Hapax

The image of a cross in the sky was seen by Constantine the Great before battle, as well as by David I of Scotland, Saint Eustace, and Saint Hubertus of Germany, whose vision was embodied in the Jägermeister logo. It is a common optical illusion. The cross originated with the Egyptian symbol, ankh, which meant life, as in the name of Tut-ankh-amen, combining Amun-Ra, the Sun God, with ankh (eternal life), and tut, the verb “to be perfect.”

The Sator Square is a sixth-century Roman word puzzle, a double acrostic, also called the Templar Magic Square, based on the word TENET, which is a palindrome (a word which is the same backwards), and which appears in the middle of the larger acrostic, both from left to right and from top to bottom. That is, “tenet” becomes a cross in an acrostic:

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 Sator Square was thought in the past to have curative powers. People have proposed that it had Gnostic, Mithraic, or Orphic associations. Dan Stone adapted such cryptic runes in The Da Vinci Code.

The literal translation would be “the sower wields a rolling wheel.” Ranchers know that sheep eventually excrete what they eat and sow the same weeds they eliminate. Or, as MacBeth said, “we do but teach bloody instructions which, being taught, return to plague th’inventor.” The Circadian rhythms of crops are circular, the Eternal Return of spring to a devastated land, and its opposite: the ritual death of warmth. Human nature is an ouroborous, an eternal loop. Blood will get blood, as Greek tragedy teaches us. We don’t learn. We live in a DNA spiral, a whorl, a world of our own making. As I wrote in my poem, “Arabesque,” about the whorl of leaves in a palm canopy:

The DNA of light weaves in
And out like Escher stairs,
Leaving labyrinths where thread had been,
Layered by a hand that copies theirs.

The Sator Square forms the basis for Christopher Nolan’s film, Tenet, which he thought about for two decades before making. It is also a Hapax Legomenon, a word said only once, such as Shakespeare’s “Honorificabilitudinitatibus,” the longest word in the English language, essentially being a pompous form of the word "honor," used once in his play, Love’s Labor’s Lost, and one of the now out-of-favor cryptograms advanced to prove that Bacon wrote Shakespeare, since its letter can be re-arranged into the Latin sentence, Hi ludi orbi tuiti nati F. Baconis, or, “These plays were born and protected for the orb [the earth] by F. Bacon.”