Charakterとは 意味・読み方・使い方

名詞

charakter (plural charakteres)

1. A glyph with no agreed semantic or phonetic value, generally formed by deforming a letter of the Greek alphabet or a simple geometric symbol via one of several predefined processes, used as part of magical texts in the Hellenistic world.
   • 2004, Angelos Chaniotis, Thomas Corsten, R. S. Stroud, Rolf Tybout, editors, Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum, volume LIV, page 660:

     […] (yellow diasper; inscription in a circle enclosing magical charakteres on two lines; other letters (?) and charakteres on the rim; scorpion on the reverse; 3rd cent. A.D.; N. 660/661) […]

   • 2011, György Németh, Sequences of charakteres in some circus defixiones in Latin from Hadrumetum:

     Among the roughly forty curse-tablets found, mainly by French army officers in the late nineteenth century, at Hadrumetum, is a group of texts exhibiting a common feature, namely that they contain recurring sequences of charakteres. In this form they have not been found elsewhere; moreover, the individual charakteres are also different from magic signs found elsewhere.

   • 2014, Richard Gordon, Charaktêres between Antiquity and Renaissance: Transmission and Re-invention:

     The great majority of charaktêres, like the majority of voces magicae, were never memorized – they were simply produced on one occasion. That is why there could be so many of them. We shall see this principle emphatically re-asserted in the medieval and early-modern shift from the charaktêr to the sigillum.

   • 2019, Radcliffe G. Edmonds III, Drawing Down the Moon: Magic in the Ancient Greco-Roman World, page 337:

     Such hissings and poppings are not the only incomprehensible signs that the theurgists use to make contact with the divine; various sources make mention of charakteres, incomprehensible drawn figures that seem to resemble letters or images but without any clear iconic resemblance.