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Words Themselves, a First Take

Sator.

Literally, sator means 'the seeder,' or 'the begetter.' It is also a metaphor for God--not so much the Judeo-Christian monotheos, but just as well the Roman father of gods and men, Jupiter (as well as the Hellenic Zeus or Theos).

In fact, just as early Christians did not use as their key symbol that emblem of shame, the cross on which the most vile of common criminals were executed, so it is quite likely that no Christian would have dirtied his or her thoughts with a powerful ‘pagan’ saying.

Arepo.

Nobody has ever found the word arepo used, in any language that could conceivably have been connected with Rome--neither Greek, Etruscan, Gaulish, nor even Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the theoretical mother language of half the modern world's languages.

Some, like Jerome Carcopino and I (separately), have thought that it is a form of an ancient Latin or Gaulish word for 'plough'. Others argue that it is a proper noun, probably a name.

One scholar was suggested that Arepo derives from the popular Roman-Egyptian deity Harpocrates.

Another school of thought argues that arepo is a nonsense word, and that the Sator Square itself has no meaning at all.

If, however, the Sator Square has no meaning, then why did the Romans transport it all over their empire over a period of centuries, and prominently display it in military headquarters, fora, and other public spaces?

In any case, the word arepo has proven to be the most frustrating and baffling element of the Sator mystery. I agree with Carcopino on this one. I'll explain my belief that it is a shoe-horn word for 'plough,' made to fit the five by five format of this palindrome.

We should bet that the Roman farmers’ saying about the aphorism existed long before some literate person, maybe trying to be clever at a party in a seaside villa of the rich along the Tyrrhenian coast, turned it into the symmetrical, beautiful palindrome that we see amid the ruins.

Tenet.

Tenet is a verb meaning 'he, she, or it holds.' Notice that the word tenet makes a cruciform in the center of the palindrome. At the letter N, tenet intersects itself. Those who feel the Sator Square has a Christian connection point to that as a crucial piece of evidence. However, as I will show in this paper, the cruciform itself has a much more ancient usage of great importance for augury in Roman, Greek, Etruscan, and other cultures. There were many representations of God the Father, long before Christians came along. For example, the name Jupiter in Latin is an elision (joining together) of the separate words Deus Pater, literally meaning God the Father.

Opera.

This word is generally taken to be a noun used as a participle (a noun used as a description), meaning 'with effort,' from opera, operae (f) effort, related to opus, opera (n), work. In the sense generally assumed for the Sator Square, the usage would be the ablative case of opera, the feminine noun indicated at the start of this paragraph: again, 'with effort.'

Rotas.

This word is generally taken to be a noun form. Readers have tended to see it as meaning 'the wheels,' in the accusative plural of rota, rotae (f) 'wheel.'

Totally wrong. It’s a verb meaning ‘you turn’ as in the modern English verb ‘wheel’ (from the noun ‘wheel’) whose infinitive form is ‘to wheel’ which is a figure of speech based on the image of a wheel turning.

Let's briefly look at a summary of the general scholarship, and then we’ll crack the code.

I’ve already told you the solution, but we will do this systematically.

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