# Abracadabra

*The fever charm*

**Known today as.** A charm word written out line by line, one letter shorter each time, into a narrowing triangle.

Kind: Amulet

## What was it used for?

Written on parchment and hung at the neck against fever, which was meant to shrink as the word did.

## What lore surrounds it?

It is found in the medical poem of Serenus Sammonicus, whose date, his editor Vollmer wrote, cannot be told between the end of the second century and the fourth; Defoe says that during the plague of 1665 people wore it as protection.

No one knows what the word means. The Oxford English Dictionary, as the Online Etymology Dictionary quotes it, finds that “no documentation has been found to support any of the various conjectures which have been put forward”; a common theory, dating at least to the seventeenth century, connects it with the Gnostic *Abraxas*. Agrippa repeated Serenus’s prescription in his *Occult Philosophy*; Grose in 1787 still gave it, worn about the neck, as a cure for an ague;

## What did the older authorities say?

**Serenus Sammonicus.** Prescribes the word written in a narrowing triangle and hung from the neck with linen thread against the fever.

**Serenus Sammonicus.** Gives the word in his *Liber medicinalis* against the *hemitritaeos*, the semi-tertian fever, which he calls “more deadly” and says no Roman ever named in his own tongue: written on a sheet, repeated beneath with a letter taken away each time until it narrows to a cone, and bound about the neck with linen.

**Daniel Defoe.** In *A Journal of the Plague Year* (1722) lists the word among the charms the people of London wore in 1665, “as if the plague was not the hand of God, but a kind of possession of an evil spirit,” and holds that the wearers died with the rest.

**The Catholic Encyclopedia.** The Catholic Encyclopedia notes that in Egyptian magic “a mere agglomeration of vowels or of meaningless syllables was supposed to work good or evil. Their barbarous sounds were the object of ridicule to the man of common sense. In many cases they were of Jewish, or Babylonian, or Aramaic origin and because unintelligible to Egyptians, the words were generally corrupted beyond recognition.” It cites Pliny as “the earliest writer who mentions amulets,” and St. Cæsarius of Arles, from whose sermons “it appears that the dispensing of amulets was a regular profession; each disease had its appropriate amulet.”

## Sources

- Serenus Sammonicus, *Liber medicinalis*.
- Serenus Sammonicus, *Liber medicinalis*, lines 935–940.
- Defoe, D. (1722). *A Journal of the Plague Year*.
- *The Catholic Encyclopedia* (New York, 1907–1914), “Occult Art, Occultism.” newadvent.org/cathen/11197b.htm
- *The Catholic Encyclopedia* (New York, 1907–1914), “Amulet.” newadvent.org/cathen/01443a.htm
- Harper, D. (n.d.). Abracadabra. *Online Etymology Dictionary*. etymonline.com/word/abracadabra

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*Abracadabra.* In *Materia Medica*, edited by B. C. P. Statema. Version 1, revised 2026-10-03. The Thinking Press. https://thethinkingpress.org/materia-medica/abracadabra

Historical description, not medical advice.