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Page 10.

Lost in Translation

The Sator Square began appearing in churches, on public buildings, and as a decorative element in wealthy private homes in the European Middle Ages. Its meaning was lost, and it achieved the status of a mystical, powerful magical spell. As recently as the last century, Pennsylvania Dutch farmers, and some ranchers in South America, carved in on fence posts to ward off cattle diseases.

What caused this popular aphorism of the Classical world to become an enigma?

There are at least three major reasons.

First, it was most likely never associated with Christianity, and thus became one of the many hated 'pagan' cult properties tossed overboard during the ban on all pagan worship in a series of decrees from 381 to 393 under Theodosius I the Great. In 393, Theodosius permanently banned the Olympic Games as yet another item of cult worship. We can be quite sure that the Sator Square was one of many 'pagan' artifacts left in the dust of polytheistic antiquity. It is clear, from a sympathetic study of Julian the so-called Apostate’s life, that the Christians may have wiped out Classical civilization (milestones: 410 CE, sack of Rome by a horde of Arian Christian Goths and other Germanic nations; 476, removal of last pretender Romulus Augustulus in the West; 537 siege of Rome by Visigoths, breach of aqueducts, collapse for more than a millennium of the city). But the Christians reinvented what they destroyed, from its shards and tatters over the next thousand barbarian years, with their centuries of loss and longing ultimately resulting in the twin-edged sword of Rebirth (Renaissance) which sundered Medieval understanding but created a new world order out of the lost ancient one. The Sator motif was burned with Rome, but its philosophical impact (logical, after all; rational; common sense) would not flicker out and die.

Second, the apparent perfect symmetry of the Sator Square blinds one to the fact that it is really composed, lopsidedly, of two sentences. One sentence is three words long, the other two. Further confusing is the word arepo, whose linguistic origin has baffled scholars for generations. That in itself suggests it is a shoe-horn, a blemish on the expected perfection of the palindrome. This is no doubt the last blush of that irrational awe and inspiration Rome still inspires, has its ghost has for many centuries; but the final realization is that the Romans were not immoral or bogeymen as centuries of sectarian lies and propaganda have insisted, but people much like ourselves who grappled (with occasional brilliance) with many of the same issues that are foundational to our civilization and therefore who we are. In other words, the ancient Roman is a guy you could sit down with and have a beer; or she is a lady with whom you could share a glass of wine and a giggle.

Third, a further illusion comes about with the shift from Latin to the modern Romance languages, and the resulting changes in sentence order. This is a simple, mechanical matter—so the real amazing fact is how the overturn of Classical civilization and the victory of barbarians has blinded moderns to simple facts (secrets) hidden in plain sight—like the easily decipherable meaning of the Sator Rebus when all is said and done (and we ought to wonder what the tediousness was all about, and learn from that as well).

Latin is a nearly perfectly inflected language, which means that, generally, its word endings convey much of the meaning in a sentence. Most Latin sentences can be scrambled into any configuration and still mean the same. When the Roman empire in the West broke up in the late 5th Century, the Latin of the Vulgate (popular Latin, Latin of vulgus, the people) broke up into dialects, which became languages.

Within three centuries, scholars say, one can detect the proto-languages that grew out of Latin, like Italian, French, Spanish, etc. Aside from Latin and Greek, the other great PIE-derived language family of western Europe is the Germanic family. This includes modern German, English, the Scandinavian languages except Finnish, and so on. A large amount of the vocabulary of these languages is Latin-derived. It's been said that English is 80% Latin. English is not a Romance language, however, because most of its key words are Germanic. The spine of English consists of mostly monosyllabic Germanic words: eat, drink, sleep, fight, go, come, fly, walk, love, hate, and so on.

All or most of these modern languages are nowhere as inflected as Latin. English, in particular, lies at the opposite end of the scale. In a highly inflected language, you can change the word order around, and the sentence still means the same. In an uninflected language, word order is everything.

Modern people, accustomed to speaking, writing, and thinking in their uninflected languages, have been further blinded by the apparent symmetry that doesn't quite exist. Then there is that exquisite tenet-tenet cruciform forming the cardo and the decumanus of the Sator Square. People expect that the palindrome must consist of a single sentence, whose predicate is tenet, whose subject phrase preceding it is sator arepo, and whose direct object phrase, following the predicate in proper sentence order, is opera rotas.

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