Ancient love spells date all the way back to Ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, and the rest of Fertile Crescent. While magic was discouraged and sometimes even punished in antiquity, it thrived all the same. Authorities publicly condemned it, but tended to ignore its powerful hold as it was very widespread and quite common. Erotic spells were a popular form of magic. Professional magic practitioners charged fees for writing erotic charms, making enchanted dolls (more to come on dolls used in spellwork), and even directing curses against rivals in love.
Magic is widely attested in archaeological evidence, spell books and literature from both Greece and Rome, as well as Egypt, and the rest of the Middle East. The Greek Magical Papyri from Graeco-Roman Egypt is a large collection of papyri listing spells for many purposes. The collection was compiled from sources dating from the 2nd century BC to the 5th century AD, and includes numerous spells of attraction.
Some spells involve making dolls, which were intended to represent the object of desire (usually a woman who was either unaware or resistant to a would-be admirer). Instructions specified how an erotic doll should be made, what words should be said over it, and where it should be deposited. Such an object is a form of sympathetic magic.
The best preserved and most notorious magical doll from antiquity, the so-called “Louvre Doll” (4th century AD), depicts a naked female in kneeling position, bound, and pierced with 13 needles. Fashioned from unbaked clay, the doll was found in a terracotta vase in Egypt. The accompanying spell, inscribed on a lead tablet, records the woman’s name as Ptolemais and the man who made the spell, or commissioned a magician to do so, as Sarapammon.
The spells that accompanied such dolls and the spells from antiquity on all manner of topics, were not mild in the language and imagery employed. Ancient spells were often violent, brutal and without any sense of caution or remorse. In the spell that comes with the Louvre Doll, the language is both frightening and repellent in a modern context. For example, one part of the spell directed at Ptolemais reads:
Do not allow her to eat, drink, hold out, venture out, or find sleep…
Another part reads:
Drag her by the hair, by the guts, until she no longer scorns me…
Such language is hardly indicative of any emotion pertaining to love, or even attraction. Especially when combined with the doll, the spell may strike a modern reader as obsessive (perhaps reminiscent of a stalker) and even misogynistic. Indeed, rather than seeking love, the intention behind the spell suggests seeking control and domination. Such were the gender and sexual dynamics of antiquity.
But in a masculine world, in which competition in all aspects of life was intense, and the goal of victory was paramount, violent language was typical in spells pertaining to anything from success in a court case to the rigging of a chariot race. One theory suggests that the more ferocious the words, the more powerful and effective the spell. Most of the technologies that are used in spells for throwing erotic passion into someone are borrowed from the realm of cursing. If you actually track it down, melting wax, sticking pins into an image, and a lot of the language in the surviving erotic charms are all used in cursing rituals. Thus half of the repertoire of love magic is curses, whereas the philia-producing spells uses amulets, knotted cords, and potions, which aren’t technologies you find in curses–you find them in healing magic.
Most ancient evidence attests to men as both professional magical practitioners and their clients. There was a need to be literate to perform most magic (most women were not educated) and to be accessible to clients (most women were not free to receive visitors or have a business). However, some women also engaged in erotic magic although the sources on this are relatively scarce. This healing magic, which seems to have been the purview of women, evolved in the hands of women into forms of philia magic focused on healing or preserving a broken relationship. Erotic magic, on the other hand, is based on cursing techniques and often seems to be used by one family to attack another. Most often it seems to be used by a man who’s on the outside of a family trying to get a woman out of her father’s house or her husband’s house by breaking up a relationship.
Taking a psychological approach to erotic spells, it could be argued that they were primarily used by people who were helplessly in love. They were used self-therapeutically. By projecting their pain and suffering on the victim, who they perceived as the cause of their pain, it would take away their own suffering or gain progress in their relationship. It is more likely that men used these curse-like spells for sexual conquests and domination. In one of the surviving texts, a man casts erotic spells on several different women.
These were used by men to inflict great pain and suffering on women, but the men want the pain and suffering to stop when the women arrive at their door. Thus a common formula reads something like: “Burn, whip, torture the heart, the liver, the body of NAME, until she leaps from her home and comes to me, NAME.” The assumption of the users of these spells is that these women are not going to make love to them or even look their way unless some supernatural torture is applied to them to force them to come.
In ancient Athens a woman was taken to court on the charge of attempting to poison her husband. The trial was recorded in a speech delivered on behalf of the prosecution (dated around 419 BC). It includes the woman’s defense, which stated that she did not intend to poison her husband but to administer a love philtre to reinvigorate the marriage. The speech, entitled Against the Stepmother for Poisoning by Antiphon, clearly reveals that the Athenians practiced and believed in love potions and may suggest that this more subtle form of erotic magic (compared to the casting of spells and the making of enchanted dolls) was the domain of women.
Within the multiplicity of spells found in the Greek Magical Papyri, two deal specifically with female same sex desire. In one of these, a woman by the name of Herais attempts to magically entreat a woman by the name of Serapis. In this spell, dated to the 2nd century AD, the gods Anubis and Hermes are called upon to bring Serapis to Herais and to bind Serapis to her. In the second spell, dated to the 3rd or 4th century AD, a woman called Sophia seeks out a woman by the name of Gorgonia. This spell, written on a lead tablet, is aggressive in tone;
Burn, set on fire, inflame her soul, heart, liver, spirit, with love for Sophia…
Gods and goddesses were regularly summoned in magic. In the spell to attract Serapis, for example, Anubis is included based on his role as the god of the secrets of Egyptian magic. Hermes, a Greek god, was often included because as a messenger god, he was a useful choice in spells that sought contact with someone. The tendency to combine gods from several cultures was not uncommon in ancient magic, indicative of its eclectic nature and perhaps a form of hedging one’s bets (if one religion’s god won’t listen, one from another belief system may).
Deities with erotic connections were also inscribed on gems to induce attraction. The Greek god of eroticism, Eros was a popular figure to depict on a gemstone, which could then be fashioned into a piece of jewelry.
The numerous erotic spells in antiquity – from potions to dolls to enchanted gems and rituals – not only provide information about magic in the ancient Mediterranean world, but the intricacies and cultural conventions around sexuality and gender.
The rigid system of clearly demarcated gender roles of active (male) and passive (female) partners, based on a patriarchy that championed dominance and success at all costs, underpinned the same societies’ magical practices. Yet it is important to note that even in magic featuring people of the same sex, aggressive language is employed because of the conventions that underlined ancient spells.
Still magic remains, in part, a mystery when it comes to erotic practice and conventions. The two same-sex spells from the Greek Magical Papyri, for example, attest to the reality of erotic desire among ancient women, but do not shed light on whether this type of sexuality was condoned in Roman Egypt. Perhaps such desires were not socially approved; hence the recourse to magic. Perhaps the desires of Sarapammon for Ptolemais were also outside the bounds of acceptability, which led him to the surreptitious and desperate world of magic.
Much of my research information comes from this article here. Feel free to read the original!
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