Magic formulas
The same contract as the Roman formula or the school textbook, but turned toward the invisible: a brief text that promises that, pronounced exactly by the right person, under the right conditions, it will produce an effect: cure a fever, open a door, drive away an evil. This piece follows that text from the Roman amulet to the pseudo-Latin of fictional spells, distinguishing at every step what is attested from what remains a hypothesis.
0The parts of a magic formula
Six parts recur, under different names, from one culture to another. Rarely all present at once, but each answers a question the ritual has to settle before the effect can be promised.
| Part | Role |
|---|---|
| the words | Often opaque (voces magicae): syllables that do not translate into everyday language, and do not need to in order to act. |
| the medium | The object that carries the formula over time or in a given place: an amulet worn around the neck, a rolled papyrus, a lead defixio buried in the ground. |
| the gesture and the moment | Writing, reciting, burying, wearing: the material execution of the formula, often fixed to a precise hour or circumstance. |
| the qualified operator | The one with the right and the knowledge to pronounce the formula: mage, healer, priest, or street performer, depending on the case. |
| the target | What the formula sets out to act on: a demon to be driven off, an illness to be pushed back, a lock to be opened. |
| the condition of success | Exactness. A word changed, a gesture skipped, an unqualified person: and the promised effect no longer occurs. |
1Abracadabra, a medical prescription
The most famous of Western magic formulas begins as a prescription, not as a stage trick.
The earliest known attestation of the word abracadabra appears in Serenus Sammonicus, in his Liber Medicinalis, around 200 AD: a treatise in verse that prescribes the word as a remedy for a recurring fever, hemitritaeus. The instruction is precise: write ABRACADABRA in a triangle, one letter fewer on each line, down to the single letter, then wear this amulet around the neck.
The logic is said to be sympathetic: the word shrinks line after line, and the illness is supposed to shrink with it, drawn out of the body by the progressive disappearance of its name. The etymology of the word itself remains uncertain: links have been proposed with Aramaic, with Hebrew, or with the magical name Abraxas, none of them established. This piece cites them as competing hypotheses, never as facts.
2Ancient words of power
The Greek and Greco-Egyptian world produced its own words of power, on amulets, on papyrus, or engraved in lead.
The Ephesia Grammata are six Greek words (askion, kataskion, lix, tetrax, damnameneus, aision) worn for protection since classical antiquity. The Greek Magical Papyri (PGM), compiled in Greco-Roman Egypt, multiply the voces magicae, those opaque words, of which the palindrome ablanathanalba is one of the most cited. Curse tablets, finally, are defixiones, curses engraved on lead, deposited in tombs or thrown into springs: the formula becomes an object that is buried so it can act at a distance and over time.
A palindrome offers a strong image of verbal armor: a word identical read in either direction gives, symbolically, no grip to the spirit it aims to contain, it closes back on itself. The Greek form of ablanathanalba illustrates the principle almost perfectly, with a nuance worth stating: the Greek letter theta (Θ) counts as a single letter. It is therefore the transcription in a single Greek character, not its Latin transliteration into two letters "th", that makes the palindrome exact down to the letter.
3Open sesame
The key formula of the Ali Baba tale is the shortest in this piece, and the tale itself demonstrates its own fragility.
Open sesame entered the Thousand and One Nights through Antoine Galland's 1712 translation, who had the Ali Baba tale from the Syrian storyteller Hanna Diyab. The formula holds to a minimal structure: a vocative, addressing the thing, followed by an imperative, ordering it to act. Nothing more is needed for the effect to follow.
The tale teaches its own moral in the negative. Cassim, Ali Baba's brother, knows the formula exists but not the exact word: he tries "barley, open up", confusing sesame with another grain, and dies trapped inside the cave for this single approximation. The formula tolerates no deviation, exactly like the legis actiones of the earliest Roman law, where a single wrong syllable lost the case (see the praetor's formula).
4From Merseburg charms to grimoires
The pagan Germanic world left only two written formulas; the Christian Middle Ages, by contrast, produced entire volumes of them.
The two Merseburg charms are copied in Old High German in a manuscript from the 9th or 10th century, discovered in 1841: they are the only surviving pagan Germanic incantations. Each combines a short mythic narrative with a performative formula that draws the consequence from it: "bone to bone, blood to blood, limb to limb, let them be joined". The narrative does not decorate the formula, it grounds it: it supplies a divine precedent that the formula invokes so it can act in turn.
The European grimoires that follow, the Clavicula Salomonis, the Petit Albert, change scale: the formula surrounds itself with an ever-growing set of conditions, favorable hours, circles traced on the ground, particular inks. It is a bureaucracy of the supernatural, where the text's efficacy depends as much on an entire protocol as on the text itself.
5The formula as a speech act
The intellectual hinge of this piece is not one more ritual, but a theory of language that explains why all the previous rituals could ever have seemed plausible.
In How to Do Things with Words (1962), the philosopher J. L. Austin distinguishes performative utterances from descriptive ones. Saying "I now pronounce you married" or "the meeting is open" describes nothing pre-existing: the utterance itself performs the act it names. For a performative to work, Austin sets out felicity conditions: the right words, spoken by the right person, following the right procedure, under the right circumstances.
The magic formula is a performative dreamed to its limit: it extends this power of doing things with words from the social world to the physical one, the fever, the closed door, the enemy. The judge who sentences, the praetor who drafts his formula, the priest who baptizes, and the mage who conjures share the same grammar, the same felicity conditions; only the domain on which the utterance is meant to take effect changes.
6Case study: the pseudo-Latin of fiction
Modern fiction has invented its own formulas. This section analyzes them as objects of language, not as a catalog to reproduce.
Why do so many fictional spells sound Latin? For the European reader, Latin is the dead language of power: that of law, of the church, of learned science. A word bearing its marks inherits, by association, an authority that everyday English or French lacks. A few spells from the Harry Potter series (J. K. Rowling) illustrate this, in brief quotation, without any intent here to list them exhaustively: Expelliarmus combines expellere (to drive out, to expel) and arma (weapons); Wingardium Leviosa mixes wing (English) with arduus (high) and levis (light); Expecto Patronum is, for its part, actual grammatical Latin, "I await a protector"; Lumos comes from lumen (light), Nox from its opposite; Accio, likewise real Latin, means "I summon".
Avada Kedavra occupies a place apart: J. K. Rowling has publicly linked it to an Aramaic variant of abracadabra, meaning "let the thing be destroyed", in remarks made at an Edinburgh festival in 2004. This link deserves to be cited exactly for what it is: a statement by the author about her own inspiration, not an etymology established by linguistics. Tolkien, with his fully constructed Elvish languages, and tabletop role-playing games, with the verbal, somatic, and material components of Dungeons and Dragons, extend the same gesture in passing: making magic sound like a language of its own, with its own grammar.
7Hocus pocus and the doubt
The most theatrical formula in this piece is also, frankly, the one whose origin remains the least certain.
Hocus pocus is attested in England around 1620 as the stage name of a fairground conjurer, before becoming the stock formula of the street-performer's trick. The best-known hypothesis about its origin comes from Archbishop John Tillotson, in a sermon published in 1694: hocus pocus would parody "hoc est corpus meum", the Latin words of the Eucharistic consecration. The hypothesis is appealing, it has circulated for more than three centuries, but it has never been demonstrated: it must remain presented as a hypothesis, not as an established fact.
Whether the hypothesis is true or not, the story says something in the background: when a formula leaves the institution that legitimized it, the church for hoc est corpus, it becomes gibberish to the ears of those who no longer share the framework that gave it meaning; and gibberish, in turn, becomes spectacle. The street performer picks up what has lost its sacred authority and turns it into an act.
8Six misconceptions
9Test yourself
Eight questions, one correct answer each time. The explanation appears after your choice.
10The lexicon
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| incantation | a formula recited to produce an effect |
| conjuration | a formal appeal addressed to a power, to drive it off or summon it |
| vox magica | an opaque word of power, often untranslatable (plural: voces magicae) |
| amulet | an object worn on the body, supposed to protect or heal through the formula it carries |
| talisman | an object made to attract an effect, rather than to guard against one |
| defixio | a curse engraved on lead, deposited in a tomb or a spring |
| grimoire | a collection of formulas and magical procedures, often medieval or modern |
| palindrome | a word or sequence that reads identically in both directions |
| performative | an utterance that performs the act it names, rather than describing it (Austin) |
| felicity condition | a requirement that must be met for a performative to produce its effect |
| sympathetic magic | the principle that acting on an image or symbol acts on the thing itself |
| apotropaic | serving to ward off evil or misfortune |
| pseudo-Latin | a forged word that imitates the morphology of Latin without being Latin |
| glossolalia | the production of sounds resembling speech, without an identifiable utterance |
| gibberish | speech perceived as incomprehensible by the one who hears it |
| abraxas | a Gnostic magical name, sometimes proposed as a possible source of abracadabra |
| Ephesia Grammata | the six Greek protective words (askion, kataskion, lix, tetrax, damnameneus, aision) |
| votive formula | a formula pronounced in support of a vow, in exchange for an expected favor |
| exorcism | a verbal ritual meant to drive out a presence deemed malevolent |
| spell | a generic term for a magic formula, in everyday usage as much as in fiction |