Sourcery (Terry David John Pratchett) читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги

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The word ‘Sator’ refers to a famous magic square (magic square, get it?) dating back to the times of the spread of Christianity in Europe. ‘Sator’ means sower or farmer. The complete square is:

S A T O R

A R E P O

T E N E T

O P E R A

R O T A S

This square is palindromic in all directions. The sentence you get reads: Sator Arepo Tenet Opera Rotas, which means, more or less: “The sower [i.e. God] in his field controls the workings of his tools [i.e. us]”. Some correspondents questioned the correctness of this translation, so if anyone has a good reference to something else I’d love to hear it.

The magic Sator square also has the property that it can be ‘unfolded’ into two “A PATER NOSTER O” strings that form a cross with the ‘N’ as a pivot element (sorry, proper graphics will have to wait until a future edition of the APF). The ‘A’ and the ‘O’ stand for alpha and omega.