The Binding Curse

On the broad plains of Thessaly, famous for its powerful witches, and north into the wild savage lands of Thrace, the people of the ancient Hellenic world lived in a time of magic. To the ancient Greeks magic was not a dark and separate thing from religion, it was a part of it.

Although in the more sophisticated south the Olympian gods held sway, there was in that time, no difference between magic and religion. The Olympians were the gods of the skies and the dominant gods, while below the earth the chthonic gods, goddesses, and demons ruled. Most Greeks resorted to both.

It was Hecate, the old goddess of the crossroads who was most often associated with with magic charms, though Persephone was addressed and Hermes was officially the sky god of magic. Hecate seems to be a lingering manifestation of the old, all powerful earth goddess, Ge, whose worship long continued in the wilder north. She appears to have been a symbol of a time when women were more powerful.

The attempt to control the physical world by magic would indicate an inability to do so more directly and in ancient Greece, it was the exploited and powerless women who are most often associated with magic. Men were most often seen to be gifted with prescience and were famous as seers, though many men resorted to curses regularly. Controlled by men every moment of their lives, the women turned to their mother, the earth, Ge.

Among the most common of ancient artifacts are small pieces of lead so thin that a simple stylus can be used to engrave a message upon them. Curses and love charms abound in this medium, but there is a wide variety of other sorts of requests. These simple lead rectangles called, katadesmoi may originally have been more elaborate than the surviving metal. There is extant a description of the casting of a curse called, the thrice cold curse, which calls for the use of several colors of yarn to be plaited and knotted in an elaborate ritual manner and such more perishable material may have accompanied the surviving metal.

Lead is a byproduct of the smelting of silver and the great number of katadesmoi found at Athens is due to the large amounts of silver mined there. Curse tablets of organic material must have been used as well and must have been more widely used in areas where lead was more difficult to obtain or more expensive. Papyrus was used and has survived in the dry climate of Egypt, but as it decays in the climate of Greece non have been found there. For a curse to last, the physical tablet must last and metal would be a good choice.

This recently discovered tablet unearthed at Pella is an excellent example of the importance of the curse lasting. The woman casting the curse, Dagina, wishing to bind the man, Dionysophon to her for all of his life chooses lead available in Macedon due to the silver mines of Thrace. The following is a translation;

"1. On the formal wedding of [Theti]ma and Dionysophon I write a curse, and of all other
2. wo[men], widows and virgins, but of Thetima in particular, and I entrust upon Makron and
3. [the] demons that only whenever I dig out and unroll and re-read this,
4. [then] may they wed Dionysophon, but not before; and may he never wed any woman but me;
5. and may [I] grow old with Dionysophon, and no one else. I [am] your supplicant:
6. Have mercy on [your dear one], dear demons, Dagina(?), for I am abandoned of all my dear ones.
7. But please keep this for my sake so that these events do not happen and wretched Thetima perishes miserably
8. and to me grant [ha]ppiness and bliss."

This is a fine example of a binding curse. Most Greek curses are binding curses. They never call for the death of the victim. They seek to control the victims behavior.

It would have been very foolish to leave behind a curse which called for the death of any individual as a curse would have been considered a weapon like a dagger or poison in the courts of the time. Everyone believed implicitly in their efficacy. as Christopher A. Faraone of The University Of Chicago says, " Like the NRA holds about guns, curses don't kill. people do". a curse was then considered only another sort of weapon.

Curses were often much more elaborate then a simple lead rectangle. There is a group of artifacts called voodoo dolls which it seems are obviously prepared by professional curse makers. A group was found in the Karamikos which indicate some degree of sophistication which would lead to the conclusion that professionals were involved in their making. These are lead cast figures of people bound with their hands and feet tied behind their backs. They are placed in coffin- like leaden cases and most often have nails or spikes inserted in varying places in their bodies. Gruesome as these might appear to be, they do not indicate death or pain, but rather suggest an inability to use the indicated areas of the body. Again these are binding curses. Judging from the amount of finds which indicate pending law suits, it was usual for a litigant to purchase the services of a curse maker to bind the tongue of an orator and produce a favorable result for the curse maker. One notable curse of this nature seeks to bind the tongues of those who would respond to Lysias, one of the most successful orators of the day.

The vast amounts of these tablets attest to the fact that they were generally accepted as effective in ancient Greece. The childless wife buried these pleas for a son, men sought to acquire the women they loved, women the men they desired, as well as court litigants and anyone who wished the answer to a question. These tablets give an insight to the private lives of the ancient Greeks. They are at once immediate and moving in their candor. The following translated tablet tells an entire story of life in those times;

"Theocritus (c. 310-c. 250 BCE) wrote a treatise under the title Pharmakeutriai (‘the Witches’). The text describes a young Greek woman, Simaetha, who fell in love with a young athlete. They hooked up and for a time were happy together, but now, he has not come to see her for 11 days. She decides to use magic to get him back. She visits a number of practitioners and then performs a magical ritual near her house that involves barley groats, bay leaves, bran, wax, liquids (wine, milk, water), coltsfoot, and pulverized lizard. She uses a magical wheel, a bull-roarer, and a bronze gong as tools. She also has a fringe from her lover’s cloak that she uses to represent him that she throws into the fire. Finally, she speaks various spells and incantations to the full moon and to Hecate."

Simaetha believed; one wonders if it worked. Can love be forced? Should it be? Is it the same?

It was only with the coming of the Romans that magic became a dark and fearful thing; in ancient Greece it was an everyday thing. The beautiful young handmaiden of Persephone, Hecate becomes an old and fearsome hag. With the coming of Christianity, an evil witch. To this day in Greece, the Greek Orthodox church employs secret prayers to ward off the evil eye, a superstition older than history.