326 THE MAGIC OP JEWELS AND CHARMS
jasper was esteemed in ancient times, this designation covering jade as well :14
Auto, quid melius? Jaspis. Quid Jaspitef Virtus. Quid virtutef Deus. Quid dettate Î Nihil.
What is better than Goldf Jasper. What is better than Jasper? Virtue. What is better than Virtue? God. What is better than the deity? Nothing.
The
first mention of the famous charm Abracadabra, which so often appears
engraved on Gnostic gems, occurs in a Latin medical poem written by
Serenus Sammonicus who lived in the third century and is said to have
bequeathed his library consisting of sixty-two thousand volumes to the
Emperor Gordian the Younger. The poem recommends this mystic word, or
name, as a sovereign remedy for the "demi-tertian" fever, if it were
written on a piece of paper and suspended by a linen thread from the
neck of the patient. To have its full emcacy the word should be written
as many times as there are letters in it, but taking away one letter
each time, so that the inscription assumed the form of an inverted cone.15
It
is interesting to note that De Foe, writing in the seventeenth century
of the Great Plague in London (1665), alludes to this strange talisman
as still in use.16 Treating of the curious prophylactics
employed at that time, he reproaches those who employed such methods,
and acted "as if the plague was not the hand of God, but a kind of
possession of an evil spirit, and that it was to be kept off with
crossings, signs of the zodiac, papers tied up with so many
14 " Curieuse Kunst und Werck-Schul," Nürnberg, 1705, p. 994.
» Préceptes Médicaux de Serenus Sammonicus, text and trans, by L. Baudet, Paris, 1845, pp. 74-77.
»De Foe, " A Journal of the Plague Year," London, 1895, p. 38 (roL ix of Works ed. by Aitken).
