The squares are often treated as detached icons. In the manuscripts they are arranged within a larger narrative and ritual text, and their letters carry evidence about transmission.
- Four-book location
- Fourth book in Kollatsch’s account
- Scholarly count
- 257 squares in that edition
- Historical question
- Which witness supplied the letters?
More than a decorative grid
Kollatsch describes the fourth book as an appendix to the preceding initiation account, with 257 letter squares arranged by purpose. They are textual diagrams: their sequences of letters, row and column patterns, labels, and position in the book matter. Many employ symmetries associated with the familiar Sator-square pattern; not every form does. A web thumbnail that keeps a geometric outline but changes letters has altered the evidence.
The symbols also reveal the work’s chronology. Kollatsch argues that certain Hebrew and Greek words, including copied errors, derive from a multilingual dictionary published in 1595 and 1596. For that inference, exact letter readings are evidence, not decoration. The inference comes from his textual analysis. The Herzog August Bibliothek’s record anchors the early Wolfenbüttel witness, but the catalogue alone does not demonstrate which dictionary supplied a particular letter sequence.
Why versions look different
Peterson’s edition explains that Mathers translated from a French witness whose grids left many letters blank. German versions preserve additional content and have been used by modern editors to compare or correct readings. A square copied from Mathers, one reconstructed in a modern edition, and one photographed in a manuscript are three distinct visual witnesses even when they share a stated purpose.
Book numbering adds a second source of confusion. Mathers’s third book contains symbols; Kollatsch’s four-book account places the appendix in the fourth. “Book III” can therefore lead to different material depending on the version. The squares themselves may appear as manuscript images, editorial transcriptions, or modern reconstructions. Those forms can look similar at a glance while preserving different evidence about letters, blank cells, and the arrangement of the underlying copy.
What a variant can reveal
A missing letter and a different letter are not the same kind of variation. One may mark a gap in a copied grid; the other may point to a different reading in another witness. A modern editor may fill a gap by comparing copies, but that supplied letter should not be mistaken for a mark visible in the damaged or incomplete source. The letters and their positions distinguish these variants before the squares’ supposed purposes enter the comparison.
A grid also belongs to a particular book arrangement. The same diagram can acquire a different page number or chapter label when a French three-book copy and a German four-book copy are compared. Each sequence belongs to a particular edition and witness, together with an editor’s treatment of unclear cells.
Worked reading: SALOM, AREPO, LEMEL, OPERA, MOLAS
One five-by-five arrangement printed by Mathers in the group concerned with affection has the rows SALOM, AREPO, LEMEL, OPERA, and MOLAS. Read down the columns and the same five sequences reappear: the first column spells SALOM, the second AREPO, and so on. That row-and-column symmetry is a property a reader can verify without accepting the effect assigned to the square. It also shows why changing a single letter matters: one substitution can break both a row and its matching column at once.
The grid echoes the form of the SATOR square through its reversible, interlocked layout, but it is not the SATOR text. Mathers’s edition surrounds such grids with numbered purposes and editorial guesses about word origins; German witnesses preserve letters where his French source sometimes leaves cells blank. A modern completion may restore symmetry, yet it also adds a reading not visible in that French copy. The worked example separates three questions that online reproductions often merge: what the diagram visibly does, what a chapter claims it does, and which witness supplied every letter.
Source records
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