The Sator square, an ancient magic square, appears to serve as one inspiration for Christopher Nolan’s new film, Tenet. The film, which is a blend of science fiction and international espionage, is well worth watching, even though it’s guaranteed to make your head spin. Despite its complexity, its lack of character development and its poor - potentially deliberately poor - sound mixing, the imagination and ambition of the film is brilliant, as with every other Nolan film.
Tenet, as a word, is obviously a palindrome, meaning that it reads the same left to right as right to left. The number ten, when expressed as a word, can also be found in both directions in the word Tenet. More importantly, the word Tenet sits at the core of an ancient magic square, called the Sator square. Magic squares have been used down through history in the belief that they have magical properties, and were still used in Europe and America as late as the nineteenth century to protect against fire, disease and theft. The Sator square is a four-directional palindrome, meaning that it can be read in four directions, and it is made up of five Latin words: Sator, Arepo, Tenet, Opera, and Rotas.
What is interesting is that all these words feature in the movie. Most obviously, Tenet is the name of the movie and the name of the time-travelling organization that is trying to save the world. Sator is the last name of the central antagonist in the movie, Andrei Sator, who is played by Kenneth Branagh. Arepo is the last name of an art forger in the plot of the film, whilst the first scene takes place in an opera. Finally, guards at a free port in the movie work for Rotas Security.
The first Sator square was discovered on a bathroom wall in 1925 when excavating the ruins of Pompeii. Ancient Pompeii was destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, meaning that the square predates that. If we look at the square as a sentence, SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS translates as: “The farmer [named] Arepo uses [or holds] the plough for work.” Whether these five words were simply to be read as a sentence is unclear, but it seems unlikely, as why go to the trouble of weaving them into a magic square which can be read in numerous directions.
A later discovery was probably more significantly. If you rearrange the 25 letters that make up the square, you can make two copies of the words Pater Noster, with two A’s, and two O’s, left over. Pater Noster means “Our Father” in Latin and potentially speaks to the religious origins of the square. In fact, certain scholars argue that the creator of the square worked backwards: starting with two Pater Noster’s, two A’s and two O’s, and then creating the five words from the 25 letters available (Fishwick 1964: 42). The A’s and O’s are thought to mean Alpha and Omega, the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, potentially symbolizing god, and the start and end of time.
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Sources:
Fishwick, D. (1964). On the Origin of the Rotas-Sator Square. The Harvard Theological Review, 57(1), 39-53.
Griffiths, J. (1971). 'Arepo' in the Magic 'Sator' Square. The Classical Review, 21(1), 6-8.
Power, E. (31 August 2020) Your starter for Tenet: the archaeological mystery behind the film of the summer, The Telegraph https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/starter-tenet-archaeological-mystery-behind-film-summer/
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica's, Magic Square https://www.britannica.com/topic/magic-square#ref13436
Wilkinson, A. (4 Sep. 2020) The ancient palindrome that explains Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, Vox News - https://www.vox.com/culture/21419050/tenet-explained-sator-square-nolan
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Photo Personnelle, oeuvre sculptée par auteur à définir et visible à l'ermitage de GALAMUS. Production sur wikipédia avec l'aimable autorisation du responsable des lieux que nous remercions - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Carr%C3%A9_SATOR_de_l%27Ermitage_Saint-Antoine_de_Galamus_%C3%A0_Saint-Paul-de-Fenouillet.jpg Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en
