Up until fairly recently - okay, up until yesterday - I had given little thought to the history of the famous word used by performance magicians almost universally. I need hardly say it: "abracadabra."
For years, I had grouped the whimsical expression with the other nonsensical catchphrases of my childhood like the Fairy Godmother's "Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo" and the more obscure "Iggy la Piggy Wiggy," coined by the mediocre magician who visited my synagogue's youth group every now and then. It's magic, I thought, something nonsensical in and of itself; it doesn't need an explanation. And I had assumed there was an understanding among the teen-plus community that the word was just a bunch of silly, garbled syllables thrown together in the name of children's entertainment.
Naturally, I was shocked to find out that "abracadabra" predates Silly Billy by quite some time, finding its roots instead in Kabbalah, a mystical rabbinical tradition; Gnosticism, a spiritual belief system of certain early Christian sects; and medicine, among other sources.
One popular theory about the word's origin explains "abracadabra" as a derivative of the Basilidan Gnostics' word for the supreme deity, Abraxas (which jolts us from "bunch of silly, garbled syllables" to "God" far too quickly, in my opinion).
Others suggest one of a few Semitic etymological roots, including the Aramaic "avra kehdabrah," which translates as "I will create as I speak," and the Hebrew words "av," "ben" and "ruach hakodesh," translated, respectively, as "father," "son" and "holy spirit."
Personally, I can envision the two fat magicians in "The Prince of Egypt" using any one of these magical, mystical customs to do their bidding.
The first official written record of "abracadabra," though, appeared only much later, in the second century A.D. in a medical poem authored by the Roman physician Q. Severus Sammonicus. The poem "De medicina praecepta," originally written in Latin, speaks of the word's healing powers. Instead of reciting or chanting the word, though, you wear it around your neck in a triangular shape whose top line consists of all of the word's letters, the next line of the entire word minus the last letter and so on and so forth until you are left with just a lonely little "a," like so:
A B R A C A D A B R A
A B R A C A D A B R
A B R A C A D A B
A B R A C A D A
A B R A C A D
A B R A C A
A B R A C
A B R A
A B R
A B
A
The idea is somewhat metaphorical - that just as the word "abracadabra" vanishes slowly, so too does the sickness.
Call it crazy, call it witchcraft, call it whatever you want. Until we get our hands on some swine flu vaccines, I'm not ruling anything out.
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Romy Oltuski is a junior majoring in English. She can be reached at Romy.Oltuski@tufts.edu.
