21 PALINDROMES AND LETTER FORMULAE: SOME RECONSIDERATIONS Mare Kõiva The article is based on the collection of incantations in the Esto- nian Folklore Archives and it aims to provide a description of an old and less-known type of incantations in Estonia. The term “let- ter formulae” will hereafter be used to designate incantations based on letters or letter combinations, palindromes, other formulae con- nected with letter mythology, and also names which function as spells. In general it can be said that this originally old type of in- cantations has reached this cultural area relatively late. A major- ity of the formulae are more or less directly connected with caba- lism, the connection is genetic and the formulae spread through the mediation of cabalism. The formulae reached Estonia through secondary manuscripts and it is not likely that at that time any Estonian folk doctors/healers would have been familiar with the cabala; neither were proper names attributed meanings and val- ues characteristic of occult sciences. Letter formulae and independent incantations have been distin- guished as a separate subgroup of spells. Karlis Straubergs has referred to letter formulae as cabalistic texts (Straubergs 1939: 270 ff.). Generically scholars have used the name of one of the most wide-spread incantations abrakadabra (Astakhova 1928: 50 ff., Poznanski 1917, 58 ff., Peskov 1977, 38, Gagulashvili 1983, 104 ff.). In standard language the word has gradually taken on the meaning of the unknown and the unintelligible. Alongside with incantations directly based on letter magic some researchers have included into this subgroup incantations which at the first glance seem semantically and logically incomprehensi- ble. Examples of such formulae are “The dog is white, the cat is gray – all one family of snakes” (Peskov 1977: 38) and incantations employing foreign words in original or distorted shapes (Gagulash- vili 1983: 105).