MAGIC WORDS Abraxas Abraxas, the perfect word. -- Louise Erdrich, "Hydra," Baptism of Desire: Poems (1989) Mystique: Have you ever been mesmerized while waiting for the sunrise? As you watch the horizon for that first burst of light, you get swept up in the eternal present moment. With baited breath, your sense of time is suspended, and you're primed for a miracle. This is the "liminal zone," the threshold between night and day, between here and there, between this and that. It's the crossroads where anything is possible. And then the dawn breaks through, like a sudden burst of inspiration, like an act of creation: "Let there be light." That is the magic of Abraxas, a word that has perhaps always been closely associated with the power of the sun. This "strange, mysterious name"71 captures that magical, suspended, timeless moment: "all of time as an eternal instant."72 Abraxas is the power of infinity -- the promise of endless possibilities, the "cosmos" itself.7 The word suggests a power that is not properly ours but rather a gift from another world. Figure 7. Abraxas as depicted in a gnostic gem, from Charles W. King's The Gnostics and Their Remains (1887) 71 Annemarie Schimmel, The Mystery of Numbers (199 ) 72 Gene Wolfe, Shadow and Claw (1994) 7 Carl Jung, the third sermon of the Seven Sermons to the Dead (1917)