page_title: Sator Square
section_title: Translation
hierarchical_section_title: Sator Square / Translation
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Inscription située sur porte sise au 20 rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau à Grenoble (France). palindrome latin "SATOR RAPEO TENET OPERA ROTAS", signifiant «&#160;Le Laboureur à sa charrue ou en son champ, dirige les travaux&#160;».English: Registration located on door located at 20 rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Grenoble (France). latin palindrome "SATOR RAPEO TENET OPERA ROTAS", meaning "The Plowman with his plow or in his field, directs the work".
context_page_description: The Sator Square is a word square containing a five-word Latin palindrome. The earliest form has ROTAS as the top line, but in time the version with SATOR on the top line became dominant. It is a five-by-five square made up of five 5-letter words, thus consisting of 25 letters in total, all derived from eight Latin letters: five consonants and three vowels.
  In particular, this is a square two-dimensional palindrome, and admits four symmetries: identity, two diagonal reflections, and 180-degree rotation. As can be seen, the text may be read top-to-bottom, bottom-to-top, left-to-right, or right-to-left; and it may be rotated 180 degrees and still be read in all those ways.
  Other 2D palindrome examples may be found carved on stone tablets or pressed into clay before being fired.
context_section_description: SATOR
  (nominative or vocative noun) (from serere=to sow) sower, planter, founder, progenitor (usually divine); originator; literally “seeder”.
  AREPO
  unknown, likely a proper name, either invented or, perhaps, of Egyptian origin, e.g. coded form of the name Harpocrates or Hor-Hap (Serapis).
  TENET
  (verb) (from tenere=to hold) he/she/it holds, keeps, comprehends,  possesses, masters, preserves, sustains.
  OPERA
  (nominative, ablative or accusative noun) work, care, aid, labour, service, effort/trouble; (from opus): (nominative, accusative or vocative noun) works, deeds; (ablative) with effort.
  ROTAS
  (rotās, accusative plural of rota) wheels; (verb) you (singular) turn or cause to rotate.
  One likely translation is The farmer Arepo has [as] works wheels [a plough]; that is, the farmer uses his plough as his form of work. An alternative would be to interpret opera as the ablative instead of the nominative. In that case the sentence could be read as The farmer Arepo holds the wheels with difficulty (or with effort), shifting to focus on ROTAS with all its mystical connotations. The first interpretation, though not a significant sentence, is grammatical; the square can be read up and down, backwards and forwards. C. W. Ceram also reads the square boustrophedon (in alternating directions). But since word order is very free in Latin, the translation is the same. If the Sator Square is read boustrophedon, in reverse direction, the words become SATOR OPERA TENET AREPO ROTAS, with the sequence reversed and the position of ROTAS being the main difference.
  Given that the Square’s Outer consonant string joined with the Square’s central letter produces S-T-R-N, and that SaTuRN was the Roman God of time-cycles, agriculture, and magic, this claim by The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic is especially relevant: “Sator may originally have been a Sacred Name of Saturn. The Roman scholar Marcus Terentius Varro (De Lingua Latina, 5.64) was of the opinion that the name Saturn had its origins in the verb sero (sow/beget), which the noun sator is derived from.”. The theory is further affirmed when one notes that Saturn’s consort Ops, from which “opus” comes, the plural form of which is “opera”. 
  The word arepo is a hapax legomenon, appearing nowhere else in Latin literature. Its similarity with arrepo, from ad repo, 'I creep towards', may be coincidental. Most of those who have studied the Sator Square agree that it is a proper name, either an adaptation of a non-Latin word or most likely a name invented specifically for this sentence. Jerome Carcopino thought that it came from a Celtic, specifically Gaulish, word for plough. David Daube argued that it represented a Hebrew or Aramaic rendition of the Greek Ἄλφα ω, or "Alpha-Omega" (cf. Revelation 1:8) by early Christians. J. Gwyn Griffiths contended that it came, via Alexandria, from the attested Egyptian name Ḥr-Ḥp, which he took to mean "the face of Apis". An origin in Graeco-Roman Egypt was also advocated by Miroslav Marcovich, who maintains that Arepo is a Latinized abbreviation of Harpocrates, god of the rising sun, in some places called Γεωργός `Aρπον, which Marcovich suggests corresponds to Sator Arepo. If one accepts that one or more deity names is encoded into the Sator square then this word square could be considered an example of a theophoric mandala.
caption: The Sator square on a wooden door in Grenoble (France)
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