Passwords Old and Ancient

The password to get into Abulafia had to be seven letters or fewer. Letters or numbers. How many groups of seven could be made from all the letters of the alphabet, including the possibility of repetition, since there was no reason the word couldn’t be ‘cadabra’? I knew the formula. The number was six billion and something. —Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum (1988)

We've previously discussed how the original password was open sesame (better translated as "simsim"), and how passwords are like magic words in that they are the keys for unlocking barriers, dissolving obstacles, revealing something beyond. Passwords are the coveted guarded secrets that grant admittance into inner chambers and secret circles. The folks at Wired sought to track down the first computer password. (Thanks, Gordon!)

Open Sesame

“‘Open Sesame!’ yelled Henry, just in case it might work.” —Beverly Cleary, Henry and the Clubhouse (1962)

Open Sesame

Vocal commands such as “open sesame” seem to hark back to ancient sonic technologies. Some researchers are convinced, for example, that sound vibrations were manipulated to levitate heavy stones during the building of the Great Pyramid. Umberto Eco suggests: “It is known that the Chaldean priests operated sacred machines by sounds alone, and the priests of Karnak and Thebes could open the doors of a temple with only their voice—and what else could be the origin, if you think about it, of the legend of Open Sesame?” (Foucault’s Pendulum, 1988).

One Word: That's Magic

Professional magician John W. LeBlanc notes that there are “untold numbers of anecdotes told by professional performers who found that just changing one, single word made an enormous difference in the response of the audience to a performance piece. One word. That’s magic.”

As in the fables of old, “It’s in the words that the magic is—‘Abracadabra,’ ‘Open Sesame,’ and the rest—but the magic words in one story aren’t magical in the next. It seems . . . that the real magic is to understand which words work, and when, and for what” (John Barth, The Tidewater Tales, 1987).

Open Sesame

Open sesame, one of the most celebrated magic phrases, held enough power for Ali Baba to shift boulders and open a passage into the unknown. This colorful, centuries-old fable points to a literal truth about the power and importance of magic words:

We know that words cannot move mountains, but they can move the multitude. . . . Words shape thought, stir feeling, and beget action; they kill and revive, corrupt and cure. The “men of words”—priests, prophets, intellectuals—have played a more decisive role in history than military leaders, statesmen, and businessmen.
Words and magic are particularly crucial in time of crisis when old forms of life are in dissolution and man must grapple with the unknown. Normal motives and incentives lose then their efficacy. Man does not plunge into the unknown in search of the prosaic and matter-of-fact. His soul has to be stretched by reaching out for the fabulous and unprecedented. He needs the nurse of magic and breath-taking fairy tales to lure him on and sustain him in his faltering first steps. Even modern science and technology were not in the beginning a sober pursuit of facts and knowledge. Here, too, the magicians—alchemists, astrologers, visionaries—were the pioneers.
—Eric Hoffer, The Ordeal of Change (1976)

From ideology to science, from spiritualism to cultural revolutions, words open passages into the unknown. And anyone, whether leader or follower, for whom discourse serves as a first step to unexplored territory, is an Ali Baba, a personal pioneer.

Portals into other realities

"Sound in the form of music can evoke deep emotions in all of us. Words have similar power to evoke emotional reactions and can even lead us to kill each other. No doubt the source of the classic magical words, 'abracadabra' and 'open Sesame', which led to the opening of the cave that contained the treasures of Ali Baba, was based on the idea of the power of words. In the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, it is the physical cave that is opened by the magical words. At the metaphysical level, the opening leads into the unconscious mind, or, as some would say, into another realm of existence. Intrinsic to both ideas is that powerful words/sounds have potency in themselves. There is clearly more to music than mere pleasure; as some cultures opine, sound can take us into other realities, help us to communicate with other beings, summon up 'demons' and evoke the gods."
—Lynne Hume, Portals: Opening Doorways to Other Realities Through the Senses, 2007.