What is Abracadabra?!
I have seen the magicians casting this spell whenever I watch a magic show or something related to magic, and it made me really interested to find out what this word means and has this word any sort of significance anywhere in the history or is it just a formal phrase used by magicians. I found out that it actually does have some significance in the earlier times. Here are a few myths and details about this word. In Aramaic this word roughly translates into “I will create as I speak. The very first origins of the word abracadabra are found in the in a Latin medical poem, De medicina praecepta, by the Roman physician ‘Quintus Serenus Sammonicus’ in the second century AD.
Serenus Sammonicus was a roman servant who worked as doctor at that time. Although this poem is incomplete and the translation can be confused the surviving work, ‘De medicina praecepta’ in 1115 hexameters, contains a number of popular remedies, borrowed from Pliny and Dioscorides, and various magic formulae, amongst others the famous Abracadabra, as a cure for fever and ague. He said that whoever will wear an amulet around the neck, a piece of parchment inscribed with a triangular formula derived from the word, will stay safe as it acts like a funnel to drive the sickness out of the body, this amulet diminishes the hold over the patient of the spirit of the disease. It is also believed that this word may have originated even earlier and has been derived from one of the sematic languages but there is no written proof for this statement. This word is believed to have been transacted into English via French and Latin from a Greek word ‘abrasadabra’ (the change from s to c seems to have been through a confused transliteration of the Greek). Abracadabra was also used by the Gnostics, who placed great stock in esoteric knowledge.
They have explained this term as (1) a combination of the Hebrew words ab (“father”),ben (“son”), and ruach acadosch (“holy spirit”) (2) a derivation of Abraxas, a Gnostic word for God, “the source of 365 emanations.” Allegedly the Greek letters for Abraxas add up to 365 when translated according to numerological principles if you wrote abracadabra on a parchment in a triangular arrangement. Abrahadabra is another term that is related to the word ‘Abracadabra’ and was first appeared in The Book of the Law, which was considered a holy book. It is described as “the Word of the Aeon, which means ‘The Great Work accomplished.’ This is in reference to his belief that the writing of Liber Legis (another name for “The Book of the Law”) heralded a new Aeon for mankind that was ruled by the god Ra-Hoor-Khuit (a form of Horus).
Abrahadabra is, therefore, the “magical formula” of this new age.
