”Abracadabra” was a magical amulet to cure fever. Here’s the recipe

Before being a word almost exclusively used in a moment of magic, “abracadabra” consisted of a combination of medicine, religion, ritualism and sorcery.

The oldest known reference to the word appears more than 1,800 yearsin the 2nd century AD, in a Latin text attributed to Quintus Serenus Sammonicus, according to . Serenus would have tutored children who would become Roman emperors, Geta and Caracalla, and this privileged position lent weight to his prescriptions.

No Medicinal book (“Book of Medicine”), “abracadabra” appears not as a “magic” word, but as a therapeutic instrumentmore specifically a remedy for fevera common and sometimes fatal symptom in a world without antibiotics, and associated with diseases such as malaria.

The procedure was as follows: the patient had to wear an amulet with a parchment around his neck where the word had to be written in successive lines, forming a inverted triangle: in each line, one letter was removed from the “abacadabra” until only one “A” remained. So, as in the photo above:

• ABRACADABRA
• ABRACADAB
• ABRACADAB
• HUG
• ABRACAD
• HUG
• ABRAC
• ABRA
• ABR
• AB
• A

Just as the letters were “dissolving”, the fever would also be extinguished — or at least that was the logic of this “medicine”.

This type of writing is not limited to the Roman context. There are similar versions in Egyptian papyri written in Greek in the 3rd century AD, and in a Coptic codex from the 6th century, although with variations in the way letters are suppressed or even with different magical words.

For certain practitioners of so-called Greek magic, gradually reducing a word into a triangle could represent the diminution of the name of an evil spirit.

The word would therefore function as a mechanism of protection. But what word is this?

There are proposals that link “abracadabra” to Hebrew or Aramaic expressions, bringing it closer to the idea of ​​creation through words — “I create as I speak” — or formulas associated with divine acts. Other readings argue that it could derive from a Hebrew expression interpreted as “name of the blessed one”. In several traditions, divine names were seen as sources of supernatural power to heal and protect. For primitive Christians, the text adds, words of Hebrew origin would have a special status as they were associated with the language of God and creation.

Over the centuries, “abracadabra” has maintained a reputation as a spoken and written remedy. A 16th-century Jewish manuscript from Italy includes a version of the spell as an amulet against fever. And in the 17th century, during plague outbreaks in London, the word appears in accounts of popular practices to avoid infection, alongside religious signs, knots and figures.

As modern scientific treatment replaces the spirituality of diseases, “abracadabra” loses its therapeutic function and migrates to the entertainment. At the beginning of the 19th century, it appeared as an example of a word that illusionists could utter on stage; In the 20th century, it reappears in occult contexts, such as in the Thelema religion, founded by Aleister Crowley, who adapted the word to “abrahadabra” and gave it a symbolic role linked to numerology and a spiritual “new era”.