An economist’s “new” approach recapitulates long-extant modes (Creator Styles, Part 3)
Continuing through David Galenson’s Old Masters and Young Geniuses,¹ he goes over what he sees as a continuation of the pattern he theorizes through more media apart from painting, which he started with. While interesting, it’s also something of a dry read, filled out as it is with charts and statistics. Specifically, he covers poetry, literature, and film direction. And this last one provides a much closer corollary to the medium I work in, videogames. He also touches briefly on architects and economists, and posits these same types might apply to all fields of intellectual activities.
In order to discuss film, he conveniently skips over the fact he accepts auteurism wholesale. This value system was popularized in the ’40s and ’50s by Cahiers du cinéma and, in particular, François Truffaut, who wrote for the film journal. Since then it has found application in both film and in games. Wikipedia defines it as positing:²
[A] singular artist who controls all aspects of a collaborative creative work, a person equivalent to the author of a novel or a play.
What Galenson utterly omits to mention is there is significant criticism of this idea in both media. Indeed, few people today, especially in games, accept the notion all the achievements in this type of work are attributable to one individual. And I say this is as a game designer—a role typically benefiting from auteur theory.
I don’t think it’s either fair or true. I always try to promote the contributions of my coworkers when interviews attempt to focus on my role. My belief has always been the whole, at least, should be greater than the sum of its parts, and working with smart, creative people who can improve on one another’s ideas is one of the dynamics that continues to attract me to this field of endeavor. If holism is not occurring, it’s a red flag for me. Additionally, as many in this business have, I have had my name struck from credits, and indeed, have worked at companies in which individual credits were never given. These practices simply suck; if nothing else, games should learn from the standardized and guaranteed credits in Hollywood.
Furthermore, Galenson has focused all along on artists’ critical reception and, in the case of film directors, monetary success in evaluating them and which category they belong to. But not only is criticism inherently subjective, it can also be fickle, so these criteria are flawed ones. Just take a look at the ratings for some of your favorite movies on Rotten Tomatoes if you want to see: 1. audiences and critics don’t always agree, and 2. you are likely to not agree with either of them.
As I have learned through the hard knocks of my own career, there’s many a slip ’twixt the cup and the lip—lots of factors are beyond a creator’s control even if they are somehow the auteur of a work: patronage, changing audience tastes, and in our modern era marketing, user acquisition costs, and a dozen other things.
Just one such factor in the timing of a creator’s success in their field, which Galenson himself points out, is the complexity involved in an activity:³
[The] Abstract Expressionists dominated the advanced art world of the late 1940s and early ’50s with visual works that were highly complex, and generally required long periods of apprenticeship from important contributors.
However, he notes conceptual dudes come along and change things:⁴
Within a brief span of time, however, in the late 1950s Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg created new conceptual forms of art that were much less complex, and could be assimilated much more quickly, with very brief required apprenticeships. Thus the contributions of Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and many others who followed Johns and Rauschenberg were highly conceptual, and were generally made much earlier in their careers than those of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and the other important Abstract Expressionists.
And with this, he expands his taxonomy of his two types, to include:⁵
Aesthetic Experimenter
Inductive
Empirical
Discover methods during process
Continue to improve over a long career
Anti-intellectual
Value audience reception (commercial success)
Do not show themselves in a work
Add content to media
Conceptual Innovator
Deductive
Theoretical
Plan everything, then execute
Peak young (run out of things to say)
Intellectual
Self-pleasing (about their own ideas, not the audience)
Autobiographical
Change and simplify media
And here, some ideas he ascribes to his types begin to sound familiar. The types of translations of poetry expounded by Jorge Luis Borges in his “Two Ways to Translate”, I’ve previously covered, we recall, were Classical:⁶
The classical way of thinking is interested only in the work of art, never the artist. The classics believe in absolute perfection and seek it out. They despise localisms, oddities, contingencies.
And Romantic:⁷
Romantics never seek the work of art, but rather the man himself. […] That reverence for the I, for the irreplaceable human difference that is any I, justifies literal translations.
Based on Galenson’s expanded descriptions of his two types, it seems clear Aesthetic Experimenter and Classicist are synonymous, as are Conceptual Innovator and Romanticist.
Furthermore, the dyad of artistic values Borges refers to, just like the one Galenson proposes, permeates all creative endeavors. And indeed, as Galenson suggests of his categories, these might apply across intellectual activities. So ultimately, the categories presented in Old Masters and Young Geniuses don’t appear to be new, but simply restate these long extant ones.
Arguably, the categories Borges uses are both too value-laden with respect to the terminology employed and less well-known in modernity. The only value Galenson seems to add then is a discussion of the relative ages of creators belonging to one or the other group as related to their successes in their chosen field. And, as related previously, a great deal of statistical data intended to prove out these categorizations.
But again, I think this boils down to a commonplace: there is a certain brash reductiveness required of the Romantic point of view that nearly directly implies youth—or at least makes this approach appealing to younger creators.
In the end, Galenson concludes to be successful, ambition and aptitude are more important than the concerns of method. Here we finally agree, and indeed, being aware of these styles and changing one’s approach as needed might be still more important.
Read previous articles in the Creator Styles series
An intricate solution to an ancient enigma (Sator Square, Part 3)
Part 2 cleared the theoretical graveyard—Harpocrates, Nativity shepherds, boustrophedon readings, the Pater Noster anagram. What all those theories had in common was direction of travel: they started with a meaning and worked backward to the square, forcing arepo to behave, ignoring the chronology, making the geometry serve the conclusion.
The discovery of the Sator Square in Pompeii set a terminus ante quem of 79 CE, making it pretty clear it’s not Christian in origin. Other solutions were put forward, more or less far-fetched, involving overlaying a Templar cross on the figure, as well as several other patterns. Other religious contexts were also suggested, including Mithraism. I won’t go into this except to say this cult was even more of a newcomer than Christianity to the Roman world, with the earliest literary references dating to around 80 CE. A Templar origin is absurdly anachronistic.
What follows moves the other way. The square has properties—mathematical, structural, linguistic—and those properties point somewhere specific.
Dr. Nicolas Vinel’s contribution is the most historically grounded of the origin theories. Jewish communities were demonstrably present in Pompeii. But notice what Vinel actually demonstrates: an early—perhaps the earliest recoverable—act of reception. He shows us someone who could have looked at the square and seen a Judaic recognition code. He does not show us someone who put this code there. The square does not need a Jewish author to read as a code, any more than it needs a Christian author to read as Christological. Its power lies precisely in needing no author at all. Vinel has not found the origin. He has found the first reader.
Inscriptions and graffiti confirm Jewish individuals in the city—traders and freedmen, mostly. The broader Campania region had substantial Jewish settlement: Puteoli, a major port just west along the Bay of Naples, had Jewish merchants operating for generations, and Pompey’s conquest of Judea in 61 BCE had brought prisoners and slaves into the Italian south, many of whom eventually settled there.
The decades before Vesuvius erupted were not quiet ones for these communities. Emperor Claudius expelled Jews from Rome around 49 CE, pushing diaspora populations into exactly the kind of provincial cities where the Sator square has been found. Acts records it:¹
There he met a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus, who had recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had ordered all Jews to leave Rome.
Suetonius confirms it:²
Iudaeos impulsore Chresto assidue tumultuantis Roma expulit. Since the Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, [Claudius] expelled them from Rome.
Then came the Jewish-Roman War (66–73 CE), ending with the destruction of the Temple. Pompeii’s end in 79 CE came nine years after Jerusalem’s. In this context—expulsion, war, catastrophe, individuals scattered in a foreign city without an organized religious center—a recognition signal makes a different kind of sense. Not a declaration of faith. A handshake in a hostile room.
Vinel, if not the originator of the Judaic interpretation of the Square, certainly ties it up with a bow, and his work is the main source of what I’m relating here.³ I’ll note also what’s compelling is this is not a single solution, but a web of correspondences that so completely covers every aspect of the Square.
The first such element relates to the size and shape of the Square, which corresponds to the bronze altar Moses is instructed to build in Exodus:⁴
“And you shall make the altar of acacia wood, five cubits long and five cubits wide; the altar shall be square, and its height shall be three cubits. And you shall make its horns on its four corners; its horns shall be of one piece with it, and you shall overlay it with bronze.”
In Joshua, the important symbolic function of this altar is described thus:⁵
“[The altar is] a witness between us that YHWH [is] God.”
Thus, simply by its 5×5 size and shape, the Square is a representation of this altar in plan, itself a symbol of the Jewish Diaspora and faith in their God.
The next part of the solution involves a transformation of the square based on its underlying sequence of. This moves the 5×5 of numbers in order into a new configuration thus:
Essentially, two rotations are performed: the central cross is rotated clockwise 45 degrees, and the diagonal cross is also rotated the same direction, but the numbers alternate rather than maintaining their positions, with the other numbers falling fairly easily into place after that.
As I’ve implied in the title to this article, the fact a rotationis performed, and the solution uses the proper rotas-first form of the square, means the first line gives a clue to this solution.
Now we are looking at a figure known as a magic square: In a magic square, a figure whose discovery easily predates the Square, the numbers in each row and column, as well as the diagonals, add up to the same number. In the 5×5 version, this number is 65, the center remains 13, and in each of the two concentric squares adding a number with the one across from it adds up to 26.
The numbers 13, 26, and 65 are numerical representations of the divine name in the gematria, a system that assigns numerical values to words. Though it was originally Assyro–Babylonian–Greek, its use in Jewish mysticism has a long and well-known history.
Using this system, 13 is אֶחָד (ehad) “One”, and indeed, there is but one ⟨N⟩—in the center where all things begin. 26 is the numerical value of the Tetragrammaton, the four letters transliterating the name of God, i.e. YHWH. At some point, people decided that saying YHWH aloud was not cool—think the repeated stonings in Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979)—and אֲדֹנָי (Adonai) was used in its place. 65 is the gematric value of Adonai.
Now, while it is true there are many, many names of God, these, particularly the last two, are very important ones. 13 also corresponds to ⟨N⟩, in yet another way, as it is the 13th letter of both the Greek and Latin alphabets. Note it is not contended the letters simply correspond to the numerical values of the magic square, but the magic square is important to transforming the square.
When we move from the numbers back to the letters, the result of the transformation is a set of rows and columns, each of which is its own palindrome, and the central tenet cross remains, but on a diagonal.
T O P O T A E R E A R S N S R A E R E A T O P O T
The fact this transformation yields this result is compelling in itself, but there’s more: Now there appear not only the words, but a picture also of the bronze altar of the temple: now we see it in profile, where its biblical dimensions are 5×3, and it is made up of the Latin words:
ARA AEREA
altar of bronze
The tenet’s ⟨T⟩s at the corners also correspond to the biblical instructions for the altar’s construction as the “horns on its four corners”,⁶ where the physical shape of the ⟨T⟩ is suggestive of this description. Furthermore, as the holiest part of the altar, there is a tradition of grabbing these horns as a sort of sanctuary, such that in the Vulgate version of Kings it says of אֲדֹנִיָּה (Adonijah), a servant of Solomon fearful of being put to death:⁷
[…] tenuit cornu altaris.
[…] he […] took hold of the horns of the altar.
The cryptogram’s use of ⟨T⟩ to represent these horns as well as tying in the word tenet as what one does with them can only be called extremely clever—here, tenuit is simply an inflected form of tenet. Also, though I am aware the Vulgate did not yet exist, having pointed it out in the previous part, I am not engaging in an anachronism, as this is a simple one-word correspondence between Hebrew and Latin.
Furthermore, and working off the same aerea we’ve already seen, is a reference to the prophylactic symbol of the brazen snake created by Moses to cure those poisoned by real ones:
SERPENS AEREA
snake of bronze
And, as with the previously revealed words, the word serpens describes what it is with its shape, tracing a snaky path. Additionally, it is “lifted up” just as the snake it represents was on a pole. The corresponding bible passage from Numbers is:⁸
And the Lord said to him: Make a brazen serpent, and set it up for a sign: whosoever being struck shall look on it, shall live. Moses therefore made a brazen serpent, and set it up for a sign: which when they that were bitten looked upon, they were healed.
Finally, both the double ara aerea and the double serpens in the square, rather than simply being palindromes, continue forever. They share their first and last letters and read in an unending circle—the opposite of the ungodly, as described in Solomonic wisdom:⁹
[A]fter our end there is no returning: for it is fast sealed, so that no man cometh again.
The square succeeded beyond any reasonable intention. Without a key, every receiver could furnish their own. Medieval practitioners would find a childbirth charm; others would find the name of God.
This is why the square “goes ’round” so easily—why it rolls out of Pompeii and into Coptic Egypt, Nubia, medieval Iceland, without losing power along the way. It travels without its meaning intact, because the meaning was never the cargo. The form is the cargo, and the form is legible as sacred without being legible as specific. We will see in the final part of this series just how little of the “meaning” you can strip away before the square stops working: the answer, startlingly, is almost all of it.
Failed solutions to an ancient rebus (Sator Square, Part 2)
The so-called Sator Square, a palindromic grid of letters which can be read beginning at any of the four corners, has captured people’s imaginations for millennia. Early in its history, those who ostensibly understood it inscribed it widely, and it eventually came to have a cultural value similar to that of the Icelandic Rune Staves I have also written about. More recently, lacking a key to its understanding, scholars and layfolk have theorized about its meaning. So, in something of a turnabout from my posts about the Witham Sword, I want to evaluate some of the different solutions to this mysterious square.¹
The square appears in graffiti scratched into the walls of Pompeii, buried under ash from Vesuvius before 79 CE, and has been generating theories ever since.
The text reads:
R O T A S O P E R A T E N E T A R E P O S A T O R
Five Latin words—or near-words—arranged so they read identically in four directions: left to right, right to left, top to bottom, bottom to top. The central word, TENET, forms a cross. The whole structure is palindromic, geometrically perfect, and almost-but-not-quite meaningful. Arepo appears nowhere else in Latin literature. The grammar is just coherent enough to invite a reading and just strange enough to refuse one.
That refusal is the source of everything that follows.
The square has appeared widely, reaching a status some have described as memelike long before the intertubes began trading in such stuff. Its earliest appearances were on the Italian Peninsula, but it has been seen in France, Portugal, and as far away as England and Syria. There is even a runic inscription of the square. Although somehow this has been characterized and spread across the internet as being a runestone, it is (as can be seen in the image below) carved into wood—the bottom of a wooden bowl, partly missing, but which doubtless finished the Square.²
Then, as I noted, the secret of the square seems to have been lost. The earliest known attempt at a decipherment of the Square came from a Byzantine scribe in the 14th century, but there have been many since. The 19th century saw a boom in scholarly efforts, which continued until last century when they dropped off, with codebreakers either feeling it to be unsolvable or being satisfied with the efforts already made.
Rose Mary Sheldon provides us with an exhaustive 34-page bibliography of the solutions posited.³ What unites these non-starters is not that they guess the wrong composer. It is that they all assume a composer in the first place—a single mind encoding a single secret. Each theory then “discovers” exactly the secret its author went looking for. Hold that pattern in mind; by the end of this series it will turn out to describe not just the failed theories but the successful-looking ones too.
First there’s the one of that first Byzantine scribe, who broke it down thus:⁴
There are problems, of course. Mainly these are around arepo, which would continue to bedevil would-be codebreakers as we shall see. The scribe here claims is ἄροτρον (L. arepum, of which arepo would be an inflected form) supposedly meaning “plow”, although it is found in no other source. Some have suggested a borrowing from a Gaulish or Celtic term, *arepos, which again is nullibiquitous. The asterisk is used by linguists to mark a reconstructed word—that is, one unattested but conjectured to exist.
Wanting arepo to mean plow or opera rotas to somehow imply it seems a clear case of confirmation bias: “it says ‘sower’ so it must say ‘plow’.” I think given the brevity of the rebus, the inclusion of such redundancies would actually be quite undesirable. Still, it lives on in many modern interpretations which hold the phrase’s full translation, with the other words translating in order as “the sower”, “to hold”, “works”, and “wheel”, is therefore:
The sower holds the plow, the works, the wheels.
Others have decided arepo is a proper name, again choosing to set aside the fact it’s a hapax legomenon, and so render the phrase:
The sower Arepo holds the works, the wheels.
They somehow feel “the works, the wheels” implies a plow, even though the plows of the appropriate time in no way resembled such a description.
Frustration with the word led some to dismiss it as a term like abracadabra—without meaning, but while some such terms are attested, it’s a far from satisfying conclusion. Abracadabra, rather, seems to derive from ΑΒΛΑΝΑΘΑΝΑΛΒΑ (ablanathanalba), a palindromic term associated with the rooster-headed anguipede, ΑΒΡΑΣΑΞ (Abrasax). Ad repo, “I creep towards” is another interpretation suggested, but results in still worse nonsense.
Yet another suggestion is the Latinized and shortened name of the popular god of good luck from Graeco-Roman Egypt, Harpocrates (Har-pa-khered, “Horus the Child”).
To get from Harpocrates to Arepo, elide the initial ⟨h⟩ (the Greek is Ἁρποκράτης), inject a vowel ⟨e⟩ to break up the consonant cluster ⟨rp⟩, drop the entire second half, and Robert is your father’s brother.
The meaning (in a charitable reading) thus becomes a decently apotropaic formula:
The sower Harpocrates keeps in check toils and tortures.
Never mind the god is nowhere depicted as a “sower”, appearing in Egyptian stelae perched on a crocodile’s back, snakes clutched in his outstretched hands—an image calling to mind Herakles…. And later, and especially in the Graeco-Roman context, as a child with a finger pressed to his lips. Varro was apparently the first to describe the gesture thus:⁵
[…] Harpocrates digito significat, ut taceam.
[…] Harpocrates with his finger makes a sign to me to be quiet.
However, it is important to note this pose actually relates to the form of the hieroglyph for “child”, and did not have a meaning relating to silence or secrecy in its original context. This sometimes-winged figure was later conflated with Cupid—Cupid with a uraeus on his head, though later forms morphed it into a topknot. If anything, he is shown holding a cornucopia—the polar opposite of the idea of sowing.
The next major direction of exploration came from the idea the inscription should be read boustrophedonically. The term means “as (plowing) oxen-turn”, therefore referring to a reading alternating directions, so:
SATOR OPERA TENET (TENET) OPERA SATOR
The image of plowing oxen probably was a temptation to employ this type of reading, but it’s just more fruit of the poison arepo tree. And again, applying a generous amount of imagination to the reading, we can interpret this as the New Testament dictum:⁶
[W]hatever a man sows, that he will also reap.
This solution also has its share of issues: first, inscriptions in boustrophedon appeared only in the prehellenic Greek (until 510 BCE) and archaic Etruscan (until 480 BCE) periods, coinciding with the advent of the Phoenician-based alphabet into those cultures, before they had settled on a single reading direction; left-right for Greek and right-left for Etruscan. So these predate the first known appearance of the square by just about 500 years.
Second, in boustrophedon inscriptions, the letters themselves are typically reversed to show the reading direction. Such inscriptions also invariably begin left to right, while this solution requires a right-to-left start. That is, this solution would require the versions beginning with sator to be the older, original form, which contradicts all evidence. Indeed, the desire to read the cryptogram boustrophedonically may have actually prompted the current dominance of the sator-first form.
Finally, the symmetry of the square is a major element of its magic, or at any rate, aesthetics. The 5×5=25 form is destroyed by the 30-letter reading required for the boustrophedon to work. Furthermore, the words arepo and rotas are omitted entirely in this solution, which seems like taking the easy way out.
As you may have also noticed, we have now entered a realm where interpretations are based on the idea the inscription is a Christian one. And the locations it has been found in suggest such an association, as they include Benedictine and Cistercian abbeys, a cathedral, an Anglican church, and a private chapel.
And many other seeming links to Christian tradition have been noted in potential solutions: an old Cappadocian tradition gave the shepherds of the Nativity the names Sator, Arepon, and Teneton. An old Byzantine biblical tradition names the Three Magi as Ator, Sator, and Peratoras. And the Ethiopians and Abyssinians invoke the Savior by enumerating the five nails of the Cross: Sador, Alador, Danet, Adera, and Rodas.
Attempts were also made to read the opening lines of the square as a set of abbreviations, similar to those I used in my solution for the Witham Sword:
SAlvaTOR A REx Pontifex O
and
SATOR A Rerum Extremarum Principio Omni
Of the two, the first is execrable and the second only somewhat less so, but again, nowhere apart from this posited solution to the Square are these words found together—a fairly clear sign there was no such phrase to code into a rebus.
One solution has seduced historians for decades. It interprets the Square as an anagram of the opening words of the Lord’s Prayer. This is the non-starter that refuses to die, so I’ll give it a clean death here.
In 1926, German evangelical preacher Felix Grosser proposed the square’s 25 letters could be rearranged into a cross: PATERNOSTER reading horizontally and vertically, intersecting at the shared ⟨N⟩, with two ⟨A⟩s and two ⟨O⟩s left over—Alpha and Omega, the divine bookends from the Apocalypse of John.⁷ The diagram is elegant. It is also a conjuring trick, and there are three independent reasons to put it in the ground.
First, the cross itself is Grosser’s invention, not the square’s. One might argue there is a cross formed by the two TENETs, but it is a requirement of the form rather than a designed feature. So you have to disassemble the square and rebuild it in a shape it never occupied. And this rebuild has a deficit—two complete PATERNOSTERs require two Ns, but the square contains exactly one. What you actually get is:
PATERNOSTER
PATEROSTER
AAOO
The cross format conceals this unsatisfying result by sharing the ⟨N⟩ at the intersection, the way a crossword does. But the claim is not that the square is a crossword. The claim is that it encodes PATER NOSTER. The encoding requires you to add the very structure—the cross—that makes the single ⟨N⟩ look sufficient. Grosser did not discover a hidden message; he discovered 25 letters can be shuffled into a near-fit, and decorated the gap.
Some aver this could not possibly be a coincidence, and so must be the solution. But what should have ended the discussion 50 years ago is this: the method is empty. In 1968, Paul Veyne notes:⁸
Les lettres qui composent le palindrome sont si banales et leurs fréquences respectives si peu anormales […].
The letters that make up the palindrome are so commonplace, and their respective frequencies so unremarkable […].
This allows dozens of other anagrams to be produced using the 25 letters of the square. He gives these seven as dating to the Middle Ages (ca. 500–1500):⁹
Ora, operare, ostenta te, Pastor Pray, labor, show thyself, O Shepherd
Satan, ter oro te, reparato opes. Satan, thrice I pray to thee: restore my wealth
Satan, oro te pro arte, a te spero Satan, I pray to thee for thy craft; in thee I place my hope
Retro, Satana, toto opere asper Get thee behind me, Satan, rough in all thy works
Satan, ter oro te, opera praesto Satan, I pray thee thrice: perform the works
Oro te, Pater, oro te, Pater, sanas I pray thee, Father, I pray thee, Father: thou healest
O Pater, ores pro aetate nostra O Father, mayest thou pray for our generation
Many of these are equally Christian readings with an equally valid claim to intention, which is to say none. To demonstrate this further, Veyne added:¹⁰
Petro et reo pater rosa Sarona To Peter, both defendant and father, the rose of Sharon
Sat orare potentes ore parato It is enough to pray, O mighty ones, with a prepared mouth
In 2000, an Italian cruciverbalist presented the ultimate reductio:¹¹
Sottrar oro a paperone: saette Stealing gold from Scrooge McDuck: arrows
Pornostar: parte osee a teatro Porn star: Hosea’s part at the theater
O porta estera o porta esterna O foreign gate, o outer gate
But the Paternoster reading is a defective, repeated palindrome of only 13 letters. With these Veyne produces:¹²
Stat Noe e prora Noah stands at the prow of the Ark
Se portant ora The faces carry themselves forth
Est nota pro reo It is a mark in favor of the defendant
Potare Nestora To give drink to Nestor
Orarat nepotes He had prayed for his descendants
Raro, nate, potes Rarely, my son, are you able
Ostento parare To prepare a portent
Separaret Noto It would sever by the South Wind
E re nota portas From a known matter, you bring forth
Portae nostrae Our gates
The existence of such counter-anagrams is not a curiosity. It is the proof that anagramming is a reader’s activity, not a writer’s signature. You find what you bring.
As for the Paternoster cross, no historical receiver of the square ever produced the independently. No Coptic scribe drew it. No charm-maker in Iceland or Nubia or medieval Italy mentions it. It appears for the first time in a German academic journal in the 20th century, proposed by a man who was looking for Christ in everything he touched. The Paternoster cross is not a discovery. It is the most successful fraud in the history of the field—a modern projection so structurally pleasing that it has been mistaken for an ancient signal for a hundred years.
Finally, the Alpha-Omega reading is anachronistic:¹³
ἐγώ εἰμί τὸ Ἄλφα καὶ τὸ Ὦ […].
I am the Alpha and the Omega […].
This has as its source the Book of Revelation by the Apostle John. Although this was to become one of the titles of Christ and God, traditional sources and historians agree its first use dates to the reign of the Roman emperor Domitian (81–96), and so could not possibly have been used in Pompeii.
The interpretive framework that turns leftover ⟨A⟩s and ⟨O⟩s into a Christological signature postdates the artifact by at least a generation. Strip the Alpha-Omega reading, and the four leftover letters are just that—leftover. Bad anagrams produce remainders. Grosser elevates his to theology.
In fact, the discovery of the first of the Pompeiian Squares in 1936 was most likely the cause of the decline of scholarship on the issue more specifically than the cases I mentioned earlier—nearly everything had to be simply thrown away. The second, while actually found in 1925, was in much worse shape, coming from a ruined house, and was only able to be identified via the model of the other graffito.
What this graveyard of failed theories reveals isn’t scholarly incompetence. Each generation brought its own framework and found the square accommodating—Christian interpreters found a Nativity, Kabbalists found the Tetragrammaton, the Byzantine scribe found a field. The square doesn’t give up its meaning. It gives back yours.
These non-starters share a tell: each requires the square to be specifically legible—as Christian, as Mithraic, as whatever—when the square’s actual talent is to be vaguely legible as holy to everyone. A theory that needs the square to mean one thing precisely is fighting the one quality that made it travel.
Rose Mary Sheldon, “The Sator Rebus: An Unsolved Cryptogram”, Cryptologia, July 2003.
Grec 2511, p.68, Bibliothèque nationale de France, ca. 15th century.
Marcus Terentius Varro, De lingua latina libri XXV (On the Latin Language in 25 Books), 5.10, ca. 47–44 BCE.
Gal. 6.7, King James Bible (KJV), 1611, though the original dates to ca. 40–60.
Felix Grosser, “Ein neuer Vorschlag zur Deutung der Sator-Formel” (“A New Proposal for Interpreting the Sator Formula”), Archiv für Religionswissenschaft, 1926.
Paul Veyne, “Le carré Sator ou beaucoup de bruit pour rien” (“The Sator Square, or Much Ado About Nothing”), Bulletin de l’Association Guillaume Budé: Lettres d’humanité, December 1968.
Ibid.
Ibid
Stefano Bartezzaghi, Lessico e Nuvole (Vocabulary and Clouds), la Repubblica, June 2000.
Deru Kugi 