‘Abracadabra’: the mysterious origin of the word and its various uses

You may not remember precisely when you first heard it, but it was probably during your childhood.

Someone may have introduced it as a magic word, when you were beginning to learn what magic is.

It was soon understood that pronouncing this word generates something unexpected – things appear or disappear, change shape or color or move on their own.

This is not an everyday word. But even so, it sticks in the minds of countless children around the world.

“Abracadabra” is part of the vocabulary of so many languages ​​that it has been claimed to be older than the Bible’s Tower of Babel.

But what no one certainly told us is its meaning… Because no one knows for sure.

The Houaiss Dictionary of the Portuguese Language, for example, records that “abracadabra” is a “kabbalistic word to which the ancients attributed the virtue of curing illnesses”. But it does not provide its exact meaning.

And this is not the only issue. The Oxford Dictionary of the English Language, since its first edition in 1884, indicates that the word “abracadabra” has an “unknown” origin.

But this did not stop experts from trying to decipher the mystery, developing different theories over the centuries.

Several conjectures consider that the word “abracadabra” originated in the early Judeo-Christian tradition.

This esoteric word may have derived from the Hebrew-Aramaic phrase avra gavra. It refers to the words spoken by God on the sixth day of creation, according to the Old Testament: “I will create man.”

But this is just one of several possibilities.

Another theory argues that the word may come from Aramaic avra c’dabrah (“I believe with the word”) or from the Hebrew open kedobar (“it happened as announced”).

It is “a Talmudic maxim that expresses the belief that the person speaking has the power to cause the world to exist”, according to American rabbi Alan Lew (1943-2009) in his book This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared (“This is real and you are completely unprepared”, in free translation).

In other words, the mere act of pronouncing the word or naming something can instigate its creation.

Other experts also believe that “abracadabra” comes from Aramaic and Hebrew, but they consider its meaning to be entirely different – ​​for example, “disappears like this word” (abhadda kedkabhra) or “cast your thunderbolt to death” (abreq ad habra).

There are other searches for meaning, following the hypothesis that “abracadabra” comes from these Semitic languages. But there are also theories that venture down different paths.

Among the many hypotheses mentioned by American professor Craig Conley in his book Magic Words: A Dictionary (“Magic Words: A Dictionary”, in free translation), one of them argues that “abracadabra” was the supreme deity of the Assyrians.

Another claims that it would be a corruption of the name of the father of algebra, the 9th century Arab mathematician Abu Abdullah abu Jafar Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi.

The British astronomer Samson Arnold Mackey (1765-1843) assured in 1822 that “abracadabra” is a phrase formulated by ancient astronomers to describe the constellation Taurus.

There are still other hypotheses, but the debate does not reach a consensus. After all, as the Oxford Dictionary explains, “no documents were found to support any of the various conjectures.”

But the fact that “abracadabra” became “unintelligible to the heirs of the tradition, often unaware of its meaning and original language” – as highlighted by academic Joshua Trachtenberg (1904-1959) – ended up becoming a virtue.

“There is so little need for the magic word to have any intelligible meaning that it is most often considered efficacious because it is strange and meaningless, incomprehensible words in foreign languages ​​being particularly preferred,” wrote academic Benno Jacob (1862- 1945) in the book Im Namen Gottes (“In the name of God”, in free translation).

Therefore, exotic and meaningless, but perhaps more powerful precisely for this reason, “abracadabra” has marked its presence in history for centuries. And a lot has always been expected from this word.

Long before making rabbits come out of hats, “abracadabra” was used for very different purposes, such as scaring away demons and death, as well as fighting disease.

Its first known use appears in the fragments that have come down to us from the Liber medicinalisfrom the 3rd century AD, also known as Praecepta Saluberrima.

Its author is Sereno Samónico. Not much is known about him, but he was a physician to the Roman emperor Caracalla (188-217) and was considered wise.

Among several other treatments, remedies and antidotes, his book mentions one for “the deadly fever that the Greeks called hemitritaion“.

“The word was never translated into Latin, either because the nature of the language does not allow it or because the parents, believing that translating it would be harmful to their children, did not want to give it a name”, wrote Samónico.

The doctor was referring to the disease known today as malaria, which devastated Ancient Rome. To cure it, he recommended the following:

“Write on a sheet [de papiro] the word ABRACADABRA, repeat it omitting the last letter, so that more and more individual letters are missing in each line […] until there is a single letter left like the apex of a cone. Remember to secure it around your neck with a linen thread.”

The idea was that the disease would gradually disappear, like the word “abracadabra”.

Samonicus also prescribed anointing the body with lion’s fat or wearing the skin of a domestic cat adorned with jewels to protect against this fever.

But what remained was the use of the curious word, which left its traces across different places and cultures.

It appears, for example, engraved on some of the Abraxas stones, which the Basilidians – members of the 2nd century Gnostic sect founded by Basilides of Alexandria – used as talismans.

“Abracadabra” was part of a magical formula to invoke the aid of benevolent spirits to combat illness and have good luck.

The word also appears in the “Tree of Knowledge” (Etz ha-Da’at), a small codex written by Elisha ben Gad of Ancona, Italy, in the 16th century.

The first incantation included in the book is a “heavenly cure” for “all kinds of fever.” He starts by saying:

“Av avr avra avrak avraka avrakal avrakala avrakal avraka avrak avra avr av“

As Zsofi Buda highlights on the British Library blog, it is easy to discover the magic word “abracadabra” in this spell.

In England, as in many other places, “abracadabra” continued to offer hope of a cure well into the 18th century.

The word is highlighted in the book A Diary of the Plague Year (Ed. Arts and Crafts, 2002), written in 1722 by the author of Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe (1660-1731).

The author laments that people believed in frauds “as if the plague [bubônica] was nothing more than a kind of possession by an evil spirit”, resorting to superstition to ward it off.

Among these superstitions were “papers tied with so many knots; and certain words or figures written on them, particularly the word ‘abracadabra,’ in the shape of a triangle or pyramid.”

People who trusted talismans continued to follow the instructions given centuries earlier by Sereno Samónico. They wore them for nine days and then discarded them, throwing them over their left shoulder before dawn into a stream flowing from west to east. All in vain.

“How many poor people were then taken away in hearses and thrown into mass graves with these infernal pendants hanging around their necks,” wrote Defoe.

There were also those who carried amulets with the pyramid facing upwards, to attract good luck.

At the beginning of the 19th century, with the emergence of the British obsession with spiritualism, the famous English occultist Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) decided to appropriate the word magic.

He reconstructed “abracadabra” through a Kabbalistic reformulation that transformed it into “abrahadabra” in his work The Book of the Lawwhich defines the basic principles of his new religion, called Thelema.

For him, “abracadabra” is “the Word of the Aeon, which means the Great Work accomplished.”

At that time, the word was already losing its supposed healing power. But, at the same time, it acquired another meaning when it was incorporated by magicians into their repertoires.

This is how, from the first decades of the 19th century, “abracadabra” transformed, as if by magic, into the enchantment we know today, since childhood.