Obviously it would have no more than a placebo effect on the user, but people seem to put a lot of stock in it. It was thought to cure diseases, fever, and other problems by siphoning it out of the person and expelling it through that bottom “A”. Perhaps more intuitively, it could be derived from and Aramaic phrase “avra kadavra.” Harry Potter fans will likely know that this is what JK Rowling used when she was coming up with the killing curse “avada kedavra.” In an interview, she stated that the original phrase meant “let the thing be destroyed,” (more on this in the Bonus Facts below) which would suit the cure-theory well abracadabra was written to “destroy” the sickness.Īs strange as it may seem today, people did wear talismans of sorts with the “abracadabra” cone as Sammonicus described. It could be that early sages thought this was a powerful word and somehow created “abracadabra” out of it and turned it into a “cure.”Īlternatively, the word might be derived from the Hebrew words for “father, son, and holy spirit”: “ab, ben, and ruach hakodesh” respectively. First, it could have been derived from the equally magical word “abraxas” whose letters, in Greek numerology, add up to 365-the number of days in the year. There are a couple of theories as to where it might have ultimately come from. It’s unlikely that Sammonicus came up with the word on his own and it is thought to have been in use before then. Many people say that the lard of a lion is effective.

Remember to wind this with linen and hang it around the neck. Continue until the (last) letter makes the apex of a cone. On a piece of parchment, write the so-called ‘abracadabra’ several times, repeating it on the line below but take off the end, so that gradually individual letters, which you will take away each time, are missing from the word. None of our ancestors could name this disease in our own language, nor did they feel the need to. The malady the Greeks call hemitritaeos is more deadly. The exact origin of the word is up for debate, but perhaps one of the oldest records we have of “Abracadabra” being used is a snippet from a Roman sage named Serenus Sammonicus in the 2 nd century AD from his Liber Medicinalis: These days you might hear this word before some stage magician pulls a rabbit out of his hat, but hundreds of years ago people actually believed that “abracadabra” was a magical spell. Today I found out the origin of the word “abracadabra.”

Magic word abracadabra