Charaktêres (singular: charaktêr) are letter-shaped signs lacking both semantic and phonetic correlations, which were used as magic signs in ancient literary documents.[1]
In her 2013 thesis Kirsten Dzwiza studied 94 magical texts and recorded 699 different charaktêres occurring over 943 times.[2] The character forms are mostly nonsensical and may include ring-letters, balls, points, closed elements, separate strokes, linear elements, small element, and hieroglyphs. The most common forms consists of asterisks and configurations of straight lines with small circles at their ends.[3]
The signs appear mostly on apotropaic spells and phylacteries, but also on a few ancient curse tablets. They may appear as loose groups of characters on a magical gemstone or spell to large groups alongside other figures on a magical text or table. They are often used alongside comprehensible arcane words, like the voces magicae in the texts of the Greek Magical Papyri.[4] Charaktêres were not intended as an alternative-alphabet or code - they were usually used only once or twice in the context of a single spell.[5]