Magical gems with Abraxas: the cock-headed god
The so-called Gnostic gems: Abrasax and the number 365, the cock-headed anguipede, Chnoubis, the first collectors and why the traditional name is misleading.
Archaeological museums across Europe hold thousands of small stones engraved with bizarre figures: a being with a cock's head, a human torso and snake legs; a lion with rays streaming from its mane; scarabs, Egyptian deities, incomprehensible Greek words. For centuries they were called “Gnostic gems”. Today scholars prefer to speak of Greco-Egyptian magical gems, and the change of name tells an interesting story.
Abrasax, the name worth a year
The most frequent name on these stones is Abrasax, often spelt Abraxas. Its Greek letters, added up according to the numerical value each had in the alphabet, give three hundred and sixty-five, the number of days in the solar year. This property already fascinated the ancients. Irenaeus of Lyon, in the second century, reports that the Gnostic teacher Basilides spoke of three hundred and sixty-five heavens, ruled by a prince called by this name.
The figure associated with Abrasax is the so-called anguipede: a human body in a cuirass, with a cock's head and legs ending in two serpents. In its hands it usually holds a whip and a shield, on which the word IAO, a Greek form of the Hebrew divine name, often appears. The iconography combines solar, military and chthonic elements, and seems to represent a protective deity of universal character.
Why they are not really Gnostic
The label of Gnostic gems goes back to the scholars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who linked the name Abrasax to the Church Fathers' accounts of Basilides. In 1657 the canon Jean Chifflet published an illustrated treatise on these stones, and in the following century Bernard de Montfaucon reproduced many of them in his great work on antiquity. Later studies have shown that most of the gems have no connection with the Gnostic sects.
They are rather objects of everyday magic from Roman Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean, dating mostly from the second to the fourth century. Egyptian deities such as Harpocrates and Anubis appear on them side by side with Hebrew names, Greek formulas and astrological figures. A decisive moment for modern study came in 1950, when the American Campbell Bonner published a volume on magical amulets that classified the gems by type and function.
Chnoubis and the stones of health
Another frequent figure is Chnoubis, a lion-headed serpent surrounded by rays, often engraved on green stones. The physician Galen, in the second century, records that according to the legendary Egyptian king Nechepso a green stone bearing this image benefited the stomach, but he remarks that in his opinion any virtue came from the stone and not from the figure. In ancient tradition many gems were associated with specific ailments.
The name of Abrasax travelled down the centuries and resurfaced in modern literature, for instance in Hermann Hesse's novel Demian, published in 1919, where it denotes a deity uniting good and evil. This, however, is a philosophical reinterpretation, far removed from the meaning the name had for those who wore it engraved on a stone in the Roman world.
Magical gems are tiny but eloquent witnesses to a plural religious world in which Egypt, Greece, Judaism and astrology mingled without difficulty. Studying them means looking closely at the hopes and fears of ordinary people, who entrusted to a small engraved stone, worn on a finger or around the neck, their wish for protection and good fortune.