The Last Chance To Argue The Soteriology of the Sator Square

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There are certain subjects a sensible man ought never discuss after supper: religion, politics, the proper pronunciation of Sanskrit, and whether a Roman palindrome can save your immortal soul.

Naturally, we discussed all four.

Somebody had scratched the Sator Square on a piece of paper:

SATOR
AREPO
TENET
OPERA
ROTAS

It is a remarkable contraption. You can read it forward, backward, upward, downward, and probably sideways if you have sufficient whiskey and theological training.

The Christians got hold of it and discovered a cross hiding inside. This is the customary fate of mysterious things. If a man finds five words nobody understands, somebody will eventually discover God concealed among them, while another fellow will discover the Devil, and a third will publish a book explaining that both gentlemen were mistranslated.

Then somebody said, “It represents salvation.”

That was when the Vedāntin at the end of the table cleared his throat.

Now there is no sound in nature more dangerous than a Vedāntin clearing his throat.

“Salvation,” he said, “ain’t moksha.”

This caused considerable unhappiness.

Salvation generally requires a predicament. Man has fallen into a ditch and requires extraction. There is sin, estrangement, judgment, redemption, and finally somebody throws down a rope.

Moksha is a stranger business.

The Advaitin looks into the ditch and says, “Who told you that you were in it?”

This is not especially comforting.

You shout that you are plainly sitting in mud.

He says the mud is mithyā.

You throw mud at him.

He says the thrower is also mithyā.

At this point Christianity begins looking wonderfully practical.

But the distinction matters. Salvation can mean being rescued, forgiven, restored, delivered from a condition that is terribly real. Moksha, in Advaita, is liberation through knowledge: the discovery that the deepest bondage rested upon ignorance of what you already are.

One story says the prisoner gets out.

The other asks who the prisoner was.

And there sat the Sator Square between us, turning its little wheels:

SATOR—sower.

TENET—holds.

ROTAS—wheels.

The sower holds the wheels.

Or the wheels hold the sower.

Or nobody knows what AREPO means and two thousand years of theology have been obliged to proceed without asking his permission.

That is my favorite part.

Human beings cannot leave a mystery unattended. We must baptize it, translate it, initiate it, psychoanalyze it, compare it with the Upaniṣads, and finally put it on a coffee mug.

Perhaps the square saves nobody.

Perhaps moksha saves nobody either.

Perhaps that troublesome word “nobody” is precisely where the argument becomes interesting.

But by midnight everybody had achieved one indisputable form of liberation:

we had exhausted the whiskey, misplaced the Sator Square, and become temporarily free from theology.