renders for us in verse as:

Abracadabra, strange mysterious word,
In order writ, can wond'rous cures afford.
This be the rule:-a strip of parchment take,
Cut like a pyramid revers'd in make.
Abracadabra, first at length you name,
Line under line, repeating still the same:
Cut at its end, each line, one letter less,
Must then its predecessor line express;
'Till less'ning by degrees the charm descends
With conic form, and in a letter ends.
Round the sick neck the finish'd wonder tie,
And pale disease must from the patient fly.

--- John Aubrey, Miscellanies upon Various Subjects, 1696.

The origin of the word is far from certain. Aubrey thought that Basilides, who he thought was the charm's inventor, was invoking the name of God. Other theories suggest that it was borrowed from an Eastern tradition and have proposed etymologies from Arabic (abra kadabra, meaning 'let the things be destroyed'), Aramaic (abhadda kedhabhra, meaning 'disappear like this word') and Hebrew (abarah k'dabarah, meaning 'I create as I speak').

It has even been suggested, though this is unlikely, that the word has its source in the mystical letter-manipulating Jewish tradition that became known (much later) as the Kabbalah.