Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing by George Barton Cutten (best large ereader txt) 📕

The Basilideans, and other sects developed from the Gnostic systems, assigned great power to stone amulets, and prepared them for their initiates, who used them for identification and for curative purposes. They quickly acquired a celebrity undiminished for ages, and were known under the general name of Abraxas. They were composed of various materials, glass, paste, sometimes metals, but principally of various kinds of stones. Through the irresistible might of Abrax, their supreme divinity, the Basilideans were protected and cured. Clement of Alexandria strictly interdicted the use of gems for personal ornamentation, with evident allusion to the Abraxas stones. These stones had various inscriptions carved upon them, most of which had some hidden meaning of great puissance. One of them, for example, is engraven with Armenian letters, and contains a standing invocation for fruitful delivery; in its medicinal property it was evidently a cure for sterility.93

From the stone itself the word "Abraxas" came to be used as an amulet when written on paper. The numerical equivalent of the Greek letters when added together thus, A = 1, B = 2, P = 100, A = 1, Ξ = 60, A = 1, Σ = 200, is 365. The significance of this was that the deity was the ruler of 365 heavens, or of the angels inhabiting these heavens; he was also ruler over the 365 days of the year. Notwithstanding the fact that it was referred to by the Greek fathers, the name was evidently Egyptian in origin, some of the figures on the stones being strictly Egyptian.

Amulets in the form of inscriptions were called "Characts," the word Abraxas being an example. The very powerful word "Abracadabra" was derived from Abraxas, and when written in the proper way and worn about the person was supposed to have a magical efficacy as an antidote against ague, fever, flux, and toothache. Serenus Samonicus, a physician in the reign of Caracalla, recommends it very highly for ague, instructing how it should be written, and commanding it to be worn around the neck. It might be written in either of two ways: reading down the left side and up the right must spell the same word as at the top; or, having the left side always start the same, reading up the right side should be the same as the top line. Below are the two forms:

Julius Africanus says that pronouncing the word in the same manner is as efficacious as writing it. The Jews attributed an equal virtue to the word "Aracalan" employed in the same way.94

Bishop Pilkington, writing in 1561, protests against a then current practice in this way: "What wicket blindenes is this than, to thinke that wearing Prayers written in rolles about with theym, as S. Johns Gospell, the length of our Lord, the measure of our Lady, or other like, thei shall die no sodain death, nor be hanged, or yf he be hanged, he shall not die. There is so manye suche, though ye laugh, and beleve it not, and not hard to shewe them with a wet finger." The same author observes that our devotion ought to "stande in depe sighes and groninges, wyth a full consideration of our miserable state and Goddes majestye, in the heart, and not in ynke or paper: not in hangyng writtin Scrolles about the Necke, but lamentinge unfeignedlye our Synnes from the hart."

The following charact was found in a linen purse belonging to a murderer named Jackson, who died in Chichester jail in February, 1749. He was "struck with such horror on being measured for his chains that he soon after expired."