MAGIC WORDS • Abrasax -- Kurt Rudolph, Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism (1987) • Abraxis -- Constance Victoria Briggs, The Encyclopedia of God (200 ) In Literature: • "The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. That God's name is Abraxas." -- Hermann Hesse, Demian (1925) • From Jean-Paul Sartre, The Flies (194 ), translated by Stuart Gilbert (1946): zeus: By the way, if those flies bother you, here's a way of getting rid of them. You see that swarm buzzing round your head? Right. Now watch! I flick my wrist -- so -- and wave my arm once, and then I say: Abraxas, galla, galla, tsay, tsay. See! They're falling down and starting to crawl on the ground like caterpillars. orestes: By Jove! zeus: Oh, that's nothing. Just a parlor trick. I'm a fly charmer in my leisure hours. • "Other magic words in the history of the world had never had any effect on her: 'open sesame,' 'abracadabra,' 'abraxas,' 'please,' 'I love you.' But times had changed. The old alchemical incantations had been replaced by the modern buzzwords of mental chemistry." -- William Kowalski, The Good Neighbor (2004) • "I need to be a new kind of Magician, one who not only flows through and around and quickly, but one who can change and mold and effect these creatures. I must be an Abraxas of change, a maker of effect." -- Marvin Spiegelman, Reich, Jung, Regardie & Me (1992) • "Suddenly a severe and vibrant voice like a bell immobilized him with the words: 'Abraxas is a cock and the cock crows before dawn.' A kind of chorus replied in a deep refrain. The young man, astonished and excited, thought that it resembled a response from the Earth to the call of Heaven. He turned his attention to the meaning of the sentence, but he had scarcely begun to do so when something like a sack enveloped him from head to foot, and a powerful blow to the head hurled him into the black pit of unconsciousness." -- Jorge A. Livraga, The Alchemist (1999) • "The abraxas, the phalangeal rhythm, the multicolored wobbly notes which nevertheless bind the hair of the lover, whom he has yet to glow." -- Hugh Knox, The Paving Stones of Xanadu (2004)