sator rebus: An unsolved cryptogram?*, The

Cryptologia, Jul 2003 by Sheldon, Rose Mary

Daneliou suggests that Bishop Irenaeus of Lyons (c A.D. 200) knew of the cryptogram and spoke of Him "who joined the beginning with the end, and is the Lord of both, and has shown forth the plough at the end," (Adv. haer. 4.34.4). Irenaeus was refuting the Gnostics who interpreted John 4.37, "one sows, another reaps," as an opposition between the Demiurge, who created, and Christ, who redeemed. He maintained that the creator and the redeemer are one, and the passage refers to the cross, symbolized by the plow (as in Irenaeus), which was shown forth at the beginning or seed time, and in the end at the final weeding.

Ernst Darmstadter, "Die Sator-Arepo-Formel und ihre Erklarung," Isis - Quarterly Organ of the History of Science Society 18(1932), 322-329.

Darmstadter also attributes a religious meaning to the famous palindrome. He provides an ingenious series of translations relating the square to the veneration of the macrocosmos.

G. Letonnelier,"Une interpretation du carre magique SATOR AREPO," Bulletin Archeologique du Comite des Travaux Historiques (1951-1952), 168-69.

Letonnelier suggests some of the words are abbreviations. His reading: Sat Orare Poten(tia) et Oper(a) A Rota S(ervant). Prayer is our strength and will save us from the wheel (of fate?). The formula is thus a Christian call to prayer.

Jean Orcibal, "'Dei agricultura': Le carre magique Sator Arepo, sa valeur et son origine," Revue d'Histoire des Religions 146 (1954), 51-66.

Orcibal concentrates on the concept of Christ as the Sower and the meaning of Sator. He takes examples from the Gospels and Christian writers. He believes it was used for its magical powers long before it was Christian. He discusses the mathematical possibilities of the pater noster solution being just chance. He feels that the magic which pagans saw in the square rested purely on the symmetry of the words. He suggests we might have found the formula in a collection of pagan magical papyri had Diocletian not had such documents burned.

Remigio Sabbadini, Rivista di Filologia 47 (1919), 34.

Interprets Jesus as sower or Sator as God the creator.

Erich Dinkler, "Alteste Christliche Denkmaler," in his Signum Crucis: Aufsatze zum Neuen Testament und zur Christlichen Archaologie. Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1967, 134-178.

See pp. 160-173 which deal specifically with the sator-rotas square and the plausibility of its being a Christian production. He was one of the first authors to comment that upon the adoption of the square by Christians it was reversed with sator at the top possibly because that word suggested the Greek word soter or saviour often applied to Christ. This interpretation was suggested earlier by Jerphanion, La Voix des Monuments, pp. 88-89.

C. W. King, Early Christian Numismatics and Other Antiquarian Tracts, London, 1873, p. 187.

King reports a version of the square in a Greek manuscript in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris (ms. 2411, f. 60). His translation is: "the laborer holds the plough wheels and I the sower creep after him."