The SATOR square

The SATOR square: what was it used for?

Written on walls, tiles, parchment, and bread, which was eaten, against fire, fever, madness, the bites of dogs and snakes, and the dangers of childbirth.

The SATOR square: what does modern science say?

Examples are known from Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the Americas, from first-century Rome to the nineteenth century.

The SATOR square: what did the older authorities say?

Pompeii

Two squares were found there: a fragment Della Corte published in 1929 from the house of Publius Paquius Proculus, and a whole one “neatly inscribed on the plaster of a column of the Palaestra,” found some five years after the Dura discoveries. Fishwick argued that it was written before the eruption of AD 79, which made a Christian origin hard to credit.

The Romans abroad

Squares of Roman date were found scratched on wall plaster at Cirencester, on the walls of a military office at Dura-Europos on the Euphrates before the Persians destroyed the town soon after AD 256, and on a roof tile at Aquincum, now Budapest; the ROTAS form is the earlier.

The Catholic Encyclopedia

The Catholic Encyclopedia's account of magic observes that “all rely on the power of words, the utterance of a hidden name, or the mere existence of the name on an amulet or stone. Magic was supposed to be the triumph of intellect over matter, the word being the key to the mysteries of the physical world,” and that “so potent is a name that if an inscribed amulet be washed and the water drunk or the charm written on papyrus be soaked in water and this taken, or if the word be written on hard-boiled eggs without shell and these eaten, preternatural powers come into play.” Of amulets generally it says that “each disease had its appropriate amulet” and that the Church, “while forbidding amulets, permitted the use of emblems which would remind the bearers of some doctrine of Christianity.”