Saturday, August 12, 2006

Rotas Opera Tenet Arepo Sator


There's an enigmatic connection between the Star of David and the Magic Square
Rotas Opera tenet Arepo Sator (Shorter name: Sator) . The Sator is a palindrome that can be read in the same way from four directions of the square. There are dozens of interpretations of its meaning, but still there is no consent which of them is right.
I found two instances of this connection:
1. Elio Galasso wrote an on line book in order to show that the most ancient Sator found in Pompeii, dated 79 C.E, is eligible if you put a Star of David on it and read the letters along its lines and not from left to right.
2. M. Costa ["Hatakh ha-zahav, hotam Shelomoh u-magen-David", Poalim, 1990, Hebrew, pp. 174 [copied a whole page from A. Kircher's book "arithmology" (1646) with a Star of David encircling a Sator.
IMHO the Star of David and the Sator served for many centuries as amulets. Their perfect symmetry doesn't allow the penetration of evil spirits from any side. This is a solution for amulets that contain words since those that go from left to right can be read by the demons from right to left and those that go from right to left can be read by the demons from left to right. This solution is a double action prevention device and its proliferation shows how convincing it was….
Rotas Opera Tenet Arepo Sator can be translated: The sower, Arepo, guides the wheels with care.
The earliest examples are Roman: Two Sator squares were discovered in the ruins of Pompeii, Italy. There is a Christian interpretation that many scholars accept, which claims that the Sator contains the PATER NOSTER prayer plus A and O (alpha and omega in Greek). This could mean Christianity reached Pompeii at a very early date. These scholars believe that during that time of persecution the owners of the house were it was found used the Sator as a secret sign showing they were Christians. Another version is that it was put on the side of houses which offered refuge to Christians, who were the only people who knew how to decipher the code. Other historians think that the Sator was even older than the Christian Church.
Four Sators were unearthed in 1931-32 excavations in Dura Europos, in Syria; three of them on the walls of a [Roman] military office in a building that had originally been the temple of Artemis Azzanathkona. In 1868 it was found in excavations of a Roman villa, scratched on a wall plaster, at Corinium Dobunnorum, near Victoria Road in Cirencester, Gloucestershire, England. Another Sator square was found in Manchester and is considered to be the earliest evidence of Christianity in Britain. There are some specimens of it in Egypt, in Cappadocia, in Aquincum, in Hungary, on the wall of the Duomo of Siena, Italy, in the pavement outside the church of the Knights in Valetta, Malta…In later periods uncountable other examples have been found all over the world.
Rose Mary Sheldon wrote an excellent review of the literature on this subject.
Picture (courtesy of Synwell Liberation Front from Flickr) shows wall-plaster from second century C.E., excavated at Victoria Road, Cirencester, 1868

6 comments:

zeevveez said...

The number 666 comes directly from the worship practices of the city of Babylon about the time of the Bible prophet Daniel. The people of Babylon worshiped gods that were associated with the sun, moon, visible planets of our solar system, and certain of the stars involved with the practice of astrology. The Babylonians were the principle developers of astrology, as we know it today. In their worship system, they had 37 supreme gods, and one of these, the god associated with the sun, was supreme over all the other gods. These people believed that numbers in some way had power over the gods they worshiped. However, they had to create numbers that they could assign to the gods so that they could have power over them. To do this, they counted their gods and assigned a count number to each of the 36 lesser supreme gods, and then added up all of these numbers (from one to 36) and assigned the sum to the sun god. The first god they counted got the number one assigned to it, and the second god they counted got the number two assigned to it, and so on up to all 36 lesser supreme gods. Now, if you have not guessed it by now, the sum of the numbers from one to 36 totals 666, which they assigned to the god associated with the sun...
However, they went further. They feared these gods and worried that one of them might strike them down sometime, so they made amulets with a 6 x 6 matrix of the numbers one through 36 on them. Today we call these numeric matrixes magic squares. The design of the amulets was to achieve a magic purpose, and they evidently believed that wearing a particular god's number would protect one from a specific god striking them down using his power of magic. Now, the amulets had to be as powerful as possible, so in order to increase its power, they arranged these numbers in such a way that the sum of any given row, column, or diagonal is 111, and therefore the sum of all six rows or all six columns was 666. This was supposed to provide extra protection, including from the god associated with the sun, since this god's sum was present on the amulet.
Source:http://www.666man.net/666religionhistoryoverview.html
The above excerpt paves the way for a possible explanation of the Sator Magic square 5 X 5, in a similar way to the 6 X 6 Magic square, which is connected to the counting of some gods…

zeevveez said...

My friend Lucian says that
"SOTAR = SOTIR (SOTHR , sothr), is Greek for Redeemer. (Yep, there it is again: Jesus)". This insight may strengthen the theory about the Early Christian origin of this magic square.

zeevveez said...

My friend Lucian suggested I check how many gods the Babylonias had in fact.
I checked on a list of gods
http://folk.ntnu.no/wiborg/tableofgods/index.php?sort=name
and counted 134 who were marked as babylonian.
I don't know where did the guys from
http://www.666man.net/666religionhistoryoverview.html
take their list of gods...but I'll be happy to see their source.

zeevveez said...

"The Square of Mars is given here as an example, each side 5, total squares 25, each side counting 65, and total 325."
From:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/eso/nop/nop06.htm

zeevveez said...

"Rawlinson, in his volumes on the Ancient Monarchies, states that the Chaldeans associated mystic numbers with their Deities; thus to Anu, Pluto, 60; Bel, Jupiter, 50; Hoa,
[paragraph continues] Neptune, 40; Sin, the Moon, 30; Shamash, the Sun, 20; Nergal (Mars), 12; and Beltis or Mylitta, 15; and Nin is Saturn, 10.
It will be noticed that the great number of Sol is 666, called Sorath, SURT, the number of the Beast, about which so much folly has been written. One famous square of five times five divisions, amounting in most directions to 666, is formed of the mystic words sator, arepo, tenet, opera, rotas. Of these the first, third, and last number 666, but opera and its reverse number only 356."
From p. 31
http://www.sacred-texts.com/eso/nop/nop06.htm

Glenn Westmore said...

Latin Square of the Moon can generate a Magic Square. If we replace the numbers in the first column of “moon” with their respective root numbers we commence filling a root Square. Read more about it on my blog: http://www.glennwestmore.com.au/category/latin-squares/.