Erotic Magic and its Socio-cultural Context
Student Podcast for Credit in HIST 2210, LC
By: L. Baker
Hey y’all, welcome back to “Contemporary Classics”. My name is Lily, and I’ll be your host for the next fifteen minutes. Today’s topic is on the socio-cultural use of Erotic magic in ancient Greece from the Hellenistic period, which begins in 323 BC with the death of the late, Great Alexander, and goes all the way up to 31 BC which is marked by the rise of the Roman Empire under the Emperor Augustus.
Before we delve into the specifics, I’d like to set the scene with some context regarding magic in general. First, why are we learning about it? Well, aside from the fact that magic is obviously amazing and everyone loves hearing about it, magic was a key part of everyday life in Greek antiquity. At a time when the basic connection between hygiene and health was still a mysterious concept, the world was full of inexplicable events and realities, from the changing seasons to natural disasters. Without the scientific knowledge to explain natural occurrences, religion and magic became the way people understood the world. When an earthquake occurred, Poseidon was responsible and needed to be appeased; if a couple was having trouble conceiving, they could sacrifice a pig to gain the favour of one of the numerous fertility goddesses. Essentially, rituals provided people with a sense of control over their environment and their lives, and a way to understand events that seemed utterly random. We actually see examples of this today, from a simple rhyme that some of you may have learned and sang in childhood, “rain rain go away, come again another day”, to the Balinese festival of Eka Dasa Rudra which involves a life or death ritual that occurs every one hundred years in order to restore balance between the forces of Good and Evil. Magic and its rituals, whether a part of religion or perceived as separate altogether, serve a multitude of purposes in daily life, whether in contemporary times or in antiquity. So, for our purposes, the study of spells and magical practices is an integral part of understanding Greek society.
Okay, now that you have an idea of the importance of magic in general, let’s go into Erotic magic. As you know, from my many previous episodes, topics like Erotic magic have to be contextualized within a certain location and era, because the nuances of a certain culture’s understanding can differ vastly from their neighbours, or even the same culture’s perspective from a hundred years into their past, and that unique perspective brings a very unique meaning to a term. So, it’s important that I clarify what Erotic means from the perspective of classical antiquity. While the term might bring to mind sensual pleasures and sexual or romantic love, magic in the context of antiquity tends to be controlling and outright violent. So, rather than enhancing pleasure or increasing arousal, or any of the things that you might think Erotic magic would be used for, it is, in the words of Classical scholar Mathew Dickie, “a form of magic intended to control the sexual behaviour of others” (Dickie, 2000, p. 565). Erotic magic, otherwise pradoxically known as love magic, typically relies on curses which aim to torment an individual, driving them mad with pain or depriving them of basic functions such as sleep, in order to push them into the arms of the curser or away from the curser’s lover. Not only was it used for the acquisition or defense of a lover, but also for professional situations such as prostitutes aiming curses at rivals (Dickie, 2000, p. 565). To understand this foundation of violence, I’d like to read a passage from Christopher Faraone's text, Ancient Greek Love Magic, which can be found in the second chapter, titled “Spells for Inducing Uncontrollable Passion (Eros)”.
Before we can adequately understand why a man would bind and torture an effigy to force a woman to desire him, we need to explore in greater detail how the Greeks perceived the experience of erotic desire as the onset of a pathological disease. Indeed, it is instructive that when Homer wishes to express the feeling of erotic infatuation, he uses epic formulae that elsewhere describe dead and wounded warriors whose limbs have been “loosened” or on whose heads a mist has been poured. The earliest Greek lyric poets knew this equation of erotic seizure (erÃs) and illness (nosos) all too well. Archilochus speaks in similar ways of a thick mist over his eyes or pains piercing his bones, and when Anacreon says “Eros struck me with a massive hammer, like a bronze worker, and then doused me (i.e., red-hot) into a frigid stream,” he is probably thinking of the alternation of fever and chills that often accompanies severe illness. Indeed, this is an image that Sappho develops in great detail when she speaks in the same sentence of a fire running under skin, her ears buzzing, and a cold sweat pouring over her (frag. 31.9–15). But erÃs is also treated as a mental disease, which attacks the various inner faculties of thought and emotion, such as the heart (phrenes or thumos) or the mind (nous). In epic poetry, the magical kestos himas of Aphrodite can “steal away the mind of thoughtful men,” and Eros can “pour a mist over the stout heart” of Zeus or “subdue the mind and thoughtful counsel in a man’s breast.” Likewise Ibycus says that Paris caused Helen’s heart to flutter in her breast and that she was driven mad, and Sappho speaks of her heart (phrÁn) burning with desire. This tradition of erÃs as a disease, moreover, continues into Roman times both as a literary conceit and as a serious topic of medical debate. (pp. 43-44)
Essentially, the quote from Faraone tells us that love and sexual desire were seen as destructive forces, which brought physical and mental illness to the infatuated party. It really gives new meaning to a saying like “once burned, twice shy”. You may have noticed that, at the very beginning of the quote, the individual working magic is a man. In classical literature, namely the Epics of Homer, sorceresses and enchantresses abound, and magic is essentially a weapon used by evil women. However, much like today where practitioners of magic can be any gender, age, or class, magic was practiced by women and men in antiquity. In fact, based on the archeological evidence of papyrus spell books and curse tablets, men employed the use of erotic magic far more than women (Dickie, 2000, p. 563). Spells were often inscribed by professional scribes rather than the individual curser, and were in fact often composed by professional curse-writers, who produced templates which could later be adjusted for the personal circumstance of the curser. It is noteworthy that these pre-made curses were written under the assumption that the curser was male and the victim female. However, scribes could change the gender for a specific case, whether the curser was a woman or both parties men, and curses were advertised to people of any gender (Dickie, 2000, p. 565).
Alright, now that you understand some context and the necessary background, I’d like to talk about some specific examples of Erotic magic. Just as we might use a children’s rhyme to influence the weather, the Greeks believed certain rituals could influence spirits, demons, gods, and the like to affect the lives of other people, including smacking someone with love sickness (Faraone, p. 49). One such ritual, or rather a tool used in rituals, were curse tablets. These tablets were made of metal, typically lead, although other local metals such as tin could be used in its place. The properties of metal had metaphorical parallels to concepts of death and immobility, which were fundamentally tied to curses (Bravo, p. 125). Pottery, papyrus and wax were also possible materials, although no wax tablets survive from antiquity, and are only mentioned in Ovid's writings (Edmonds, p. 57). The tablets were inscribed with curses. Early curse tablets simply included the victim's name and a binding verb, whereas later tablets included more complex descriptions, and occasionally a drawing (Edmonds, p. 59). Tablets have been found rolled up or folded, either in an attempt to maintain secrecy or as part of the ritual, and some have been pierced with a nail in a symbolic attempt to bind the victim (Edmonds, p. 60). Alternatively, a piece of string can be used, knotted in various ways (Edmonds, p. 61). The unifying factor for all curse tablets, is that they seek to actively punish victims; they could be created against an athlete to prevent him from winning, a neighbour for borrowing a tool and never returning it, or a rival professional. The desired punishments could range from discomfort, like being urinated on by a donkey, to violence, such as extreme pain or a gruesome death (Edmonds, p. 53). Once the curser had inscribed the tablet with the desired punishment, they would then perform rituals such as blood sacrifice and incantations, which could be spoken or sung, in order to imbue the tablets with power (Edmonds, p. 56). Now, as I’ve said, curse tablets were used for a wide range of magic, and certainly aren’t limited to erotic content, but for the purposes of this episode I’ll be sharing some erotic curses from real curse tablets. The first, is from a batch of Hellenistic-era tablets recently discovered at the sanctuary of Zeus at Nemea, which was actually the location of the Nemean games, one of the four locations for the Olympics in antiquity. More specifically, it was found near a hero shrine of a man who died young and by violent means, which is significant because spells were thought to be most effective when placed somewhere infused with magical properties. A violent death and a life cut short created a particularly powerful energetic hotspot (Bravo, p. 121). The tablet reads as follows:
I turn Euboula away from Aineas: from his face, from his eyes, from his mouth, from his chest, from his soul, from his belly, from his erect penis, from his anus, from all his body. I turn Euboula away from Aineas. (Bravo, p. 129)
Another tablet, from a sourcebook titled Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds by scholar Daniel Ogden, is an excellent example of the detail that can be seen in certain curses. It reads as follows:
I register the rite and the marriage of Thetima and Dionysophon, and those of all other women, widows, and maidens alike, but especially that of Thetima, and I deposit this spell with Macron and the demons. If I were ever to dig up, unroll, and read this tablet again, then may Dionysophon marry, but not before. May he take no woman other than me, and let me grow old beside Dionysophon, and no other woman. I am a suppliant woman before you. Take pity on <Phil-[?]>a, dear demons….[lacuna] I have no friends or family and I am alone. But guard this text for me, so that these things don't come to pass and so that the evil Thetima is destroyed in a fittingly evil fashion…[lacuna] [M]ay I become fortunate and blessed (p. 227)
As you can hear, curses can have the option to remove or rescind the curse if certain conditions are met, and the same goes for enacting certain curses. Sometimes punishments require a certain action to be done, or not done, within a certain time frame. For example, a curse may describe a gruesome death that should only occur if the victim continues to behave poorly or fails to make amends by the end of a year.
Aside from curse tablets, there were a variety of other magical devices and techniques which were available to practitioners. Voodoo dolls were popular from as early as the archaic period, and continued to be used throughout Greek and Roman antiquity (Ogden, p. 245). In the case of Greek voodoo, the victim is portrayed as a doll, made from a variety of materials such as lead, clay, wool, or dough (the latter two being only mentioned in literature, sadly having left no physical record behind) (Ogden, p. 245). The dolls could be placed at doors, crossroads, or tombs, and it's likely that the goal in doing so was for the victim to see the doll and know that he or she was being cursed, in order to instill paranoia and fear (Ogden, p. 22). Because the ancient Greeks believed such magic was effective, the mere sight of such a tool would likely be enough to send the victim into a self-inflicted spiral of doubt and panic, leading to mistakes and misfortune that could be attributed to magic. The following text, From Daniel Ogden’s Sourcebook titled “Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds”, is an example of how a wax doll could be used.
they called down curses on those who should foreswear themselves and fail to abide by their oath…[t]hey molded wax dolls [kolossoi] and burned them while calling down the curse, all having come together, men, women, boys, and girls. They prayed that the one who did not abide by these oaths but foreswore himself should melt and dissolve just like the dolls, he himself, his descendants, and his property, but that those that did abide by these oaths...should have many good things, both they themselves and their descendants. (p. 245)
I’d like to share a final quote from Ogden’s sourcebook, which describes a particularly detailed and graphic spell using a voodoo doll. I think it really embodies the violence which can be seen in erotic magic from Greek antiquity. Despite how specific it is, it’s actually a template, so I’ve filled in some names to give you a better idea of what a finished product might look like. This particular spell is extremely long, so I’m only including excerpts here.
Take thirteen bronze needles and insert one of them into the brain while saying, “I pierce your brain [Artemisia]”; insert two into her ears, two more into her eyes, one into her mouth, two below her rib cage, one into her hands, two into her vulva and anus, and two into the soles of her feet, while on each occasion saying once, “I pierce the [body part] of [Artemisia], so that she may think of no one, except me alone, [Theophrastus].”
...Lay [the doll] as the sun sets beside the grave of one untimely dead or dead by violence, and lay flowers of the season there with it
...Let her not fornicate, let her not be buggered, and let her not do anything that brings pleasure with another man, unless with me alone, [Theophrastus], so that [Artemisia] is not able either to drink or to eat, or hold out, or to endure it, or be calm, so that [Artemisia] is not able to find sleep without me...drag [Artemisia] by her hair, by her guts, by her soul, to me, [Theophrastus], every hour of time, by night and by day, until she comes to me, [Theophrastus], and let her stay inseparably by my side. Make her, bind her for the full extent of my life and compel [Artemisia] to serve me, [Theophrastus], and let her not prance away from me for an hour of time.
...bring me [Artemisia] and glue her head to my head, fasten her lips to my lips, glue her stomach to my stomach, draw her thigh to my thigh, integrate her black with my black, and let [Artemisia] satisfy her sexual desires with me, [Theophrastus], for all the time of eternity. (pp. 247-249)
Our friend Theophrastus certainly covers all the bases. The erotic spells covered in this episode all share a fervent desire to control the practices and freedoms of others, just as magic in general was used in an attempt to understand and control the world. Despite the apparent negative connotations of love as a disease, love and the devotion such an emotion inspires, was also a desirable thing within a marriage, because it led to loyalty and fidelity - two characteristics which were particularly idealized in an ancient Greek woman, who’s main role was to be a wife and mother. At a time when paternity tests were unavailable and the only way to ensure the legitimacy of a man’s children was to control the sexual activities of his wife, the appeal of erotic magic is clear. Of course, throughout human history the desire to ensure faithfulness has been a common concern of both genders, and binding a partner “for all the time of eternity” would certainly solve the issue.
Thank you for listening to Contemporary Classics. If you’re interested in getting to know more about this topic, I’d like to leave you with the following recommendations:
For more general information, covering both magic and magic users as well as more specifics such as erotic magic and the legalities of magic, Mathew Dickie’s Magic and magicians in the Greco-Roman world, and Radcliffe Edmonds’ Drawing Down the Moon: Magic in the Ancient Greco-Roman World are both fantastic sources. Daniel Ogden’s sourcebook titled Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman worlds will also provide you with many more examples of real spells and historical evidence for magic.
For a more specific look at erotic magic, I’d advise Mathew Dickie’s article titled Who Practised Love-Magic in Classical Antiquity and in the Late Roman World? As well as Christopher Faroane’s book titled Ancient Greek Love Magic
And for those of you who may be interested in Roman magic, The Campbell Bonner Magical Gems Database focuses on magical gems from the Roman Imperial period.
Bibliography
Bravo, Jorge. (2016). Erotic Curse Tablets from the Heroön of Opheltes at Nemea. Hesperia, 85(1), 121-151.
Dickie, M. W. (2001). Magic and magicians in the Greco-Roman world. Taylor & Francis Group.
Dickie, M. (2000). Who Practised Love-Magic in Classical Antiquity and in the Late Roman World? The Classical Quarterly, 50(2), 563-583.
Edmonds, Radcliffe. (2019). Drawing Down the Moon: Magic in the Ancient Greco-Roman World. Princeton University Press.
Faraone, Christopher. (2001). Ancient Greek Love Magic. Harvard University Press.
Pillinger, E. (2012). «And the gods dread to hear another poem»: The Repetitive Poetics of Witchcraft from Virgil to Lucan. Materiali E Discussioni per L'analisi Dei Testi Classici, (68), 39-79.
Ogden, D. (2002). Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman worlds: A Sourcebook. Oxford University Press.
