The word appears first in the second century AD, in a medical text written by Quintus Serenus Sammonicus, physician to the Roman Emperor Caracalla. In chapter 52 of his Liber Medicinalis, he prescribed it as a remedy for malaria. The patient was to wear it around the neck, written on a piece of parchment in a specific triangular arrangement.
From Latin it passed into English in the sixteenth century, arriving with its claimed power to cure fevers and malaria. Its first recorded English appearance is in 1565, in Aunswere to Treatise of Crosse by James Calfhill, a clergyman sceptical of its claims. It had spread beyond Rome, inscribed on amulets, small objects worn around the neck as a cure for fever. Where the Latin word itself came from, nobody agrees. The Oxford English Dictionary states that no documentation has been found to support any of the proposed theories.
Three languages have been proposed as the source, none have been proven. In Aramaic, the closest candidate means 'I will create as I speak', the belief that language holds the power to bring things into being. In Hebrew, it means 'name of the blessed', a phrase of sacred protection. In Greek, it may not be a word at all, but the first four letters of the alphabet written in sequence.
The word has no confirmed relatives, but two theories have proposed candidates. ABRAXAS was a Gnostic word of power whose Greek letters sum to 365, one for each day of the year. The same Roman physician who first prescribed this word also wrote about ABRAXAS. A second theory suggests the word derives from the opening letters of the Greek alphabet, giving English ALPHA and BETA. Neither connection has been proven. Both feel appropriate for a word whose power was always a matter of faith.
For seventeen centuries it was taken seriously. Then it was not. The Puritan minister Increase Mather dismissed it as bereft of power. Daniel Defoe, writing about the Great Plague of London in 1722, described Londoners posting it on their doorways to ward off infection, and found them ridiculous. By 1819 the journey was complete. William Thomas Moncrieff put it in the mouth of a stage magician in his play Rochester. It has not left the stage since.
