In 1970 the group Santana released an album called Abraxas. One of the hit songs was Black Magic Woman. I didn’t know until I looked it up that the word abraxas is thought to be a particularly ancient word with magical powers. Evidently by some association of Greek letters with numbers the Greek form of abraxas adds up to 365, which is of course the number of days in a year and this somehow imparts mystical energies to the word. I couldn’t quite figure it out, but I guess it’s appropriate for an album with a song on it about magic.

However ancient it is abraxas only turned up in English in 1738, while our main magic word for the day appeared 42 years earlier in 1696. I only make the connection because Brewers Dictionary of Phrase and Fable says abracadabra is probably a related word to abraxas.

I’d always assumed that abracadabra was a kind of fabricated word used by magicians, but it turns out its pedigree is at least 1500 years older than our use of it in English. The first known citation was in Latin and it appeared in a kind of medical poem as an instruction for curing the sick magically. But instead of chanting this magic word the secret was in wearing it around your neck. The theory is that you wrote out the whole word, then below that you wrote out the word missing the final letter, and so on until the writing formed an inverted pyramid with an A at the bottom.

abracadabra
abracadabr
abracadab
abracada
abracad
abraca
abrac
abra
abr
ab
a

This caused your sickness to diminish and disappear just as the word did. Michael Quinion of worldwidewords.org pretty much agrees with my other sources on this, but also provides a few more theories as to where the word might have come from before that. He says it might be from an Aramaic phrase avra kehdabra, that meant “I will create as I speak”. Alternatively it could be from Hebrew ab ben ruach acadosch meaning “father-son-holy spirit” or from abrasax, another form of abraxas I mentioned earlier, which was evidently a name for God among an early Christian sect. And finally, one that seems to line up with the medical prescription, the possibility that it came from words in a language known as Chaldean abbada ke dabra that translates as “perish like the word.”