Greetings to all the colleagues of the forum.
Today a great doubt arose and although I searched a lot of information on the internet I have no clear doubt.
How do you write the most used magic word in the world?
AbraCadabra or AbraKadabra?
What would the original word be?
I thank you very much for your answers.
Regards

Years ago there was an article on this in MUM with input from all over the world. Maybe you can find it. My volume is packed away.

The answer is that neither is correct - or both as they are but manglings of an ancient Turkic phrase. --

something like "aburabaractur" used by Safik during the Ottoman Empire control. It sounded good so magicians picked it up.

Spell it any way you wish - how you present it is everything. It translates as "making something from nothing" - can't remember exactly.

I disagree that this is the most used magic word. The Western world used to use it frequently.
The rest of the world uses something else.

Consider that this very day China has more practicing magicians than have ever existed in the USA.
Doubt they have ever heard the word by any spelling.

There are some interesting diagrams of shapes made with this word.

Maybe the problem is Internet search filled more with ads than information.

Adabadaddada

Abracadabra

magical formula, 1690s, from Latin (Q. Serenus Sammonicus, 2c.), from Late Greek Abraxas, cabalistic or gnostic name for the supreme god, and thus a word of power. It was written out in a triangle shape and worn around the neck to ward off sickness, etc. Another magical word, from a mid-15c. writing, was ananizapta.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/abracadabra#etymonline_v_65

Https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serenus_Sammonicus

Yup, someone took an 8,000 year old Turkic phrase and wrote it in book in 1690 about what someone in the second century might have said.

Therefore that explanation must be true. Check the MUM article for other "right answers," then choose the ones that suits.

This as as bad a claiming Fibonacci invented knowledge of Phi that had been acclaimed for many thousands of years.
but, put it in a movie and and most now think Phi is a part of the Fibonacci series instead of the other way around.

But, this does provide evidence as to the spelling of the modern phrase - good thoughts tommy.

Was it the as as who said: "Magic presents by far the most personal relationship with the divine possible.”?

Where can I read more about this history? I was under the impression the Ottoman empire formed around the 11th century CE and was in power until the Turkey declared itself a modern nation in 1923. Again what little history I've learned has the Turkic languages also dating back around the 11th century CE.

Where can I read more about the 8,000 year history?

Nowhere:

The earliest linguistic records are Old Turkic inscriptions, found near the Orhon River in Mongolia and the Yenisey River valley in south-central Russia, which date from the 8th century CE.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Turkic-languages

For both Jonathan and Tommy. Try talking to Turkish scholars about their history. It did not start with the Ottoman Empire.

There are references to the Turkic peoples in the XIa Dynasty of China (2070 BCE) as ancient tribes.

The migration of the Turkic peoples and the unique integrity of their language is a fascinating story.
For example, the work "adam" means "human" in Turkish - borrowed by the infant Israelite cultures.

Perhaps you confuse "written" with "history." "Turkic inscription" has little relevance to actual history, except for those who think life started with the written word.
Please do not confuse the history of modern Turkey with the history of the Turkic peoples.
Yes, your browser might confuse the two and bring up wrong articles. Try harder. Life did not begin with Google either.

Amazingly, if a modern Turk should be transported back to a Caravanserai 6,000 years ago they could converse.

I was a Turkish linguist by grace of the military back in 1968. My instructors had many stories to tell to offset modern myopia.
I have been an interested student ever since. In 1993-95 when one could post Internet ideas on the Internet boards , I reached out to explore Turkish myth. legend and hype.

Of interest was the separation of performance magic from ceremonial magic by law and tradition.
Soldiers could do a form of C&B with conical spear point guards that a priest was not allowed to do.

But, back to the them of this thread, the spelling of the phrase and its origin.

I think we can agree that most modern spellings favor the "c" over the "k"

The origin for modern magicians is found in the appeal of the words as a chant - not in any fact.
Any truth as to derivation is meaningless compared with this practical use.

If I use the chant the spectator may conjure up an image of ancient arts - that is all that matters.

When I was in Turkey I had an abracadabra kebab.

For those who know:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMz-wqQPKsY

I think you mean A.D.

The Muslim peoples there might prefer AH to AD. I was going for neutral ground on the matter.

Muslims revere Christ as a prophet and have been a greater protector of Christian historic sites than Medieval Christians were.

The modern Turks count dates as we do.

Of some interest, when I studied Turkish in 1967-68 only about 60% of Turkey's population was Muslim with about 25% Christian
with a mixture including Tangrists, Zorathustrans and Hindi. In reality, a majority practiced no religion seriously, giving lip service
to the "silent breeze" of the day.

Today, Muslims claim 98% followers, but only because a 2002 law makes anyone undecided or unproclaimed Muslim,
and no registration is allowed other than Muslim, Christian or Jewish. Conversion by computer, I guess.

Why does anyone say abracadabra? It seems... childish

Not to be offensive, but I certainly can't pull that off.

More strange to me is any concern over the spelling of this weird word when "its" or "it's" and "there, their and they're" are of no concern at all for most.

For those in New York

https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/gyb89......brooklyn

I am posting the contents of a recent National Geographic Article (normally available only to a subscriber like me). If you think this is the wrong place or otherwise inappropriate, please move or take down. Sorry about some of the glitches due to quotation marks, etc. in the original...

When you hear the word “abracadabra” you know that something magical is meant to have happened—a transformation maybe, or at least just a trick. The word itself is peculiar, yet it’s now an almost universal signal of the supposedly impossible. And while experts debate the exact origins of abracadabra, the word is undeniably ancient.

Abracadabra first appears in the writings of Quintus Serenus Sammonicus more than 1,800 years ago as a magical remedy for fever, a potentially fatal development in an age before antibiotics and a symptom of malaria. He was a tutor to the children who became the Romam emperors Geta and Caracalla, and his privileged position in a wealthy noble family added importance to his words.

Writing in in the second century A.D. in a book called Liber Medicinalis (“Book of Medicine”) Serenus advised making an amulet containing parchment inscribed with the magical word, to be hung around the neck of a sufferer. He prescribed that the word be written on subsequent lines, but in a downwards-pointing triangle with one less letter each time:

The inscription would then consist of 11 lines, written until there were no characters left in the word; and in the same way, Serenus said, the fever would also disappear.

A word against evil spirits
According to recent research, versions of abracadabra also appear in an Egyptian papyrus written in Greek from the third century A.D., which omits the vowels at the start and end of abracadabra in subsequent lines; and in a Coptic codex from the sixth century, which uses the same method but a different magical word.

For followers of Greek magic, writing variations of a word in a downwards-pointing triangle formed a “grape-cluster” or “heart shape,” which was a way of writing down an oral incantation that repeated and diminished the name of an evil spirit in the same way. Such spirits were thought to cause diseases, and both these versions of the abracadabra spell were supposed to cure fevers and other ailments.

Abracadabra was an “apotropaic—a word that could avert bad things,” explains Elyse Graham, a historian of language at Stony Brook University, noting that its origins have been much debated.

Some think abracadabra comes from the Hebrew phrase “ebrah k’dabri,” and means “I create as I speak,’” while others think it comes from “avra gavra,” an Aramaic phrase meaning “I will create man” — the words of God on the sixth day of creation. Still others note its similarity to “avada kedavra’, the “Killing Curse” in the Harry Potter books, which author J.K Rowling has said is Aramaic for “let the thing be destroyed.”

Medieval historian Don Skemer, a specialist in magic and former curator of manuscripts at Princeton University, suggests abracadabra could derive from the Hebrew phrase “ha brachah dabarah,” which means “name of the blessed” and was regarded as a magical name.

“I think this explanation is plausible because divine names are important sources of supernatural power to protect and heal, as we see in ancient, medieval, and modern magic,” he says; for early Christians “names derived from Hebrew enjoyed high standing because Hebrew was the language of God and Creation,” Skemer adds.

A spoken remedy
Abracadabra seems to have kept its function as a magical cure against illness for many centuries. A 16th century Jewish manuscript from Italy records a version of the abracadabra spell for an amulet to prevent fever; and the English writer Daniel Defoe noted in A Journal of the Plague Year that it was used in 17th century London to prevent the infection: “as if the plague was not the hand of God, but a kind of possession of an evil spirit, and that it was to be kept off with crossings, signs of the zodiac, papers tied up with so many knots, and certain words or figures written on them, as particularly the word Abracadabra, formed in triangle or pyramid.”

But the word seems to have lost its usefulness as a remedy, and in the early 1800s it appeared in a stage play written by William Thomas Moncrieff, as an example of a word magicians would utter. Its only notable reference in the 20th century may be in the Thelema religion founded in the early 1900s by Aleister Crowley. The occultist often used the word “abrahadabra” in his 1904 Liber Al Vel Legis (“Book of the Law,”) saying it was the name of a new age of humanity; and he claimed to have derived it from the numerology system known as Hermetic Qabalah, which induced him to swap out the C of abracadabra for an H.

Descent into conjuring
Historian Graham notes that magic was thought useful as a remedy only before modern medical developments: “We used to need magic to do different things, but we have better medicines now,” she says. And that’s relegated abracadabra to the realm of stage magic and conjuring tricks: “Now magic is more about spectacle and distraction.”

If abracadabra still retains any power, it may be because no one is sure what it means. “A magic word gives power to the magician, while outsiders don’t know what it is,” Graham says. “It endows the magician with power in the eyes of other people.” So if abracadabra sounds nonsensical, maybe that’s the point, she says: “If the word weren’t mysterious, then it would be less magical.”