Curse tablet
Encyclopedia
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
, κατάδεσμος katadesmos in Greek
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
) is a type of curse
Curse
A curse is any expressed wish that some form of adversity or misfortune will befall or attach to some other entity—one or more persons, a place, or an object...
found throughout the Graeco-Roman world, in which someone would ask the gods to do harm to others.
Description
These texts were typically scratched on very thin sheets of leadLead
Lead is a main-group element in the carbon group with the symbol Pb and atomic number 82. Lead is a soft, malleable poor metal. It is also counted as one of the heavy metals. Metallic lead has a bluish-white color after being freshly cut, but it soon tarnishes to a dull grayish color when exposed...
in tiny letters, then often rolled, folded, or pierced with nails. These bound tablets were then usually placed beneath the ground: either buried in graves or tombs, thrown into wells or pools, sequestered in underground sanctuaries, or nailed to the walls of temples. Tablets were also used for love spells and, when used in this manner they were placed inside the home of the desired target. They are sometimes discovered along with small dolls or figurines (sometimes inaccurately referred to as "Voodoo dolls"), which may also be pierced by nails. The figurines resembled the target and often had both their feet and hands bound. Curse tablets also included hair or pieces of clothing. This is especially the case in love spells, which calls for “hair from the head of the love target.” Some love spells have even been discovered “folded around some hair,” probably to bind the spell itself . “Not all tablets included a personal name, but it is clear especially in the Roman period, that tablets were sometimes prepared in advance, with space left for inserting the names provided by paying customers."
The texts on curse tablets are typically addressed to infernal or liminal gods such as Hermes
Hermes
Hermes is the great messenger of the gods in Greek mythology and a guide to the Underworld. Hermes was born on Mount Kyllini in Arcadia. An Olympian god, he is also the patron of boundaries and of the travelers who cross them, of shepherds and cowherds, of the cunning of thieves, of orators and...
, Charon
Charon (mythology)
In Greek mythology, Charon or Kharon is the ferryman of Hades who carries souls of the newly deceased across the rivers Styx and Acheron that divided the world of the living from the world of the dead. A coin to pay Charon for passage, usually an obolus or danake, was sometimes placed in or on...
, Hecate
Hecate
Hecate or Hekate is a chthonic Greco-Roman goddess associated with magic, witchcraft, necromancy, and crossroads.She is attested in poetry as early as Hesiod's Theogony...
, and Persephone
Persephone
In Greek mythology, Persephone , also called Kore , is the daughter of Zeus and the harvest-goddess Demeter, and queen of the underworld; she was abducted by Hades, the god-king of the underworld....
, sometimes via the mediation of a dead person (probably the corpse in whose grave the tablet was deposited). Some texts do not invoke the gods, however, but merely list the targets of the curse, the crimes or conditions upon which the curse is valid, and/or the intended ill to befall them. Some tablets are inscribed with nothing more than the names of the targets, leading to the supposition that an oral spell may have accompanied the manufacture of the curse. The texts on the tablets were not always curses; tablets were also used to help the dead. Those at whose grave sites these were placed had usually died at a very young age or in a violent manner, and the tablet was supposed to help lay their souls to rest in spite of their untimely deaths. The language of those texts that do give context is often concerned with justice, either listing the target's crimes in great detail, handing over responsibility for their punishment to the gods, using indefinite grammar ("whoever committed this crime"), or conditional ("if he is guilty"), or even future conditional ("if he ever breaks his word").. Frequently, such curse tablets are also inscribed with additional, otherwise meaningless "curse" words such as Bazagra, Bescu
Barbarous names
A barbarous name is a meaningless or seemingly meaningless word used in magic rituals. The term barbarous comes from the Greek barbaroi meaning those who do not follow Greek customs, barbarian...
, or Berebescu, seemingly in order to lend them a kind of supernatural efficacy.
Many of those discovered at Athens refer to court
Athenian law court (classical period)
The law courts in classical Athens were a fundamental organ of democratic governance. According to Aristotle, whoever controls the courts, controls the state....
cases and curse the opposing litigant, asking ("May he...") that he botch his performance in court, forget his words, become dizzy and so forth. Others include erotic binding-spells, spells ranged against thieves, and business and sporting rivals. Those curse tablets targeted at thieves or other criminals may have been more public, more acceptable; some scholars even refuse to apply the word "curse" to such "positive" texts, preferring expressions such as "judicial prayers".
About 130 curse tablets have been found at Aquae Sulis
Aquae Sulis
Aquae Sulis was a small town in the Roman province of Britannia. Today it is known as Bath, located in the English county of Somerset.-Baths and temple complex:...
(now Bath in England), where many of the curses related to thefts of clothes whilst the victim was bathing. Over 80 more have similarly been discovered in and about the remains of a temple to Mercury
Mercury (mythology)
Mercury was a messenger who wore winged sandals, and a god of trade, the son of Maia Maiestas and Jupiter in Roman mythology. His name is related to the Latin word merx , mercari , and merces...
nearby, at West Hill, Uley
Uley
Uley is a village in the county of Gloucestershire, England. It is situated in a wooded valley in the Cotswold escarpment, on the road between Dursley and Stroud. The population is around 1,100, but was much greater during the early years of the industrial revolution, when the village was...
, making south-western Britain one of the major centres for finds of Latin defixiones.
In Ancient Egypt
Ancient Egypt
Ancient Egypt was an ancient civilization of Northeastern Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now the modern country of Egypt. Egyptian civilization coalesced around 3150 BC with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the first pharaoh...
, so-called "Execration Texts
Execration Texts
Execration texts, also referred to as Proscription Lists, are ancient Egyptian hieratic texts, listing enemies of the Pharaoh, most often enemies of the Egyptian state or troublesome foreign neighbors. The texts were most often written upon statuettes of bound foreigners, bowls, or blocks of clay...
" appear around the time of the 12th Dynasty
Twelfth dynasty of Egypt
The twelfth dynasty of ancient Egypt is often combined with Dynasties XI, XIII and XIV under the group title Middle Kingdom.-Rulers:Known rulers of the twelfth dynasty are as follows :...
, listing the names of enemies written on clay figurines or pottery which were then smashed and buried beneath a building under construction (so that they were symbolically "smothered"), or in a cemetery.
Voces mysticae
Voces mysticae are words not immediately recognizable as belonging to any known language, and are commonly associated with curse tablets. Anthropologist Stanely J. Tambiah proposed in 1968 that such words were intended to represent "the language that demons can understand".Scholars from antiquity, like Christian philosopher Clement of Alexandria
Clement of Alexandria
Titus Flavius Clemens , known as Clement of Alexandria , was a Christian theologian and the head of the noted Catechetical School of Alexandria. Clement is best remembered as the teacher of Origen...
(ca. 200 C.E.), believed that human language was not appropriate for addressing the gods. Therefore, some of the inscriptions of these curse tablets are not easily translatable, because they were "invocations and secret names" which would only be understood by the spirits themselves. Another possibility is that curse tablets were produced by professionals who wished to lend their art a degree of mystique through the use of an apparently secret language that only they could understand. In support of this theory, at least some tablets appear to have blank spaces instead of a name for the target, suggesting they were prepared in advance, and that the desired target's name would be added on behalf of the customer.
Historiography
Magic was used by the people of the Greco-Roman society to control the natural. All members of society, regardless of economic or class status, used such magic. There have been roughly 1600 curse tablets discovered, mostly written in Greek. Of those tablets, 220 were located in AtticaAttica
Attica is a historical region of Greece, containing Athens, the current capital of Greece. The historical region is centered on the Attic peninsula, which projects into the Aegean Sea...
.
The first set of curse tablets to be discovered came from the city of Selinus in Sicily
Sicily
Sicily is a region of Italy, and is the largest island in the Mediterranean Sea. Along with the surrounding minor islands, it constitutes an autonomous region of Italy, the Regione Autonoma Siciliana Sicily has a rich and unique culture, especially with regard to the arts, music, literature,...
. A total of twenty-two tablets were found, mostly coming from the early fifth century, and directed toward someone that the user was suing. While the ancient Greeks may have feared the power of these tablets, some historians have compared the tablets to modern swearing, arguing that they were produced in a fit of anger, in envy towards a business competitor or athletic opponent, or in an unhealthy obsession toward a person of romantic interest.
When research first began on the topic of curse tablets, there was serious doubt that these types of artifacts truly came from ancient Greek society. Most historians believed that ancient Greek society was highly sophisticated, and did not believe in superstitions. E.R. Dodds, a professor of Greek at Oxford
Oxford
The city of Oxford is the county town of Oxfordshire, England. The city, made prominent by its medieval university, has a population of just under 165,000, with 153,900 living within the district boundary. It lies about 50 miles north-west of London. The rivers Cherwell and Thames run through...
, was one of the first scholars to begin studying the topic of magic or superstition in ancient Greece, and others such as Peter Green
Peter Green (historian)
Peter Green is a British classical scholar noted for his works on Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic Age of ancient history, generally regarded as spanning the era from the death of Alexander in 323 BC up to either the date of the Battle of Actium or the death of Augustus in 14 AD...
have also studied this aspect of ancient Greek society.
Erotic magic
There is debate over whether the use of curse tablets for erotic spells was strictly a male practice, or if both sexes took up the art. Scholars have debated the possible motivations for using erotic magic, including unrequited love, sexual control of the “victim”, financial gain, and social advancement. The love spells used were similar in design around the Mediterranean world, and could be adjusted to different situations, users and intended victims. Recent scholarship has shown that women used curse tablets for erotic magic much more than originally thought, although they were still in a minority.There is also debate over the type of women that men were trying to attract with these spells. Some scholars subscribe to the idea of men trying to make fair, chaste women become filled with desire for them, while others argue that men were trying to control women whom they thought to be sexually active for their own personal benefit. Christopher A. Faraone considered the spells to fall into two distinct categories; spells used for inducing passion and spells used for encouraging affection. Men, according to Faraone, were the primary users of the passion-inducing spells, while women were the main users of the affection spells.
See also
- Magic in the Greco-Roman WorldMagic in the Greco-Roman worldThe study of magic in the Greco-Roman world is a branch of the disciplines of classics, ancient history and religious studies. In the ancient post-hellenistic world of the Greeks and Romans , the public and private rituals associated with religion are accepted by historians and archaeologists to...
- Pella curse tablet
- Greek Magical PapyriGreek magical papyriThe Greek Magical Papyri is the name given by scholars to a body of papyri from Graeco-Roman Egypt, which each contain a number of magical spells, formulae, hymns and rituals. The materials in the papyri date from the 2nd century BC to the 5th century AD...
- Ephesia GrammataEphesia GrammataEphesia Grammata are Ancient Greek magical formulas attested from the 5th or 4th century BC. According to Pausanias the Lexicographer , their name derives from their being inscribed on the cult image of Artemis in Ephesus...
- Execration TextsExecration TextsExecration texts, also referred to as Proscription Lists, are ancient Egyptian hieratic texts, listing enemies of the Pharaoh, most often enemies of the Egyptian state or troublesome foreign neighbors. The texts were most often written upon statuettes of bound foreigners, bowls, or blocks of clay...