charakter

plural charakteres

1. A glyph with no agreed semantic or phonetic value, generally formed by deforming a letter of the Greek alphabet or a simple geometric symbol via one of several predefined processes, used as part of magical texts in the Hellenistic world.

   […] (yellow diasper; inscription in a circle enclosing magical charakteres on two lines; other letters (?) and charakteres on the rim; scorpion on the reverse; 3rd cent. A.D.; N. 660/661) […]

   2004, Angelos Chaniotis, Thomas Corsten, R. S. Stroud, Rolf Tybout, editors, Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum, volume LIV, page 660

   3 more examples

   Among the roughly forty curse-tablets found, mainly by French army officers in the late nineteenth century, at Hadrumetum, is a group of texts exhibiting a common feature, namely that they contain recurring sequences of charakteres. In this form they have not been found elsewhere; moreover, the individual charakteres are also different from magic signs found elsewhere.

   2011, György Németh, Sequences of charakteres in some circus defixiones in Latin from Hadrumetum

   The great majority of charaktêres, like the majority of voces magicae, were never memorized – they were simply produced on one occasion. That is why there could be so many of them. We shall see this principle emphatically re-asserted in the medieval and early-modern shift from the charaktêr to the sigillum.

   2014, Richard Gordon, Charaktêres between Antiquity and Renaissance: Transmission and Re-invention

   Such hissings and poppings are not the only incomprehensible signs that the theurgists use to make contact with the divine; various sources make mention of charakteres, incomprehensible drawn figures that seem to resemble letters or images but without any clear iconic resemblance.

   2019, Radcliffe G. Edmonds III, Drawing Down the Moon: Magic in the Ancient Greco-Roman World, page 337