Charaktêres

[1] In her 2013 thesis Kirsten Dzwiza studied 94 magical texts and recorded 699 different charaktêres occurring over 943 times.

[2] 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.

[3] 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.