Another word for magical
The patient should then wear this inverted pyramid of letters on a string around their neck, where it would act like a funnel, channeling the illness out of their body. Then ABRACADA, ABRACAD, ABRACA, and so on, until on the bottom line is written nothing more than a letter A: Beneath that is ABRACADAB, with the final R now gone. Beneath that is written ABRACADABR, with the last letter A omitted. In chapter 51 of his textbook, Sammonicus advises that any patient suffering from a fever should be given a piece of papyrus, at the top of which is written the magical word ABRACADABRA. But to treat full-on malarial fever, he explained, you really had to resort to magic. But whatever its etymology might be, there is one thing sets abracadabra apart from all the other “magic” words-it was once believed to be genuinely, miraculously, magic.īack in the 3rd century, a Roman scholar and physician named Quintus Serenus Sammonicus wrote a lengthy medical manuscript called De medicina praecepta, or “The Rules of Medicine.” Sammonicus’s cures included pouring a mixture of ox bile and sheep’s urine into the ear to cure earache, wrapping the head of a delusional patient with the bloody lungs of a recently slaughtered sheep, and treating one type of recurrent fever by placing the fourth book of Homer’s Iliad beneath a patient’s pillow. Or perhaps it derives from abecadarius, a Latin word essentially meaning “alphabetical order,” in which case it might once have implied putting everything magically back in its correct place or order. Alternatively, it might be a mangled corruption of the Hebrew words ab (“father”), ben (“son”), and ruach acadosch (“holy spirit”). One theory is that it comes from ancient Aramaic, and might once have meant something like “I create as I speak,” perhaps a phrase lifted from some ancient religious text. Hocus-pocus is thought to be a corruption of Hoc est corpus meum, “this is my body,” words used in the Latin Catholic Mass. Shazam was originally Captain Marvel’s catchphrase, coined so that it gave him the wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Hercules, the stamina of Atlas, the power of Zeus, the courage of Achilles, and the speed of Mercury. Why do magicians say “hey presto”? Well, as anyone who’s ever had piano lessons will likely know, presto means “quickly” in Italian, and so has long been used by conjurors to draw attention to some sudden, magical appearance or disappearance on stage.