wordstalismanطِلَسْم

The root is a verb about finishing a rite. Greek teleō, 'I complete, perform a rite'; telesma, the completion or the payment. Arabic took it as ṭilsam, French took it from Arabic, English took it from French in the 1630s.

What the Arabic word names is a craft with a timetable. The tenth-century Abbasid mathematician Thabit ibn Qurra was held to be the expert; in one of his texts on talismans he wrote, 'The noblest part of astronomy is the science of talismans.' In John of Seville and Limia's twelfth-century version of ibn Qurra's De imaginibus, talismans and astronomy matter more to wisdom than geometry or philosophy do. Adelard of Bath's translation of the same text insists on knowledge of both astronomy and astrology, because a talisman has to be made at the moment of an auspicious celestial event — and because, in that text, a maker who is distracted or in doubt produces a powerless one.

The instructions are specific about material. Adelard's translation specifies lead, iron, bronze, gold or silver for a talisman meant to earn love from a king, a family member or a peer; pitch and tar, bitumen and aloes for one meant to set people against each other, take money, defend or destroy a place, or win a legal case.

Inference — the English word kept the object and dropped the clock. A modern English speaker who calls a lucky coin a talisman is using a word that once meant a thing timed to a sky.