A 13th-century manuscript preserves Quintus Serenus Sammonicus’ ancient Roman “cure” for malaria, with the word ABRACADABRA written in decreasing letters within an inverted triangle. When you hear the word “abracadabra” you know that something magical is meant to have happened—a transformation maybe, or at least just a trick. The word itself is peculiar, yet it’s now an almost universal signal of the supposedly impossible.
For followers of Greek magic, writing variations of a word in a downwards-pointing triangle formed a “grape-cluster” or “heart shape,” which was a way of writing down an oral incantation that repeated and diminished the name of an evil spirit in the same way. Such spirits were thought to cause diseases, and both these versions of the abracadabra spell were supposed to cure fevers and other ailments.
But the word seems to have lost its usefulness as a remedy, and in the early 1800s it appeared in a stage play written by William Thomas Moncrieff, as an example of a word magicians would utter. Its only notable reference in the 20th century may be in the saying it was the name of a new age of humanity; and he claimed to have derived it from the numerology system known as Hermetic Qabalah, which induced him to swap out the C of abracadabra for an H.
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