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The Sator Rebus, pictured above, has presented a mystery of considerable charm for many centuries. It is probably the world's oldest unsolved word puzzle. Quite simply, nobody really knows what it means—except I believe I have solved the mystery. That is not the same as saying I have conclusively proven anything—far from it. I have arrived at a solution that seems logical and satisfying.
The Sator Square, as it is also known, spread across the ancient Roman empire, whose vast borders stretched from modern Britain to the Middle East, and from Belgium almost to the Equator. Examples of the Sator Rebus have been found in many parts of the ancient empire, so the puzzle was wide-spread—and had to be well understood. When the Roman Empire in the West withered away in the fifth and sixth centuries C.E., the meaning of the Sator Rebus was forgotten. It kept cropping up in various Medieval contexts, usually churches or cathedrals, but by now it was mystical formula bound up in superstition, alchemy, and witchcraft. Even in modern times, it was still used by some North and South American farmers as a magic spell to ward off things like sheeps' diseases.
Many theories have been propounded about this enigmatic and potent-seeming palindrome. A palindrome (something like "Madam I'm Adam") is a group of letters, numbers, or words that can be read the same way backwards as forwards. There are many examples of palindromes, and you can probably make one up if you doodle on paper long enough.
The Sator Rebus ('rebus' is a Latin ablative plural of res, 'thing;' usually taken to mean a puzzle) is an unusually powerful one because it reads the same way left to right, right to left, up and down, and down and up. It is a four-way palindrome whose seemingly powerful message has until now been as obscure as the night sky on a starless, cloudy night. After the fall of Rome, it became associated with dark and magical powers; but I have found a logical solution that is as simple and straightforward as it is deep and powerful—and entirely devoid of demonic influences. Rather, it is a profound yet logically clear philosophical statement.
Translating it as a purely Latin construct, I propose that it means "God holds the plough, but you turn the furrows [do the ploughing]." It is an ironic aphorism reminding literate Romans (and us) of two kinds of fate that govern our lives: a 'sator' fate that we cannot control, and a 'rotas' fate for which we are imminently responsible in our daily lives. While I strongly lean toward a non-Christian context, I remain neutral on the square's possible meaning to the Classical Roman Christian community. I will comment that the sator/rotas juxtaposition on fates seem interesting relative to the Christian concept of Free Will at a very practical, simple level, where we are responsible for the rotas actions that help determine our own fate.
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History of Scholarship Dr. Rosemary Sheldon, head of the History faculty at Virginia Military Institute, admirably summed up the history of scholarship on the Sator Rebus in an The Sator Rebus: An Unsolved Cryptogram?, an article published July 2003 in the journal Cryptologia. Unequivocally, the earliest known finds of this artifact are traced to the Neronic era in the area of Pompeii (in modern Naples). Multiple other manifestations dating to the Roman imperial age have been found as far afield as a military headquarters in Dura-Europos (a lost city in modern-day Syria, which was quite important in Classical times) and the Roman city of Corinium, Britannia (modern-day Cirencester, U.K.).
Among the many theories listed by Dr. Sheldon are the following.
Jerome Carcopino believed the word arepo to be related to a Gaulish word for plough—which echoes my finding, except that I have found an antecedent Proto-Indo-European (PIE) word that may be the ancestor of both. Many scholars have felt that arepo is a proper name, perhaps of a man or a god.
C. W. Ceram suggested the rebus be read boustrophedon (back and forth, as the plough runs, an irony of sorts, given my conjecture), so that it would read something like "The Sower Arepo the work holds, holding the work is the sower Arepo."
David Daube felt that arepo is a reference to the baby Horus, or Harap/Harpocrates, an Egyptian deity fondly adopted by Mediterranean sailors and spread to most port cities (though my analysis demurs any foreign importation and insists on a totally Latin, Tiber Delta source for both the words and their meaning). Interpretations of the rebus in general, and the word arepo in particular, are too numerous to recount here, and can be read in Dr. Sheldon's comprehensive account.
Some theorists have felt that the Sator Rebus was a Christian invention, a sort of secret handshake like the fish and Chi-Rho anagrams, used by members of the persecuted sect to communicate with one another. My conjecture is neutral on this issue, though it is evident Sator (Sower) is an epithet widely used by Roman authors in reference to Jupiter (Deus Pater), which could arguably have been taken over for cultic uses by Christians and possibly Mithraists. The Christian theory received momentum with the proposal that one can rearrange the letters to form a simple, non-palindrome construct in the form of a cross that reads paternoster left to right (but not right to left) and top to bottom (but not bottom to top)—with two instances of a and o left over, which can be read as meaning alpha and omega as in the following depiction:
There is no known contextual proof that there is a Christian component to the mystery.By the Medieval period, the meaning of the Sator Rebus had been lost, but it appears as a cryptic decoration in many churches and other buildings around Europe.
To sum up, the Sator Rebus is not only a remarkable and elegant mystery that continues to baffle scholars. Most scholars seem to prefer to read the Sator Rebus as a single sentence, and arepo as a proper name. I now suggest a different approach.
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My solution to the Sator mystery is based in part on a PIE word arenko ('plough') identified by Julius Pokorny, which is very likely the common ancestor of Jerome Carcopino's Gaulish word for plough, and some variant of the Latin aro, arare…arando.
We must read the Sator Rebus not as one sentence, but as two sentences or two complete thoughts that combine to form an ironic aphorism.
Rather than seek a foreign allusion (e.g., Harpocrates for arepo) I take the entire construct to be Latin in origin, echoing local, bucolic Tiber Delta traditions. The meaning may well have been absorbed into other cultic uses later; e.g., the proposed Christian context of ‘Pater Noster,’ but such a ‘Pater Noster,’ if there is anything to the theory, may as well reflect Dius Pater (Jupiter) in the older, native religious tradition of Latium.
The ubiquity of the Sator Rebus suggests that it most likely was a popular aphorism that would be universally recognized. We live in a world whose language and etiology are significantly influenced by Classical Graeco-Roman culture. Many moderns speak languages strongly influenced by Latin (English, German, etc.), or that are in fact dialects of Latin (Italian, Spanish, etc.). There are people on all continents with Roman names (e.g., Marco, Leticia, Priscilla), who live under legal-governmental structures derived from those of ancient Rome. Several of the world’s great religions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism) spring from soil that was profoundly saturated by Graeco-Roman civilization. For these and many similar considerations, it seems reasonable to expect that the meaning of the Sator Rebus should continue to resonate profoundly in the modern mind. Unlike many baffling and unsatisfactory translations to date, one would expect a real translation to instantly communicate a message so wise and robust that we should recognize it today. I suggest that it continues to project a profound, universal truth about the Human Condition, which is here offered, and which communicates a message about fate, free will, and individual responsibility. I believe it is a pre-Christian agrarian metaphor, from the Tiber Delta, with allusions to astrological motifs. It is the container or purveyor of a clever and gripping aphorism of great universality and importance that hearkens back to the land-locked, agrarian culture of early Latium. We can imagine the Sator Rebus to have been a bucolic touch of home for Roman functionaries across far-flung territories and provinces.
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To capture the sense of the Sator Rebus, before approaching its more literal construction, I begin with a modern, liberal translation.
It is important to understand that the Sator Rebus puts into play a rather complex metaphor borrowed from the native soil of Latium. I'll explain this in more detail, but feel I must begin by briefly mentioning that the conceit, of using the image of a plow to scratch furrows into the soil as a metaphor, will remind some modern readers of an adage familiar to motorcyclists: You don't drive the motorcycle; you merely steer it, as more than one rueful rider has remarked after surviving a crash. In the case of our plough, you don't hold the plough (of life, of greater or Sator fate)—you merely steer it ('turning the furrows,' or Rotas fate). Ours is a plow that has two sets of hands on it—one pair divine, the other pair human.
My first rendering is in the spirit of the message rather than the literal wording. We have something like: “God holds the plow, but you guide the blade” or “God steers the plow, but you guide the ploughshare.” This makes it a statement that juxtaposes fate and individual responsibility. It says the individual cannot control the inevitable forces of fate and milestones of life (birth, accidents of life, death)--but does indeed have the power to make wise or unwise decisions at any moment, which decisions lead to consequences that are the individual’s self-determined fate. An even more generalized, loose translation can also be: “[God/Fate] determines the big picture (birth, life, death)--but you, the individual, determine the choices you personally make in the daily course of your life.” Thus, our fate is a total of the things we cannot control, plus certain elements that we can control. This is a central axiom in the Free Will doctrine common to mainstream Christian theologies, though it remains unclear whether the Sator Rebus is or is not a product of Christian thought. I suggest that it is a native Latin artifact that predates Christianity, but whose interpretation proved adaptible to later Christian theologies.
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In a literal and technical sense, I find that the palindrome follows an ironic format in which two opposing thoughts collide, and communicate a profound popular wisdom. I propose two sentences, on the basis that two predicates are present. One sentence is “Sator arepo tenet,” and the second sentence is “Opera rotas.” I propose that “tenet” and “rotas” are, respectively, the predicates of each of these two complete thoughts, completely in Latin.
Now to translate the two sentences.
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Sator
Sator is a metaphor for God or Fate in the broadest sense, or Jupiter as ‘begetter of men and gods’ (instances in Virgil, Cicero, and Lucretius quoted by Cassell). This is the subject of the first sentence. In regard to a Pater Noster theory concerning the palindrome, one need only consider that ‘God the Father’ evolved in the Latin as Deus-Pater (Jupiter), similar to the Greek Theos, or Zeus. A bridge from pre-Christian to Christian contexts opens thus, by which the concept of Pater Noster can be used to span both polytheistic and monotheistic world views. Does the Trinitarian Deus Pater, or Pater Noster, contain a borrowed shadow from the older Roman polytheism?
Arepo
Arepo has been suggested to mean ‘plough’ by Carcopino (cited by Fishwick), based on a Celtic or Gaulish word. It may, in fact, be nothing more than a derivative of, or a parallel to, aratro, a dative or ablative of aratrum (plough).
I recently conferred with a linguist specializing in ancient Gaulish, Latin, and related languages, and of course Proto-Indo-European (PIE). He liked the interpretation I offered. He found strength (but not resolution) in the argument that Arepo is somehow derived from a cluster of words in PIE having as their root ar( )-. The PIE etymological dictionary of Julius Pokorny cites several ar()- words (related to words for 'grain' and 'field'), including arenko 'to plough.'
I see a number of possible paths leading to 'Arepo' as 'plough.'
First, since I see it as part of a Latin sentence, it must be an inflected form. It might be the ablative or dative of a putative word Arepum (similar to the known aratrum, gerund form arandum in the nominative, or arando in the dative/ablative), which would have a PIE antecedent that conjecturally morphed from PIE through archaic Latin into an obscure but understandable word in general usage throughout the Republic (my guess is that it is quite old, despite the first find being dated not later than 79 A.D. around Pompeii). This putative arepum may have been an archaism still understandable, as an older English variant like plough for plow is understandable to the modern English speaker. Similarly, by accident of the King James Version of Christian Scripture, archaisms like “slay,” “slew,” and “slain” remain understandable to the modern English speaker. So, the modern reader understands "Here be tygers," which again shows the underlayment of older forms of English in contemporaneously understood vernacular and literary usages. Will scholars thousands of years from today argue that the meaning of "Here be tygers" puzzle over the grammaticality of 'be' (which is puzzling and ungrammatical in the Classical English learned by 45th Century school children) and the mystifying 'tygers' ("a word that is found in no known language or dictionary of the age")? One can imagine the proliferation of learned articles in peer review journals: "Tygers is a variant of 'tires' or 'tyres' so this is an advertisement for automobiles." Or, "Tygers must be a variant of Torres, so this must mean a family named Torres lived here." Or, "Tygers is a variant of 'terrorists,' a top bulletin point of politicians seeking office." Or, "Tygers is a form of 'tired,' so this must be from an ad for stimulants, possibly a brand of coffee."
The verb tenet, as noted below, takes some interesting ablative and even dative forms.
Another possibility is that practical matter of needing to shoe-horn or torture words to fit the 5 x 5 form. In other words, if there is not a valid grammatical argument, then what remains is brute force (“nite” for “night” because “nite” is shorter and may be more convenient in some ad hoc usage).
In any case, I leave it at this for now, using a Black Box approach used as a tool in engineering, when the output is known, and one doesn't know the process for arriving at that output (Black Box), and one tries various inputs to try and achieve the known output.
ar()- --> [Black Box] --> arepo
Tenet
Tenet is the predicate, and is a verb that here can be taken in two ways. On a simple level, it is a third person singular present tense verb meaning ‘he holds,’ whose direct object is ‘plough,’ arepo, whose ending (we expect the accusative arepum, but receive the ablative or even possibly dative arepo) in this instance may be truncated to fit within the palindrome. Tenet also can be taken as a special case of the verb for ‘he holds,’ as in ‘he holds firm to.’ This is specifically a reference to holding a course, as by holding a tiller or keeping a sail steady. English equivalents might loosely include “making for” or “holding course for,” or even “holding fast to” in which case the object is more indirect than direct, and might take the dative rather than accusative. In that case, we could not actually expect an accusative (arepum), and arepo would fit precisely. I have also considered an ablative (of means) form. In this case, the object is not direct (he is not holding the sail or plow or tiller in the direct object sense, as much as he is using the object while the verb retains an intransitive sense, of direction or intent). The plough should grammatically be the direct object of tenet, but the purpose of the sentence lies more loosely within the intransitive (not taking a direct object) meaning of tenet. Thus arepo is not the direct object, but a means, or even an agent in a dative sense (dative of agent). In fact, in the sense of 'holding fast' the images of a sail (boat) or plough take on extra nuance as instruments and metaphors of journeying, while the plough moves through the field, or journeys through life.
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The above, Sator arepo tenet, by the classic definition of a sentence, is a complete thought, "The Sower holds the plough." We may take that the Sower to be, ambivalently, deity and man ('you'). So is the following, Opera rotas, meaning "(but) you turn the furrows." One senses an implied mirroring (comparison, contrast) between the two subjects. The sower is obviously the more powerful force, which puts 'you' in a less powerful and more ironic position; but there is more to this. Both are sowers (in fact, in my note on ancient ploughs, I indicate that the Roman aratrum, 'plough,' often had a sator, 'seeder,' attached, making the ploughman also a sator, 'seeder' or 'sower'). One is a divine sower, while the other is a human sower. The divine sower operates in the context of the field metaphor along with the human sower, but the divine sower, mirroring larger Sator fate, arguably also operates in a higher astrological or divinatory context that probably goes as far back as Rome's partially Etruscan roots (as my notes near the end of this text suggest).
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Opera
Opera (defined as “works,” or collectively “work”) is a specific usage in the agrarian context of Latium, meaning farm work or field work (Cassel, quoting Ovid, in defining opus). I suggest the specific meaning of opera as a broad metaphor for farm work, but more specifically of ‘furrows,’ formed by opera as accusative plural in the sense of “farm works” but more specifically as the furrows ploughed (or turned, in the sense that the plowman or sower moves in a boustrophedon fashion, turning at each end of the field before starting the next furrow). This is an example of metonymy, the figure of speech in which the meaning is indicated not by the literal word, but by another word connected to the meaning in a broader sense. Here we have the broader sense of opera (‘farm work’), referring by implication to the fact that the ‘you’ addressed by rotas is guiding a plow, and is responsible for the cutting of the blade into the furrows. Any farm work might be opera, but the Sator Rebus focuses on a plough metaphor. I suggest the work (opera) specifically is the plowing of furrows, which involved turning (rotare) at the top and bottom ends of the field to cut the next furrow. Urbanized Romans clung to their lost agrarian roots--much as modern Germans (‘Wandervogel’), or Japanese, have euphoric folk memories of their lost open countryside.
Rotas
Rotas is a verb in the second person singular, addressing the individual who contemplates the workings of fate and individual responsibility. In a broad sense, “you turn” can be understood as a more general action by figure of speech, a “doing” by the person whom the wisdom of the palindrome instructs. The “doing” is the farm work (opera), specifically that work involved in plowing and seeding, where the individual guides the plough’s blade along each furrow, and then through a turn (rotare) into the next furrow going the opposite way (almost suggesting a palindrome in itself, in the multilayered strength of this palindrome).
Rotas opera or opera rotas is a sentence in its own right—a second and complete, ironic thought—of the palindrome, which can be understood in the context of the first sentence.
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We read: “God holds the plough, but you cut the furrows.” For Sator we can liberally substitute ‘Fate,’ or ‘Pater Noster,’ or ‘Jupiter,’ or ‘the Creator,’ and any similar imaginable agents for the subject of the sentence. We can substitute “guide the blade” for “cut the furrows” within the general sense of “you do the farm work.” We can also say: “God holds the plow, but you guide its cutting edge,” or “God holds the plow, but you do the work.” If we take the word tenet to mean ‘steers’, then one might read something like “God steers the plough, but you guide the ploughshare.”
Thus we arrive at the philosophical intent of the Sator Rebus. “Immutable or heavenly Fate plays out in the large picture, the inevitable and unchangeable things such as birth, life, and death ordained by the creator/sator--but it’s your right and responsibility to make the day-to-day decisions that are important turns in your life.”
Potentially, this introduces readings in which fate and free will are juxtaposed, and this could be applied in differing ways within differing cultural contexts. For example, the mainstream of modern Christianity embraces a notion of Free Will, in which God/Sator is an observer in a created universe God/Sator has set in motion as the Aristotelian First Cause or a Prime Mover, but the individual has to be capable of making choices between good and evil, in order to be individually responsible for his/her decisions at crucial junctures in life. In the universally adapted Golden Rule (‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’) notions of individual choice and responsibility are implicit. Is the Sator aphorism inherently Christian, or is Christianity itself informed by older philosophical currents reflected in the Sator wisdom? The answer to the latter question is not clear.
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In this diagram, the domain is 'Fate,' or “Do I have control and responsibility over my life?” The two subdomains are 'Immutable Fate,' or 'Sator Fate,' and 'Mutable Fate,' or 'Rotas Fate' (Fate you as the individual can change or influence). The union of the two subdomains is 'Your Fate' or 'An Individual’s Fate.'
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A historical note is in order. A modern assumption would be that the turning (rotare) is done by, or by means of, wheels on a plough, whether it has a rotating blade, or sits on a frame whose elevation on adjustable wheels determines the depth of the blade’s ‘bite,’ but this would be historically incorrect. The ancient Romans, at least in the Republican era when I propose the Sator Rebus originated, did not possess a wheeled plow (Adkins, “Farming”). They did, instead, have a kind of harrow board and blade pulled by a farm animal, usually an ox, and guided by a plowman. As the notion of a boustrophedon coincidentally suggests, ploughing involved (by metonymy) turning, rotare, furrows, opera from end to end in a field. The ploughman follows the ox or oxen as the furrow is cut, and at the end of the field, the whole rig makes a 180 degree turn to cut the next furrow parallel to the furrow just cut. This, I suggest, is the embedded sense of opera rotare used as a metonym for ‘ploughing.’ We are specifically turning the furrows, not so much the soil. The Roman method in this time period was still essentially one of scratching or parting the soil rather than turning it over. As already mentioned, opera is a metonym for farm work in the broad sense, with turning furrows and other activities as subsets of farm work, and here rotare specifically subtends that meaning under the category of ploughing for sake of the overall metaphor.
Like the palindrome that has no beginning and no end, the field itself is a metaphor for one’s life. The furrow is a single thread that winds (rotare) back and forth from birth to death in the individual’s life, amid the strictures laid out by Fate, or by the creator/sator who made all things (gods, mortals, the field, the plough, etc.).
As a further note: A kind of seeder funnel (sator) was introduced in early times to the plough, whereby seeds were filtered or scattered into the furrows as the plough cut the soil. This increased the efficiency of sowing, and increased the yield. In this sense, the ploughman (arator) himself is a seeder (sator, in parallel with the deity, and thus with the sense of our aphorism), since the ancient plough has the simultaneous function of spreading seeds.
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Karen Armstrong describes the mythological significance of earth religions, derived from the neolithic discovery of the annual birth-death cycle of grain, which carried forward in such religious traditions as that of Ceres/Demeter. One of the underlying layers of meaning in a bucolic Sator Rebus would be the notion that Sator (God/Jupiter/Father/Begetter/Seeder) not only creates the created, but by means of immutable Fate projects a trajectory (furrow) through the field of life, from birth to death. This is implicit in the annual cycle of ploughing, whereby the dead grain stalks of one year are ploughed under, and the earth is seeded for the next season’s crop. Sator created, and directs, the grand performance of this cycle, but you (the subject of rotas) actually guide the ploughshare through the specific furrows and turns.
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Modern Analogies. We have already seen the allusion to a motorcycle as a parallel to the plough. We can form a readily understandable analogy to the Sator Rebus by creating an aphorism using everyday modern figures. We might say “Ford designs the car, but you turn the corners” or “Chevrolet makes the car, but you hold the steering wheel,” again in the same sense that some higher power sets things in motion and designs a grand arc from alpha to omega, but the individual getting into the car may drive responsibly, or drive drunk, or whatever, to that individual’s predictable reward.
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There is a special irony in the usage of Sator, ‘Begetter,’ meaning that the controller of destinies is with us from the beginning to the end—from the Alpha to the Omega. God holds the plough as the Begetter (Jupiter, Fate, perhaps later cultic deities including Jesus), who steers every human to the inescapable end point of death.
Astrological Significance There maybe be yet another layer of meaning, within the known context of Etruscan/Roman agrarian civilization. The Etruscans were great diviners of all sorts of omens, be they in the organs of sacrificed animals, the behavior of chickens, or any number of other natural phenomena. Especially, much Etruscan lore handed down to the Romans involved looking skyward. The Etruscans analyzed the behavior of lightning strikes, the flight of birds, and in particular the movement of heavenly objects. The word for a terrible happening (English ‘disaster’) probably comes from the Latin dis+astrum, where dis is another word for ‘god’--especially Pluto, of the underworld--and astrum means ‘star’ or ‘heavenly object’.
Given the implications of Fate in the Sator Rebus, one wants to look to the stars. At least two relevant asterisms fit the palindrome’s allusion.
Mythology. Immediately, one encounters a major constellation, the Plough (also known as the Big Bear, Greek arktos, Latin Ursa Major; or a wagon in some folklores; or the Big Dipper as is common in the modern world). In the one legend, Arkturos is the hunter who pursues the Big Bear and her cub, the Little Bear, across the zodiac. Arcturus is also, however, known as the Ploughman, as well as the Shepherd, in various incarnations of myths surrounding these asterisms. As arator (ploughman), [Allen 92 quoting Nigidius and Varro] Arcturus or Boötes holds steady his course in the sky.
Into this jumble of allusions comes at least one other, that of Auriga (chariot). In certain Latin contexts, it is known as Aurigator and reins-holder, and co-valent with the Ploughman and his oxen (from which some feel the name Boötes derives, from oxen, Gr. boustro-).
Of particular interest in the Plough version is the following myth. Ixion (‘axis’), king of Lapithae in Thessaly, having been invited by Zeus to a banquet, proceeded to flirt with Zeus’ wife Hera. First, Zeus protected Hera by substituting for her a cloud that resembled her, and with this cloud Ixion fathered the Centaurs. Second, Zeus punished Ixion by ‘binding him to an eternally revolving four-spoke wheel’ (Jobes 260). In some versions, Ixion is identified with a solar deity and his four rays (axes). If this Greek myth were found to have been widely known in the Latin world, whose culture was spread far and wide in the Roman era, perhaps that would account for the TENET-TENET cruciform in the palindrome as yet another layer of meaning. The story of Ixion evokes the aphoristic message of the palindrome, suggesting that the individual is responsible for his own fate, like Ixion, even though all humans are bound to the cycle of birth, life, and death that Jupiter or Fate immutably steers from alpha to omega.
Finally, it is possible that various cults may have adopted the archaic Sator Rebus for use in their own rubrics. Certainly, it appears in Medieval and even later and far-flung contexts, which however do not necessarily have any relevant connection with the original meaning of the Sator Rebus. It is possible that a Jupiter-based ‘Pater Noster’ may have been transferred to the Christian ‘Pater Noster’ reading, complete with its alpha and omega A and O letters. In fact, when Jesus in the Christian Testament says “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” he may very well have been using an already existing aphorism for emphasis.
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Literacy? It is worth noting that the ubiquity of the Sator Rebus suggests a relatively high degree of literacy in Roman society, where my suggested meaning would have been understood, whereas literacy was much lower in Medieval Europe, and the aphorism degenerated into a superstitious charm whose original meaning was lost.
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In conclusion, I believe the Sator Rebus is entirely a Latin construction, likely of the Republican age. Its original meaning was lost sometime after the Fourth Century C.E., with the dominance of Christianity, though remarkably its power as a charm or amulet has survived to this day (it is still used by farmers in the Amazon and in Pennsylvania to ward off bad luck). This is not surprising, in that it is a literate, written object. The existence of the Sator Rebus suggests a broader literacy in Classical Rome than in Medieval Europe. Ignorant and illiterate populations of all ages could be expected to use it as a magical object without understanding its written meaning. However, its universal, written message continues to shine through to inform a modern reader with its profound truth about Fate and the Human Condition.
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Afterword: How I Came Upon This Conjecture. A confluence of accidents, interests, and projects has inadvertently brought me to this conjecture. I am not a Classics expert, nor a linguist, but a writer. My degrees are in English (B.A., University of Connecticut), Computer Information Systems (B.B.A., National University), and Business Administration (M.S., Boston University). I have been a lifelong enthusiast about history in all its aspects, and I did study Latin throughout high school and briefly in college. I have a smattering of many things, including rudimentary Greek, and I am fairly fluent in German and Luxemburgish, along with further smatterings in various Germanic and Romance languages. I had heard of the Sator Rebus for decades, in passing, but I felt no inclination to tackle its meaning. Then, as I began heavily researching my nonfiction book A Walk in Ancient Rome in 2004, I gained deeper exposure to Roman topology, history, and many other fascinating things like the Roman market calendar, the Roman diet, and so forth. I became fascinated with Roman religion and its archaic animist or numenist roots, and with the culture of the ancient Tiber Delta. In 2007, by some accident whose cause I cannot recall, I approached the Sator mystery. I only worked on it in fits and starts for a few weeks. I suspect it was during a period when I was taking a break from the stress and drudgery of simultaneously republishing sixteen books over a half-year period, including typography, editing, and cover design. My brain needed a rest, and the way it does that is to go somewhere totally different and tackle some unrelated challenge whose difficulty wipes away the other clutter in the brain. What comes to mind is the image of a professional soccer player at practice, with the stress of competition off, energetically but randomly kicking a ball around a field and maybe bouncing it repeatedly off a wall. I toyed with the Sator Rebus for a few weeks in mid- to late 2007. I read the various interpretations enumerated by Dr. Rosemary Sheldon (found them all unappealing, and felt they just didn't connect with anything meaningful). What caught my eye was the thought that tenet and rotas might both be verbs, which suggested that there might be two sentences rather than one. I tried a few approaches, without feeling much satisfaction. Then, suddenly, the metaphor (and title of this paper) sprang to my mind in its complete and lucid form. It instantly made sense—like the clever and hypnotic jingle in a commercial like "Ford builds the car, but you steer it on the street." More than anything, it proves how much we owe to ancient Roman civilization, and how much our thinking is still in their mode—or even, more likely, how universal certain themes are. For a fleeting instant, we are not 21st Century persons, but Romans of the late republic or early empire. By being in touch with the philosophical construct of the Sator Rebus, we enjoy a glimpse of the universe as they saw it. For an instant, we are in their skin. It's a bit like standing under the oculus of the Pantheon, gazing up at shreds of cloud fleeting over a blue Italian sky, realizing we see the same thing they saw--perhaps even glimpsing the ghosts of their deities in the now dark and empty concrete niches at the periphery of vision. Fleetingly, their take on life and the world seems very much like ours when seen through the lens of the Sator Rebus. (JTC, 19 March 2008).
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Bibliography
Adkins: Handbook to Life in Ancient Rome, by Roy and Lesley Adkins (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998).
Allen: Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning, by Richard Hinckley Allen (G.E. Stechert, 1899; reissued in the U.K. by Constable & Co., Ltd; reissued in the U.S. by Dover Publications, New York, 1963).
Armstrong: A Short History of Myth, by Karen Armstrong (Canongate, Edinburgh, 2006).
Burris: Latin and Greek in Current Use, by Eli E. Burriss and Lionel Casson (Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey)
Cassell: Cassell’s Latin Dictionary by D. P. Simpson, M.A. (MacMillan, New York: Fifth Edition 1968).
Casson: see Burris.
Childe: The Aryans, by V. Gordon Childe (Dorset Press, New York, 1987).
Fishwick: An Early Christian Cryptogram? By Duncan Fishwick, M.A.. (Canadian Catholic Historical Association, Toronto, 1959) reference online by St. Paul’s College, University of Manitoba: http://www.umanitoba.ca/colleges/st_pauls/ccha/Back%20Issues/CCHA1959/Fishwick.htm
Jobes: Outer Space: Myths, Name Meanings, Calendars, From the Emergence of History to the Present Day, by Gertrude and James Jobes (New York and London: The Scarecrow Press, Inc. 1964) with Foreword by Phillip D. Stern, F.R.A.S., Planetarium Director, Museum of Art, Science, and Industry at Bridgeport, Connecticut.
Palmer: The Latin Language, by L.R. Palmer (Faber and Faber, London, 1968).
Pokorny: Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch by Julius Pokorny, (Bern: Francke, 1959, reprinted in 1989); referenced online by the University of Texas website at: http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/ielex/PokornyMaster-X.html).
Sheldon: The Sator Rebus: An Unsolved Cryptogram? by Rosemary Sheldon, Cryptologia, July 2003, USMA, West Point, New York, quoted online at http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3926/is_200307/ai_n9291635/pg_1.
Watkins: The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, by Calvert Watkins (New York, Houghton-Mifflin Company, 2000).
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