The Folklore of Discworld

has an ook to say in the matter. Nevertheless, far outside the hallowed walls of Unseen University, lurking in shadowy and insalubrious back-alleys and keeping out of sight of qualified wizards, are magical practitioners of a lower sort. Their ambitions are great; their skills are not. They know far less than they suppose. They band together in secret societies with imposing titles, and attach vast importance to ritual, ceremony, and magical tools. They are led by pompous, bullying men, calling themselves Supreme Grand Masters. Such are, for instance, the Elucidated Brethren of the Ebon Night, guardians of the sacred knowledge since a time no man may wot of.
    Such groups would be just as indignant as the academic wizards at the notion that what they were doing had anything in common with folk magic. No, their Grand Master had been taught profound secrets from the Heart of Being while undergoing tuition from Hidden Venerable Sages on a distant mountain. Furthermore, the Sages had given him a book of ancient wisdom … actually, he had arranged for it to be stolen from the Unseen University Library, but no matter, it was a Book. And it was ancient.
    But it would be a mistake to think that everyone in Ankh-Morpork has such a highbrow approach to magic. There are people who need no books, no apparatus, no complex rituals – people with a natural inborn talent for the occult, like the redoubtable medium Mrs Evadne Cake, noted for her precognition and her numerous spirit contacts. In some ways she is very like a witch, and every community needs its witch.
    Even in Unseen University itself the housekeeper, Mrs Whitlow, dabbles in the occult. She loves trying to peer into the future, and owns a crystal ball which she keeps under a sort of pink frilly tea cosy, several sets of divinatory cards, a pink velvet bag of rune stones, an ouija board, and special dried monkey turds which can be thrown in such a way as to reveal all the secrets of the universe. Granny Weatherwax, for purposes of her own, offered Mrs Whitlow her services as a reader of tealeaves. No doubt she had her own opinion of such amateurish goings-on, but she kept it to herself.
S ATOR S QUARE
    Most of those who walk through the streets of Ankh-Morpork never pause to wonder why the square in front of Unseen University is named Sator Square. There is indeed a reason, though you have to search the annals of a different universe to discover it: on Earth, Sator Square is the most famous of all magic squares. But it’s no use looking for it on the street map of any city, for it is not that sort of square. It is a palindromic word square.
    These are talismans, difficult to invent, but very powerful. You have to choose a group of words which can be laid out as a square of letters and which (this is the hard bit) will remain the same whether you read it downwards, upwards, from the left or from the right. Most of them are mere gibberish, but the Sator formula does make sense, of a sort. It goes:
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
    Four out of the five are normal Latin words, meaning ‘the sower holds the works [and] the wheels’, but arepo is either pure nonsense or the mysterious, mystical name of the mysterious, mystical Sower who controls the Wheels (of Fate? Of the heavenly spheres?). The earliest known example of the square is in one of the houses of Pompeii, buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79; another early one was found scratched on wall plaster in a Roman villa at Cirencester in Gloucestershire. At these dates, both homes could have belonged to Christian families, and the square could have served as a coded signal of their faith. It can hardly be a coincidence that its letters can be unpacked to reveal the first words of the Our Father ( Pater noster ) twice over, plus A and O twice. The latter could mean Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End, which is a title of Christ in the Apocalypse, the Bible’s Book of Revelation. What’s more, the whole thing can be laid out as a cross, thus:

    The Sator-Arepo Square was known all over medieval Europe, and in some countries (Russia, America and Germany, for example) was still being used in folk magic right up to modern times, almost two thousand years after it was invented. People said it would put out a fire, if you wrote it on a piece of wood and threw the wood into the flames; if you cut it into dough, baked it, and swallowed it, it would cure the bite of a mad dog; in the United