Just a brief digression from Anglo Saxon magic today. But I hope you find it interesting all the same.

A great deal of magical practice seems to cross cultural boundaries, so that certain words, numbers, gestures and methods seem to crop up time and again.

Some of them have been around for so long that they seem to have built up a power all their own. The most famous of all magic words, abracadabra was used in ancient times and in its earliest written form is written as an inverted triangle:

ABRACADABRA
ABRACADABR
ABRACADAB
ABRACADA
ABRACAD
ABRACA
ABRAC
ABRA
ABR
AB
A

Although nowadays we tend to associate this word with stage conjurors who produce rabbits from top hats, as late as the eighteenth century Defoe described people using this charm to cure them of plague.

It was popular all over Europe, sometimes to make things disappear (in the written form above you will see that the words appear to ‘shrink’) while Aleister Crowley wrote the word as ‘Abrahadabra’ and regarded it as extremely powerful. It’s up to you of course, whether you want to use it or not, but you never know, one day it may come in handy!