Abracadabra: the magic word in the poem of Serenus Sammonicus
The first record of Abracadabra in the Liber medicinalis of Quintus Serenus: the poet, the triangular figure, theories on its etymology and the plague of 1665.
Abracadabra is perhaps the most famous magic word in the world, today associated above all with conjurers and children's games. Its first secure attestation, however, is found in a serious text: a Latin medical poem in hexameters, the Liber medicinalis, attributed to Quintus Serenus. There the word appears as a remedy against a fever, in a setting where medicine, religion and magic were still closely intertwined.
A medical poet in the age of the Severans
The author of the Liber medicinalis is traditionally identified with Quintus Serenus Sammonicus, a scholar and book collector who lived between the second and third centuries and who, according to the Historia Augusta, was killed on Caracalla's orders in 212. Some scholars attribute the poem instead to his son of the same name, tutor of the young Gordian, and others to a later author. The question remains open and the sources do not allow it to be settled with certainty.
The poem, of just over a thousand lines, collects remedies for ailments from head to foot, drawn largely from Pliny the Elder and other sources. It is a handbook in verse, intended for educated readers rather than professional physicians. In the Middle Ages it was read and copied in monasteries, and its popularity partly explains the spread of the word abracadabra throughout Europe.
The shrinking figure
In the chapter on semi-tertian fever, Serenus speaks of writing on a sheet “quod dicitur Abracadabra”, the word called abracadabra, repeating it and shortening it line by line. The result is a figure shaped like an inverted triangle, narrowing until only a single letter is left. According to the poet the sheet was then worn around the patient's neck, like many other written amulets of antiquity.
The symbolic principle is clear: just as the word wastes away line by line, so, in the belief of the time, the illness was supposed to waste away. The same diminishing pattern appears in other ancient amulets with different names, and it is also documented in the Greek magical papyri. It is a form of magic by analogy, very common in the ancient world, which attributed to writing the power to act upon reality.
An etymology still mysterious
Many hypotheses have been put forward about the origin of the word. Some link it to Aramaic, with a meaning close to “I create as I speak”, others to a corruption of the name Abrasax, common on magical gems, and others still to the sequence of the first letters of the alphabet. None of these explanations has been proved, and the most cautious scholars simply observe that the term has the typical look of ancient magic words, sonorous and repetitive.
The word survived for a long time. In 1722 Daniel Defoe, in A Journal of the Plague Year, recalls that during the London epidemic of 1665 many people wore slips of paper bearing abracadabra arranged in a triangle, together with other signs and formulas. Defoe wrote about it with irony, as an example of popular credulity in times of fear, and complained that quacks and sellers took advantage of the general anguish.
From Serenus's poem to the patter of stage magicians, the word has made a singular journey. Born as a supposed remedy against fever, it has become a synonym for trickery and pretence. Its history reminds us that the boundary between medicine, magic and entertainment was drawn slowly, and that many common expressions preserve traces of ancient beliefs whose origin we have forgotten.