Sator Square

A Sator Square in Oppède, France.

A Rotas Square on a brick wall in St. Peter ad Oratorium.

The Sator Square (or Rotas Square) is a word square containing a Latin palindrome:

S A T O R A R E P O T E N E T O P E R A R O T A S

The five words may be read top-to-bottom, bottom-to-top, left-to-right, or right-to-left. When read top-to-bottom and left-to-right, it forms a Latin palindromic sentence:

SATOR   AREPO   TENET   OPERA   ROTAS

The earliest dateable Sator Square was found in the ruins of Pompeii, which was buried in the ash of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Examples may be found carved on stone tablets or pressed into clay before being fired. Its translation has been the subject of speculation with no clear consensus.

It seems that, in all early examples, it is a Rotas Square that reads "ROTAS OPERA TENET AREPO SATOR" from top to bottom, and from left to right.

Translation

Sator 

(from serere=to sow) Sower, planter; founder, progenitor (usually divine); originator

Arepo 

unknown, likely an invented proper name; its similarity with arrepo, from ad repo, 'I creep towards', may be coincidental

Tenet 

(from tenere=to hold) holds, keeps; comprehends; possesses; masters; preserves

Opera 

(noun) work, care; aid, service, effort/trouble; (from opus): works, deeds.

Rotas 

(from noun rota) wheels

One likely translation is "The farmer Arepo has [as] works wheels [a plough]"; that is, the farmer uses his plough as his form of work. Although not a significant sentence, it is grammatical; it can be read up and down, backwards and forwards. C. W. Ceram also reads the square boustrophedon (in alternating directions). But since word order is very free in Latin, the translation is the same. If the Sator Square is read boustrophedon, with a reverse in direction, then the words become SATOR OPERA TENET, with the sequence reversed.

The word arepo is a hapax legomenon, appearing nowhere else in Latin literature. Most of those who have studied the Sator Square agree that it is a proper name, either an adaptation of a non-Latin word or most likely a name invented specifically for this sentence. Jerome Carcopino thought that it came from a Celtic, specifically Gaulish, word for plough. David Daube argued that it represented a Hebrew or Aramaic rendition of the Greek Αλφα ω, or "Alpha-Omega" (cf. Revelation 1:8) by early Christians. J. Gwyn Griffiths contended that it came, via Alexandria, from the attested Egyptian name Ḥr-Ḥp, which he took to mean "the face of Apis". An origin in Graeco-Roman Egypt was also advocated by Miroslav Marcovich, who maintains that Arepo is a Latinized abbreviation of Harpocrates, god of the rising sun, in some places called Γεωργός `Aρπον, which Marcovich suggests corresponds to Sator Arepo.

In Cappadocia, in the time of Constantine VII, Porphyrogenitus (913-959), the shepherds of the Nativity story are called SATOR, AREPON, and TENETON, while a Byzantine bible of an earlier period conjures out of the square the baptismal names of the three Magi, ATOR, SATOR, and PERATORAS.

If "arepo" is taken to be in the second declension, the "-o" ending could put the word in the ablative case, giving it a meaning of "by means of [arepus]." Using this definition of "arepo" and the boustrophedon reading order produces the text "The sower works for mastery by turning the wheel."

Appearances

Square in Cirencester.

The oldest datable representation of the Sator Square was found in the ruins of Pompeii. Others were found in excavations under the church of S. Maria Maggiore in Rome, at Corinium (modern Cirencester in England) and Dura-Europos (in modern Syria).

A further example is found in a group of stones located in the grounds of Rivington Church and reads SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS. The stone is one of a group thought to have come from a local private chapel in Anderton, Lancashire.

Other Sator Squares are on the wall of the Duomo of Siena and on a memorial.

An example is found inserted in a wall of the old district of Oppède, in France's Luberon.

There is a Sator Square in the museum at Conimbriga (near Coimbra in Portugal), excavated on the site.

The Benedictine Abbey of St Peter ad Oratorium, near Capestrano, in Abruzzo, Italy, has a marble square inscription of the Sator Square. An example discovered at the Valvisciolo Abbey, also in central Italy, has the letters forming five concentric rings, each one divided into five sectors.

There is one known occurrence of the phrase on the rune stone Nä Fv1979;234 from Närke, Sweden, dated to the 14th century. It reads "sator arepo tenet" (untranscribed: "sator ¶ ar(æ)po ¶ tænæt). It also occurs in two inscriptions from Gotland (G 145 M and G 149 M), in both of which the whole palindrome is written.

Anagram formed by the letters of the sator square

Christian associations

By repositioning the letters around the central letter Ν (en), a Greek cross can be made that reads Pater Noster (Latin for "Our Father", the first two words of the "Lord's Prayer") both vertically and horizontally. The remaining letters – two each of A and O – can be taken to represent the concept of Alpha and Omega, a reference in Christianity to the omnipresence of God. Thus the square might have been used as a covert symbol for early Christians to express their presence to each other.

An example of the Sator Square found in Manchester dating to the 2nd century is considered by some authorities to be one of the earliest pieces of evidence of Christianity in Britain.

The 'Prayer of the Virgin in Bartos' claimed that Christ was crucified with five nails, which were named Sator, Arepo, Tenet, Opera and Rotas.

Other authorities believe the Sator Square was Mithraic or Jewish in origin because it is not likely that Pompeii had a large Christian population in 79 A.D and the symbolism inferred as Christian and the use of Latin in Christianity is not attested to until later.

Magical uses

The Sator Square is a four-times palindrome, and some people have attributed magical properties to it, considering it one of the broadest magical formulas in the Occident. An article on the square from The Saint Louis Medical and Surgical Journal, vol. 76, reports that palindromes were viewed as being immune to tampering by the devil, who would become confused by the repetition of the letters, and hence their popularity in magical use. The same principle, alongside the above "Paternoster cross", is also present in the Greek magical palindrome: ΑΒΛΑΝΑΘΑΝΑΛΒΑ, which probably derives from the Hebrew or Aramaic אב לן את, meaning "Thou art our father".

The square has reportedly been used in folk magic for various purposes, including putting out fires (the spell is "TO EXTINGUISH FIRE WITHOUT WATER" in John George Hohman's Long Lost Friend), removing jinxes and fevers, to protect cattle from witchcraft, and against fatigue when traveling. It is sometimes claimed it must be written upon a certain material, or else with a certain type of ink to achieve its magical effect.

See also

• Abracadabra, sometimes written in form of triangle
• Christian symbolism
• Mithraic Mysteries
• Cave canem, another Pompeian phrase
• Isopsephy, for further Pompeian graffiti
• Magic square
• Memes
• Word square

External links

• Duncan Fishwick, An Early Christian Cryptogram? (HTML)
• Sator Square, inscribed, Article; the article uses: "Rotas square"
• "Section of Page and Eloise's Memorial website related to the Sator Square, 1995 (HTML)"
• Magic Square Museum: the first Second Life museum about Magic Square. The first flow is about Sator Square. Vulcano (89,35,25)