Also called Diminishing word charm, Abracadabra triangle
A Roman fever charm in which the word ABRACADABRA is written in a shrinking triangle, one letter lost per line, so the illness shrinks with it. A historical charm only; anyone with a fever should see a doctor.
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Take care: Historical charm only, not medical treatment: a fever needs a doctor, especially with a rash, stiff neck, confusion or a fever in a baby. Burn the paper only in a fireproof dish away from anything flammable.
Serenus, physician at the court of the emperor Caracalla, told patients with a recurring fever (the hemitritaeus, likely a form of malaria) to wear the word written as a triangle on a parchment hung from the neck by a linen thread. This is the earliest known record of the word.
Uses: parchment, linen thread
Defoe's account of the Great Plague of London mocks people who wrote the word on doorways or wore it as a charm to keep sickness away. His scorn shows how widely it was still known 1,400 years after Serenus.
The same shrinking pattern was applied to other words and names, written on paper and worn or thrown away. The triangle's shape was understood as a funnel that drained the illness away.
Uses: paper
The word ABRACADABRA first appears in the Liber Medicinalis of Quintus Serenus Sammonicus, a Latin poem of medical advice usually dated to the early third century. Serenus is traditionally said to have served the emperor Caracalla and to have been killed on his orders in 212 CE. His remedy for a dangerous recurring fever was the triangle charm, worn around the neck.
No one knows for sure where the word came from. Suggestions include Aramaic phrases and the Gnostic name Abraxas, but none is proven. The amulet stayed in use through the Middle Ages and into the early modern period, and Daniel Defoe noted Londoners using it in the plague of 1665. Only in the nineteenth century did stage conjurers turn it into the magician's word we know today.
A family of British and Appalachian folk charms in which a wart is touched with an object that is then buried, tied off or given away, so that as the object rots the wart fades. Folk tradition only; see a doctor or dermatologist about skin growths.
A modern release rite: write down what you want to let go of and burn the paper in a fireproof bowl, usually at year's end. Popularised by Unity churches in the twentieth century, with older relatives in New Year fire customs.
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