The Search for SATOR-2

The Sator square is the most popular bit of word play you can graffiti on something since before c. 62 CE, the Cool S of its era with alleged magical powers to boot. Roughly translated, it means “the sower Arepo guides the wheel with skill,” but that’s not super important, look at this thing:

The Sator Square.

(The next paragraph is just me summarizing the Wikipedia page, so feel free to skip ahead.)

You can flip it and reverse it, bop it, twist it, pull it, shuffle it scramble it, whatever you want and it still looks good and meaningful and pleasingly symmetrical. Read straight: SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS. Read backwards: ROTAS OPERA TENET AREPO SATOR. Read boustrophedon: SATOR OPERA TENET [TENET] OPERA SATOR, loosely, “as ye sow, so shall ye reap.” Read boustrophedon but backwards: SAT ORARE POTEN, loosely a call to prayer. If you like, you can completely shuffle the letters and find anything else you want! An invocation to Satan, a formula for exorcism. Over the years it’s been claimed as a symbol of early Christianity, Judaism, Roman mysticism, Gnosticism, Mithraism, Pythagoreanism, and more.

Naturally, I wanted to find my own.¹ I wrote up a quick Perl script that eats a word list and spits out candidate squares. I think my favorite of this bunch is:²

The 'Tuoba' Square.

Now, TUOBA is a bit of an outlier here: it’s either a clan name from early imperial China, or a genus of centipede. This isn’t necessarily a problem, it could be a nonsense word for our purposes, given that AREPO isn’t a word we can translate either (it’s even a hapax legemenon). But I only caught it because the word list I used was sourced from Wikipedia; I would have missed a genuine nonsense word.

So, allowing for a single nonsense word, I generated 287 candidate squares! But a lot of these are suspect even then. Consider:

The 'Yarra' Square.

which isn’t exactly intelligible, and may as well be all nonsense or still in Latin.

But once I had the program written, it seemed easy enough to reach for a 6-letter square. This yielded a six-by-six grid of Fs, presumably from the hexadecimal color notation. Expanding the scope of the word list got me 129 candidate squares, of which my favorite is:

The 'werder' Square.

7-Letter squares were all very suspect, things like:

The 'Voodoos' Square.

Furthermore, these were found using my computer’s own word list, so there’s no guarantee I could even figure out what any of these words mean.

8-letter squares and higher were a complete bust.

Looking at smaller squares, it became important to use a smaller word list, or there were too many nonsense squares to sort through. Of the 4-letter squares, I liked:

The 'Part-Ajar' Square.

and

The 'Draw-Roma' Square.

Especially allowing for the single nonsense word, 3 and 2-letter squares are numerous and hard to skim, but I enjoyed

A surveillance tool for 10-5 participants.

and

Perhaps a method to attract a moon's attention.

The TUOBA Square

Part of what makes the Sator square so interesting though is the variety of interpretations. I believe this isn’t unique; the human mind can find patterns in anything it stares at long enough. So I’ll attempt to imbue my favorite, if mundane, of these new word squares with a little mystique.³

The 'Tuoba' Square, again.

Let’s look at the square in-tact:

• Read normally, the square might be read “parts around the rotor need to be attached with a tuoba strap.” Or possibly “Tuoba attaches the parts near the rotor.” The parts near the rotor are clearly the most important and dangerous in a revolving object.
• Rotated, it reads STRAP TUOBA ROTOR ABOUT PARTS, which might be interpreted, “[you must] strap the tuoba rotor about the parts.” Perhaps the tuoba rotor is a binding element that holds many things together.
• Boustrophedon, it reads STRAP ABOUT ROTOR TUOBA PARTS which actually doesn’t change the interpretation very much. Unless … “Tuoba breaks (parts) the strap around the rotor.”

It’s all a bit “the gostak distims the doshes,” but I can live with that. The square seems to lean toward some kind of instructive or mechanical interpretation.

Let’s remix it:

• Simple rearrangement gives START UP A ROBOT POTATO BURSAR, a clear warning about automation in the workplace.
• Or perhaps BOAR TAPS TUTOR ABOUT RAPTORS, a reminder to seek instruction when faced with things outside your normal experience.

Isn’t it convenient that the word ROTOR forms a symmetric “rotor” shape? Let’s take that out of context, like so:

A rotor rotor.

This leaves a new, smaller word square behind:

A reduced 'Tuoba' Square.

which can also be rearranged. Perhaps this becomes BAA BAAS PUTT PUTTS a pairing of childlike images, together with the rotor suggesting a mobile. Or we can make it into PAPA TUTS BAST TABU, but how are we to understand this? Clearly PAPA and BAST are gendered opposites, masculine and feminine divinities. We place them opposite each other around our rotor figure, and the verbs fall in-between: each eternally scolding or prohibiting the other, locked in a machine-like cycle.

An exploded 'Tuoba' Square.

Sure, that seems magic. Why not.

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1. Did I think that surely this has already been done? No, I was too distracted by the method and never checked. Of course it’s been done, and thoroughly.↩︎

2. Is it significant that this shares the placement of each letter “A” with the Sator square? I don’t think so.↩︎

3. With a great deal of help from the Internet Anagram Server↩︎

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