# The SATOR square *SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS* **Known today as.** A five-line Latin word square that can be read in four directions. Kind: Amulet ## 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. ## 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. ## What lore surrounds it? The oldest examples, from Pompeii, are reasonably thought to be earlier than the eruption of AD 79. Its letters can be rearranged into a cross of PATERNOSTER with a spare A and O, Alpha and Omega, though whether that meaning was intended remains disputed. The PATERNOSTER cross was found by C. Frank in 1924 and, independently, by Grosser soon after; the Pompeian finds then raised grave difficulties for a Christian origin, and while sceptics held the square a mere palindrome, Fishwick in 1959 argued that it began among Latin-speaking Jews and was later revived as a Christian symbol. In the fifteenth century it was set against fire in the ch teaux of Chinon and Jarnac; a citizen of Lyons was said to have been cured of madness by eating three crusts of bread inscribed with it; a thirteenth-century parchment of Aurillac uses it for women in labour; in nineteenth-century South America it was still used against dog-bites and snake-bites; and the Ethiopians named the five nails of the Cross with its five words. ## 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.” ## Sources - Kieckhefer, R. (1989). *Magic in the Middle Ages*. Cambridge University Press. - Fishwick, D. (1964). “On the origin of the Rotas-Sator square.” *Harvard Theological Review* 57. - Sheldon, R. M. (2003). “The Sator rebus: an unsolved cryptogram?” *Cryptologia* 27. - *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 - Fishwick, D. (1959). An early Christian cryptogram? *Canadian Catholic Historical Association Report* 26: 29–41. --- *The SATOR square.* In *Materia Medica*, edited by B. C. P. Statema. Version 1, revised 2026-10-03. The Thinking Press. https://thethinkingpress.org/materia-medica/sator-square Historical description, not medical advice.