The Nuclear Option: Love Spells and Curses in the Ancient World by Elisabeth Storrs

Popular culture is rife with examples of humankind’s fascination with magic whether malicious or benevolent. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a world-wide phenomenon which spawned countless TV series with fantastical elements. The Harry Potter books continue to introduce new generations of kids to the realm of wizards. Harry and his friends are schooled in the three unforgiveable curses: the Cruciatus Curse which causes the victim excruciating pain, the Imperius Curse which makes the victim totally obedient to the caster, and the Killing Curse, which instantly kills the victim.

These three dark charms are reminiscent of the types of curses levelled in Greco-Roman times. The practice of ‘Defixio’ involved using a ‘curse tablet’ Tabella Defixionis (Roman) or Katadesmos (Greek) to damn a victim or cast a love spell on a subject of desire. The tablets consisted of thin pieces of lead sheet upon which script was scratched. Often the defixiones were then folded, rolled or pierced with nails to contain the incantation. To empower them, you needed to place them underground. Many were buried in graves and tombs, thrown into wells or cisterns, or nailed to the walls of temples of Chthonic deities such as Demeter and Persephone. The fact so many examples of these tablets exist is due to the fact placing a lead tablet in the ground preserves it.

Defixio is derived from the word for ‘to pierce’ or ‘to bind’. The tablets were used to ask the gods to bind a victim to an act that either condemned them to misfortune or compelled them to do something against their will. These invocations fell into various categories such as hindering a competitor, thwarting an opposing litigant in a court case, or forcing someone to fall passionately in love or punish their unfaithfulness. There was also the extreme option of seeking your enemy’s torture, death and the downfall of their family line!

Here is an example of vicious curse against a competitor. ‘I implore you, spirit, whoever you are, and I command you to torment and kill the horses of the green and white teams from this hour on, from this day on, and to kill Clarus, Felix, Primulus, and Romanus, the charioteers.’ Tunisia C3rd CE

This imprecation is less malevolent, seeking a comedian’s routine to fall flat: ‘Sosio must never do better than the mime Eumolpos. He must not be able to play the role of a married woman in a fit of drunkenness on a young horse.’ Rauranum in western France C3rd CE.

The first examples of defixiones were discovered in the city of Selinus in Sicily. The majority of the twenty-two tablets were concerned with court cases. There are also examples of small effigies, sometimes referred to loosely as Voodoo dolls. Three such dolls were found in Athens at around the end of the C5th BCE. Each figurine lies within a casket with their hands lashed behind their back and their feet tied together. The curse scored into the casket implores the gods to bind the victim so they will perform poorly in court. The elaborate nature of these defixiones suggests the hand of a professional magician (paid by a wealthy client) compared to the more common DIY lead sheets found in their thousands in Athens.

Christopher A. Faraone, professor of classical languages and literature at the University of Chicago, posits there were an extraordinary number of curse tablets found in late Classical Athens because lead was a convenient by-product of the silver mines that contributed to the wealth of that city. As such, lead was a very cheap and reusable medium useful for business communications. After the silver mines were exhausted, however, the stockpile of lead was soon depleted. Curses were then written on wax and papyrus which did not survive burial underground.

Erotic curses could be adjusted for different situations such a ‘separation’ spell (known as a ‘Diakopai’) to drive away rivals by making them hideous to the subject of unrequited affection. An ‘Agogai’ curse sought to bind the person to the caster. Some were passion-inducing while others sought only to encourage affection. One example of a milder spell is ‘Bind Helen, so that she is unsuccessful when she flirts or makes love with Demetrius.’ In comparison, this incantation wishes harm on a rival and implies the lover could have been either male or female: ‘May he who carried off Vilbia from me become as liquid as water. (May) she who obscenely devoured her (become) dumb, whether Velvinna, Exsupereus, Verianus, Severinus, A(u)gustalis, Comitianus, Catus, Minianus, Germanilla (or) Jovina.’ (Aquae Sulis)

The use of magic in Classical Athens does not appear to be illegal. Athenians would most likely have seen it as a chthonic religious ritual connected with those gods who lived in the ground and were very closely connected with ghosts and the dead. The Ancient Romans were not so tolerant. Under the Law of the Twelve Tables (the first codified set of laws established in 451 BCE), the use of incantations to cause dishonour or disgrace attracted capital punishment. However, clearly the threat of death was insufficient to deter the use of defixiones given the number of curse tablets found across the Roman world over the centuries.

Defixiones seeking justice were useful where a crime was senseless and the perpetrator unknown to the victim. A number of curse tablets were discovered in digs in Roman Britain. One trove of 130 defixiones is known as the Bath Curse Tablets found at the site of Aquae Sulis. All bar one sought restitution of goods (evidently theft was rife in bathhouses).

Here’s an example of a bathhouse curse: ‘Docimedis has lost two gloves and asks that the thief responsible should lose their minds and eyes in the goddess’s temple.’ Somerset 2nd -4th CE

And here is a nuclear option. ‘The human who stole Verio’s cloak or his things, who deprived him of his property, may he be bereft of his mind and memory, be it a woman or those who deprived Verio of his property, may the worms, cancer, and maggots penetrate his hands, head, feet, as well as his limbs and marrows.’ Frankfurt C1st CE

By the end of the Hellenistic period (circa 323 BCE), magical handbooks began to appear which continued to be used into Roman Imperial times which provide evidence magical practices were done by professionals. Different languages were used, and different gods were implored, including the Jewish Yahweh or the Egyptian gods. The increasing commerciality of the Defixio practice is evident given tablets could be prepared in advance, with a space left for a customer to insert the name of their victim.

'Bind the tongue and the thoughts of ____________, who is about to testify against me.'

Interestingly, the playwrights of Ancient Roman and Greek literature attribute the primary use of magic to women, but archaeological evidence shows men to be the principal practitioners. In a series of over 400 tablets found in Roman Britain, over two-thirds of those inscribing the curse/spell were males.

Learning about curse tablets inspired me to create two of my own as a major plot device in the A Tale of Ancient Rome series. In The Golden Dice, a soldier risks capital punishment by not only damning his rival to a grisly fate but also inscribing an enchantment to entice his lost love to return by ‘hammer [ing] both desire and curse into the brickwork with one long iron nail—to remain there forever potent and terrible, guarded by ghosts.’ If you want to know whether such defixiones were successful, you’ll need to read the trilogy.

Elisabeth Storrs is the author of the A Tale of Ancient Rome series. Her latest release, is Fables & Lies: A World War II Novel about stolen treasure and the Aryan Myth. She is also the founder of the Historical Novel Society Australasia and the ARA Historical Novel Prize. Learn more at www.elisabethstorrs.com

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons as follows: 

-Magic curse written on a lead figurine in a lead box, found in the enclosure of Aristion, and dating 420-410 BCE Kerameikos Archaeological Museum (Athens). Photographer Giovanni Dall'Orto.

-Roman Curse Tablet, North Lincolnshire Museum. Photographer Martin Forema.

-Ancient roman lead tablet inscribed with a curse from the Baths of Diocletian in Rome – Photographer Bari' bin Farangi.

-Roman lead curse tablet Kent County Council. Photographer Andrew Richardson.

-Well in which lead scroll fragments were intentionally thrown for magical practices. C4th CE Israel. Photographer Mikey641.

Gang of Suspects Named in Kidnap Case

by Ruth Downie

STOLEN: VILBIA

HELP OF GODDESS SUMMONED

GUILTY PARTY THREATENED WITH BECOMING LIQUID AS WATER

The loss of Vilbia is the most famous cold case that’s come down to us from the Romano-British town of Aquae Sulis (modern Bath). The aggrieved party – whose name we don’t know – called up the goddess Sulis Minerva’s help by writing the suspects’ names on a thin sheet of lead, rolling it up and throwing it in the pool above her sacred hot spring. It wasn’t alone: well over a hundred other curses have been found buried in the silt and others may be hidden there still.

Most of the spidery letters on the scraps of lead are the work of victims asking Sulis Minerva to avenge a crime. Some name the suspects. Some don’t say what they did: presumably the goddess knew what Britivenda and Venibelia had been up to and could punish them accordingly.

Often, though, the victim had no idea who had wronged them. The curse on the modern reproduction below translates as “the name of the culprit who stole my bracelet…” There’s a space left, but no name in it.

When no likely evildoer could be identified, the aggrieved party often reminded the goddess to suspect everyone, “whether man or woman, slave or free.” Children could be in the frame too -“whether boy or girl” - and once, “whether pagan or Christian”.

Some victims offered Sulis Minerva a share of the stolen goods if they were recovered – a sort of ‘no win, no fee’ deal, with the suggestion that the hot property could be handed in anonymously at the temple.

A few of the lead sheets are blank. Others bear rows of squiggles, perhaps put there by people who knew what writing looked like but couldn’t actually do it. All but two seem to have been in different handwriting: some educated, some very clearly not. Writing backwards might have made the curse more powerful: it certainly made for more spelling mistakes. But no matter what was being written, the sight of a stylus waking the dull surface of the lead into a gleaming message for the goddess might have frightened the guilty party into repentance.

If the culprit didn’t co-operate, though, bad things lay in store. Docimedis, whose gloves had gone missing, demanded that the thief should lose his minds [sic] and his eyes. Anyone even remotely involved in the theft of Basilia’s silver ring was to be accursed in blood, eyes and every limb, or even have all his or her intestines eaten away.

Sometimes the thief’s whole family was cursed. And sometimes the curses were subtle enough to work on the conscience. Whoever stole Docilianus’s cloak was to be deprived of both sleep and children until the cloak was returned to the temple. Whether or not he [or she, slave or free] knew the exact wording of the curse, it’s not hard to imagine them lying awake in the night watches and wondering whether they would get a better night’s sleep tomorrow if they got up now and delivered the stolen goods to Sulis Minerva under cover of darkness.

Bath isn’t alone in having a fine collection of curses: they turn up all over the Roman empire. There are attempts to silence witnesses, to sabotage racehorses, and to crush business competitors and love rivals. Most of the Bath curses, though, seem to be about thefts from the bath-house, although one poor chap had his house burgled. The crimes must have been very annoying for the victims, but as a writer looking to set a murder mystery in Aquae Sulis, I have to say there wasn’t as much instant plot in them as I’d hoped.

Even the apparent kidnap of Vilbia might have been less dramatic than it seems. Roger Tomlin, the modern translator, points out that the word has never been found anywhere else. The stolen “vilbia” might simply be an inanimate object with a name that none of us now understands. But while Vilbia doesn’t provide a ready-made plot and cast of characters, the curses as a whole give a lively insight into a busy town and the everyday struggles of its people to thrive and survive. And perhaps of the wider divisions between them.

We know that Roman citizens lived in the town (some of their tombstones have turned up, proudly announcing the three-part names that show social superiority), but none of the curses has a citizen’s name on it. All the complainants and culprits seem to be either lower-class Latin-speakers or native Britons. That might be because, as Pliny put it, the Britons were enthusiastic practitioners of magic while all good Romans ought to look down their noses at it (yes, I am paraphrasing wildly here). It might also be because the poorer you were, the less chance you had of owning a slave who would guard your kit while you were bathing.

Even if you knew who’d done it, in the absence of a police force there wasn’t much you could do unless you had powerful friends or plenty of cash. At a guess, Arminia had neither. She knew exactly who’d made off with her two silver coins – it was Verecundinus, son of Terentius - but getting them back had to be left to the goddess. 

Did Verecundinus pay up? Or did he suffer the punishment of being unable to sit, lie down, walk or sleep? We don’t know. For us, at least, none of these cold cases is resolved. But people believed in the curses enough to carry on throwing them into the spring for over two hundred years. There might have been no police officers to investigate crime, but even while you slept, that lump of lead hidden under the steaming surface of Sulis Minerva’s waters could be working its revenge on your enemies. And that must have felt good.

Roger Tomlin’s work on the Aquae Sulis curses - from which much of this information is drawn - can be found in The Temple of Sulis Minerva at Bath, Vol 2: The Finds from the Sacred Spring – Barry Cunliffe et al – OUCA Monograph no 16, 1988

Read more about the site at https://www.romanbaths.co.uk/

Ruth writes a series of crime novels featuring Roman army medic Ruso and his British partner, Tilla. The latest is MEMENTO MORI, set in Aquae Sulis.

Witch Marks and Curses: The Rituals of Protection by Catherine Hokin

In the midst of all the Halloween madness around crazed-clown sightings (surely a PR stunt for the forthcoming Stephen King movie) and poor-taste celebrity costumes, my eye was caught this year by a request from Historic England for help with searching out some rather specialist graffiti. The patterns they are looking for date from between the the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, can be found on both homes and churches and may be marks made by the builders or occupants to deter witches.

 The Norfolk and Suffolk Medieval Graffiti Survey

We are a superstitious lot when it comes to guarding home and hearth.These marks (known as apotropaic from the Greek word for turning evil spirits away) are part of a long tradition of charms and curses stretching across cultures and centuries designed to keep homes and places of religious significance safe. The Japanese ofuda, charms written on paper and blessed at a Shinto shrine, date back to at least the seventeenth century Edo period. A nazar, a blue and white teardrop-shaped amulet, is a common sight outside homes across Turkey and Greece and is a legacy of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. Chinese door gods, or menshen, have been displayed on the entrances to temples and homes since the pre-AD Han Dynasty and any self-respecting house in Ancient Egypt would be guarded by the goddess Bast, depicted as a black cat.

 Daisy Wheels in Stratford, Nicholas Molyneau

Apotropaic witch marks seems to be an English phenomenon and Historic England's treasure hunt request is directed particularly at secular buildings: although witch marks have been discovered on homes, these have, to date, been far less catalogued than those discovered at churches. So where do you look and what are you looking for if you decide to try and wean the teenagers of hunting for Pokemon? Witch marks of the type Historic England are hoping to catalogue are usually concentrated around entrance points such as doors, fireplaces and windows which are deemed as vulnerable to malevolent incursions. Marks can be in the shape of pentacles (sometimes lying on top of demons), inter-twined Vs and Ms for the Virgin Mary or, most commonly, compass-drawn hexfoils or 'daisy-wheels'. Whatever the shape, they do appear to share the characteristic of being formed from endless lines: apparently demons follow the lines and then get trapped, a plot device which a lot of films seem to have over-looked. Sites where marks have been found include Shakespeare's birthplace in Stratford, in roof beams at the Tower of London and carved into the timbers of a room prepared for a visit by King James I (a man obsessed with witches to an unhealthy degree) at Knole House in Kent. 

The scratchings are certainly intriguing although their association with deliberate attempts to ward off evil spirits is not a given: they could simply be marks made by masons to show how and where stones or timbers should be fitted or the product of apprentices learning the geometry needed for their craft. Perhaps, as with many superstitions, they started as one thing and became another. Whatever the truth of these marks, a belief has grown up around them that they exist as a protective measure, a belief it is not hard to understand in the context of communities living in genuine fear of witchcraft and in homes far darker than anything we can imagine in these days of instant light.  

The urge to guard against danger or ill-luck is part of the fabric of our buildings and some superstitions of the past still linger. Few of us, for example, would raise an eyebrow at a horseshoe nailed above a door, even if we no longer believe iron has the power to repel witches. Niels Bohr, the Danish scientist who basically sorted out quantum physics for the rest of us, had one on his house and, when asked if he believed it brought luck allegedly replied: of course not but I have been reliably informed it will bring me luck whether I believe it or not. It's a line of thinking many are probably still happy to follow, although I imagine most would draw the line at a horseshoe rather than employing the full range of charms available to our ancestors.

 Witch Bottle, Portable Antiquities Scheme

A fear of magic implies a belief in its power. While witch marks and horseshoes are visible signs that a house is protected, some of the other methods used were far more secretive, perhaps because they had 'magic' in their creation. Repelling a witch is one thing, to be accused of being one yourself in the doing would be rather unfortunate. The stoppered vessels known as witch bottles for example, which have been discovered bricked inside walls particularly in houses in East Anglia, could be classed as a form of magic fly trap. The bottles were intended to trap the witch who threatened the home-owner and contained mixtures of pins (to catch the evil), red wine (to drown it) and rosemary (to cleanse it away). If the identity of the witch was known, adding a personal touch, such as their urine or finger parings, made the magic doubly strong. Other, perhaps less dangerous, charms included fashioning the lintels over windows and doors from rowan wood and concealing shoes in the rafters and the hearth - this latter superstition apparently stemmed from the story of a priest in the thirteenth century who once trapped the devil in a boot. For the finishing touch, a mummified cat could be placed in the chimney breast - possibly an inversion of witchcraft as it uses the traditional witch's familiar to repel the danger.

Inverted name -  Norfolk Medieval Graffiti Survey

Protection is one thing but sometimes a stronger response to danger was required and charms gave way to curses. Examples of curses, essentially an inversion of magic/evil, have also been found in and around both church and domestic buildings. Curses which may be intended to direct the evil back at its perpetrator rather than merely block it do not need to be complex: witch marks have been discovered which are, apparently deliberately, incomplete, for example with a missing petal. Some curses, however, are very specifically directed: Roman-style curses in which the targeted person's name and the details of the damage to be inflicted have been found on church walls, including at Norwich Cathedral. The writing is corrupted, being inverted with the letters jumbled, hence the assumption that these are curses.

Many of us feel like we are currently living in dark days. Whatever the truth of these marks, and no matter how difficult it is to really 'read' their intentions, they offer a fascinating insight into a world where fear of external dangers was just as real and the need to guard against them perhaps no different to our gated communities and lives lived under the shadow of CCTV. If this has wetted your appetite, Matthew Champion's wonderful book Medieval Graffiti: The Lost Voices of England's Churches is a really good read.

Happy hunting...