What the sources claim for it
A name that counts to 365, cut on stone to put the bearer under the authority of everything it numbers.
History
Where does the Abraxas Gem come from?
Carved gems from Roman Egypt carry a recurring figure: a cock's head, a soldier's cuirass, and two serpents in place of legs, usually with a whip and shield and the letters ΑΒΡΑΣΑΞ. In Greek numerals those letters total 365, the number of days and, in the systems the gems belong to, the number of heavens.
These objects sit exactly where this corpus's two halves meet. They are personal amulets with a stated function — against colic, against the wrong kind of attention — and they are also theological diagrams from a milieu of Egyptian, Jewish, Greek and early Christian speculation that no single label fits. Calling them simply 'Gnostic', as the older literature does, claims more than the gems say.
1 figure
Who is it attached to?
Figures who carry it
An attribute rather than a signature — held, worn or associated in the texts and the images.
Afterwards
What did it turn into?
The word became 'abracadabra' in popular etymology — a connection that is not established — and Abraxas was taken up by Jung and by twentieth-century occultism as a figure uniting opposites.
Which texts describe it?
None, and here is why
The unusual case on this list: the objects are the attestation. Several thousand carved gems survive, inscribed with the name and the figure, and there is no founding text behind them — the milieu that produced them left theological writing that the gems can be set beside but that does not describe them. Older scholarship solved this by calling both 'Gnostic' and treating one as evidence for the other, which claims more than either says.
Nearby
Related marks
The Pentagram
A five-pointed star drawn in one unbroken line — an accounting mark, a Pythagorean password, a Christian emblem of the five wounds, and only recently a sign of evil.
The Ouroboros
A serpent swallowing its own tail, first drawn around the sun god in an Egyptian tomb and still in use three thousand years later as a diagram of a closed system.
Saturn
The scythe. Slowest planet, heaviest metal, and the authority a grimoire invokes for work involving binding, decay and the dead.
Jupiter
A stylised Greek zeta for Zeus. The sign of increase, favour and judgment in one's favour — the grimoires' preferred authority for asking.
Mars
Shield and spear, iron, Tuesday — and, since Linnaeus, the biological sign for male, which is a much later and quite separate job.
The Sun
A circle with a point at its centre — the oldest form in the set, and the one the alchemists used for gold without further explanation.