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If you'd like to suggest a topic, you can do so on Facebook and Instagram at Morbid Curiosity Podcast, on Twitter, at Morbid Podcast, and on our website, www.morbidcuryocitypodcast.com. Humans are fascinated by gore and violence. But even more so, the mysterious and unsolved. Interest in these disturbing and unpleasant subjects is called Morbid Curiosity, and it has good hundreds of people throughout the ages.
I own one of those people. My name is Halley, and this is the Morbid Curiosity Podcast. Magic is an ancient concept that originates back before written history. The concept of a curse is likely just as ancient.
A curse in this context is a sort of wish that some misfortune will be fall or attached to a person, a group of people, a place or an object. Usually this wish is requested of a supernatural or spiritual power, such as a god or goddess, a spirit, or natural force. Later in time, these wishes could be enacted by a person believed to be imbued with magic or witchcraft. In this episode, we are going to focus on a specific type of curse casting, one that left physical evidence in the archaeological record, something that is usually rare in the case of cultural concepts like magic.
Among ancient Mediterranean cultures, such as the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians, objects known today as curse tablets or day-thixiones in Latin, were created in an attempt to exact one person's will over another. The word de fixio is derived from a Latin word, de figare, meaning to pin down or bind. Today, to around 1600 tablets with curse texts on them have been found in the Mediterranean, various parts of Europe and Northern Africa, what was known as the Greco-Roman world during the classical era between the 6th century BCE and the 6th century CE. Some of the oldest tablets come from Sicily and Attica, where it's likely the making of death-exiones originates.
This was a time when magic was pervasive in Greco-Roman literature. Now famous poets, writers, and philosophers, spoke of it, including Plato. It was in the Hellenistic period between the 3203 BCE and 31 BCE, that most of the writing about magic was produced. This is a period in which the Roman Empire emerged and conquered Egypt.
Hellenistic refers to Greek culture, which heavily influenced the Romans at this time and afterwards. It's possible that these writings indicate an avid interest in magic at this time, but it could also be that earlier texts just haven't survived, and this interest was common before this period. Either way, magic was becoming systemized with handbooks and recipes being written to show the proper way to do it. With the rise of Christianity in the Mediterranean world, many of these magical texts were burned, but enough have survived to give modern researchers of limbs into the magical beliefs of those who practiced it.
Be aware, however, that the term of magic usually refers to some type of ritual that isn't part of the regular religion of the culture. The term doesn't really define anything specific, but for this episode it will be used to describe the making of death-exiones and the effects that they were believed to bring about, even though the death-exiones did invoke deities that were worshipped at the time. The ancient Greeks and Romans were pagan, believing in multiple gods, with the Roman pantheon being nearly identical to the ancient Greek pantheon, but with different names and some added qualities from many of the cultures they absorbed as they conquered Europe and the Mediterranean. Gods of death and the afterlife, known as katonic or underworld gods, were especially associated with cursed tablets.
Magic fell into two categories in the Greco-Roman world. Theurgy and Gautia, theurgy was a type of religious magic, priests used it as representatives of the divine. Gautia was used by sorcerers and wizards and involved charms and curses. To some writers at the time, it was considered a lower form of magic.
Plato wrote that heelers, prophets and sorcerers were real, and mostly controlled by laws, and should not be feared. Too much interest in a supernatural was regarded with suspicion. However, magic didn't necessarily conflict with conventional religion either. curses and magic used the ideology of religion and its practices, such as sacrifices.
The intentions of religion and magic were quite different, as was the relationship between the gods and humans, but magic often placed at the victims of death-exiones in the hands of the divine in order to force the victim to face the god's wrath. In some ways, death-exiones were attempts to force the gods to punish a person who had done wrong. However, modern researchers are fairly confident cursed tablets were not considered good or lawful. While no laws specifically outlaw the creation of death-exiones, they are spoken of in the literature at the time as illegal and were often applied to the vice used to get literary characters into trouble.
In his dialogue, laws, Plato proposes laws against death-exiones, but it's not known if he's feeling a void where he felt outlaw should be, or echoing an unwritten law. Plato also wrote that people who created cursed tablets were severely punished sometimes with death. But again, there are no mentions specifically about death-exiones in any documented Roman laws. It's possible death-exiones fell under another name or category, and just weren't referred to specifically.
A law from 479 BCE states that it was a capital offense to prepare and use for nica, which is translated as poisonous potions. Some researchers think it's possible that this law could have extended to spells and curses. Because of the punishments mentioned and the very personal nature of most ethics-yonies, it's believed that these binding spells were not a public affair, but a very private one. While there are some examples of public threats of cursing, such as statues of Hermes on property lines which threaten the harm those who trespass, these tablets were more likely created by individuals or possibly by practitioners of the magical arts for private clients.
If thought practitioners were responsible for some of them, as some tablets show evidence of having been pre-edge, and then the name of the victim squeezed into a space that had been left blank. A collection of ethics-yonies found in a fountain in Rome also seem to bear similar handwork, while talking more about this collection after the adbreak. The type of spells written on cursed tablets are what archaeologists and historians refer to as binding spells. These were meant to bind or restrict a certain individual, and sometimes animals to the creator of the tablet's will.
Most tablet curses had to do with rivals in business athletic competitions and courtcases. Some were also an erotic nature, either trying to break up a couple or draw another individual to the cursed caster. Most times, these tablets were made of lead and were folded up before being deposited in a specific secret location, such as a grave or well. Some had nails driven through them, others had hair or a piece of clothing that belonged to the victim.
Some were even accompanied by effigies or small figurines that were meant to represent the victim. These figurines were made of clay, lead, or wax, and were often depicted with hands and feet to bound. Sometimes with nails driven through the specific body parts of the curse was supposed to affect. We'll get into how and why cursed tablets and effigies were made and used after the outbreak.
This type of magic, in which things are done to an object, in order to represent what the caster wants to happen to a human, is called a sympathetic magic or innovative magic. It's based largely on imitation, using effigies or stand-ins for a person or environment that the caster intends to affect. Many times, this type of magic requires a link to the victim, such as a personal item or name. Sometimes a sympathetic magic also involves correspondence.
The idea that a person can influence something based on its similarity to another thing, such as a corpse acting as a reference for how a leading person will act if cursed, still, and silent. Day of Exo-nays were not the only type of magic practiced by the Greco-Romans. Ambulates were also popular and made specifically in defense of curses. They were usually made from similar materials as cursed tablets, but sometimes included precious stones or beetles.
Some even resembled effigies were not deposited anywhere, and were instead carried around with the person who wanted protection. This shows that these curses were common, and fear them was quite widespread. Besides their magical purposes, cursed tablets are also major cultural, historical, and linguistic valuables. They represent some of the best preserved language texts of colloquial Oscar, Greek, and Latin.
They also indicate the diffusion of what was originally thought to be a Greek form of magic, which shows a spread of Greek culture through the Romans. Some tablets contain the names of known politicians, and therefore depict a moment in history when those who disagreed with them decided to do something about it. At first, difficionists were only used to study linguistic changes by archaeologists. As time passed, changes and a variety could be seen in the linguistic style, as well as changes in the reasons the tablets were made.
Italian and Greek tablets began to be used to study the history of magic in the Greco-Roman world. Some researchers conclude that in the earliest tablets, the magic was in the writing and speaking of the spell. This is supported by certain scrolls or papyrae that contained recipes or such spells, which state that speaking the spell as it was written was important. Later, this changed to the sympathetic manipulation of the tablet or refugee figurine.
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That's over a thousand years, during which the formula and purpose didn't change much. Handbooks on how to make Defixiones don't appear until later part of this time frame, but as the recipes result in tablets nearly identical to early versions, it's safe to say the method of creating a must have been standard for hundreds of years before the handbooks were written. Most Defixiones were made of famed lead sheets, on which the curse was inscribed, limestone and gems, papyrus, wax and ceramic were also used, but lead is most commonly found in archaeology. This is likely because it was a common material for regular letters at the time.
It was durable, easy to come by, and inexpensive. A spell text was usually inscribed in a soft metal with some sort of stylus. The text usually followed a specific formula or template. A victim was identified, a god or spirit might be invoked, and what the caster wish to happen to the victim was described.
Sometimes the name of the caster was also included, usually in the case of love or erotic defixiones, which I'll get into in a moment. The earliest tablets were simple. The victim's name only was inscribed into the lead sheet. The name was sometimes scrambled, or in backwards, likely as part of the curse.
Most of these more simple defixiones come from Attica, and Sicily in the 5th to 4th century BCE. This doesn't mean there wasn't a more complex verbal spell involved with making and depositing the tablets. The words just weren't written on them. Later, a longer, more formal spell was written, and usually followed a specific formula.
This suggests the process of cursing had become standardized and was likely written down somewhere. Indeed, many documents, likely written by professional magical practitioners, have been found from later time periods that discuss the making of curse tablets, as well as other magical spells and ideas. These documents date from between the 100 BCE and the 400 CE, and are often in the form of recipes. All together, these various documents are called the Greek Magical Papyrae, or Papyrae, Gracey, Magisei, in Latin, which is abbreviated as PGM.
Most researchers feel that as the objects mentioned in the PGM have been found in archaeology, it's safe to say these documents are copies of older handbooks for creating tablets and figurines. Several texts in the PGM indicate that many times the creation of the tablets was accompanied by verbal recitation and possibly gestures and a sacrifice of some sort. Several curse tablets mention killing animals such as roosters as part of ritual. Later, even more complex tablets appeared and included vocase missed to say, more magical words, with no meaning in any known language.
These magic words only begin during the Roman period in the 1st century CE. Some specific magic words were used in the classical and Hellenistic periods, but were limited to seven or so that were used repeatedly. These seven must have been well known and widespread before more magical words came into circulation during the Roman period. In fact, in some Roman-defic ciones, vocase missed to say, sometimes make up 80 to 90% of the text on a tablet.
These magic words are thought by modern researchers to represent a language meant for the gods, spirits, demons, or other entity that the tablet invoked. They may have also been made up in order to make the curse recipe or a professional practitioner seem necessary in order to create a proper binding curse. Strange symbols were also used and may have served a similar purpose. They were thought to embody great power despite their unknown meanings.
Later Roman air tablets also use more complex versions of the names of the gods, as well as a wider variety of gods, including Egyptian gods and some Hebrew influenced spirits and entities. Drawings of humans and animal figures also became more prevalent at this time, while figurines became less common. Many of the magic recipe books also show a heavy Egyptian influence, suggesting they were produced and copied out in Egypt, indicating an intensifying fusion of cultures. As for what's written on the tablets, Dr.
Christopher A. Therawan of the University of Chicago created four basic categories that most defects the owners fall into based on the formula of the text. The first is direct binding in which the phrases declared by the caster were directly attempting to manipulate the victim. The victim was named and sometimes further identified by their mothers or some other relations name, but this second identifier is usually only seen in tablets created after the second century CE.
The matrilineal name may be influenced by Egyptian or Babylonian writings who use matrilineal descent as a means of identification. An example of a direct binding spell is I curse, and then the victim's name whose mother is, and then her name. The second type is the prayer in which the curse invoked a deity, either obliging them to punish the victim or praying that they take action against the victim. For example, Hermes bind the victim.
The Greek god Hermes, a messenger and underworld god, was the most often invoked. Also popular were Hekate, Corey, Persephone, Hades, Gaia, Cronos, and a fewries, all of which are considered underworld gods or gods that spend time in both the realm of the living and the realm of the dead. Hekate was a god specifically in charge of magic and sorcery. Nemesis, Pluto, Mercury, and ancestral spirits known as the mains, as well as water names also appeared on Latin dephyxianis.
In Roman Egypt between the third and sixth century CE, gods, demons with secret names, and foreign deities were all blended together. The third text type is the wish formula, where the tablet is in third person, and the only subject of the text is the victim. An example would be made of victim tremble. The last type is the semilia, semilis, or sympathetic magic, which uses metaphor and simile to compare the victim's destiny without something else, such as the dead person the tablet is placed with, or the lead on which the curse is written.
For example, the tablet might read, may the victim become like this corpse, still, and silent, or may the victim become like this lead, cold, and bound. This type of curse is an example of correspondence in sympathetic magic. After the curse was inscribed, the lead sheet was either folded or rolled up. This is found both within the PGM and archaeological context.
Sometimes a lot of hair or piece of clothing belonging to the victim was included in the folds of the tablet. Sometimes a nail or pen was driven through the lead sheet, or it was wrapped around a figure, or effigy meant to represent the victim. These nails, according to Fairlon, were being used just as they are used in regular life to fasten down or bind the curse to the victim. Figurines were often made of lead, wax or clay, and were only a few centimeters tall.
The limbs were often bound or twisted, and sometimes pierced by nails or needles for the same reason as the tablets. The first mention of wax figurines being made in the image of personal enemies and buried in graves to bring harsh treatment upon them comes from middle kingdom Egypt between 2133 and 1786 BCE. The inclusion of this type of figurine with nephicsonase, hints at the great influence Egyptian culture had on Greco-Roman magic. The use of nails in a figurine is sometimes thought to originate in Greece, but has been found in the outlying Roman provinces, and what is now Germany, Austria, Britain, and France.
Sometimes these figurines were replaced by drawings of a person in a similar predicament. Both figurines and drawings were also sometimes placed in lead containers in order to better catch them in the curse. These containers could also represent coffins, creating a symbolic separation of the victim from the community of the living and delivering them into the hands of the underworld gods. figurines were usually, but not always, reserved for love or erotic exonase.
Erotic love was understood by most ancient Greece and Romans to be an accursed thing that attacked humans. It burned them, tortured them, made them ill, and could even kill. So it's not surprising erotic love spells were also cast using the difficio method. The erotic binding spells on teficio nails reflect this idea, with phrases like let her burn until she leaves her husband, or make a senseless until he comes to me.
One Greek cursed tablet was found in the mouth of an Egyptian mummy. It contained a lock of hair, and begged a demon to cause a woman to swoon, burn, and be destroyed by love until she left her husband and went to the caster for passion. One of the most elaborate and also disturbing to fix the overgreens found in archaeology is associated with an erotic binding spell. A clay figurine of a woman with bound hands and feet was found in Antino obelis, Egypt from the third or fourth centuries CE.
The figure is pierced by 13 metal pins. In both eyes, ears, the top of the head, the solar plexus, the mid-back, the vagina, the anus, the pons of the hands, and the souls of the feet. This may appear at first to look like torture, but the inscription reads that a woman named Tolymas must abandon her hottie to meaner and make love to a man named Sarapunan, otherwise be unable to eat, drink, or to anything else until she does. A manuscript with a recipe for a nearly identical figurine was found in Egypt from around the same time period.
It even includes where to place the pins for specific effects and what to say while doing so. Other examples of figurines have also been found in Egypt, such as two wax figures molded together and wrapped in papyrus with a spell written on it. This type of wax and paper difficio has survived better in Egypt due to the dry climate. Figurines of horses have also been uncovered as part of deaf exonés against cherry tears and other horse racing athletes.
After creation, deaf exonés were placed in a specific location one that pertain to the underworld gods or whatever entity the castor chose to enact the curse. The earliest tablets were placed in graves, usually the graves of people who died young or tragically. While graves served as passages to be underworld and were therefore closer to the underworld gods, they were also silent still places in which the dead were contained, and the castor usually hoped as indicated by the text that a victim too would go silent still and contain. These tablets were usually placed along after the person was buried.
Many of them invoked the dead person's spirit and promised them rest in the afterlife if they completed their task. It's not known if the spirit was supposed to transmit the curse to the gods enacted or both. It's also not known if the person who wrote the tablet or some other third party was the one to place it in grave. Later, fountains and wells were used.
For erotic deaf exonés, sometimes the tablets were hidden somewhere in the home of the victim. And for athletic rivals, the tablet might be buried or hidden somewhere in the stadium in which they were to compete. In 19 CE, Tacitus, a Roman historian and politician, described a case in which cursed tablets and figurines had been placed all around the walls and in the floors of the house. Most deaf exonés are found exactly where they were deposited in the past.
Sometimes this makes for a collection of tablets in one location which must have been the most convenient place for locals to deposit them. This gives greater context to what was going on when the tablets were deposited as they can often be dated more easily thanks to the location. Around 130 tablets dating to the second through fourth century CE were unearthed in the British city of Bath in the early 1980s. Bath was a part of the Roman province of Britannia so it makes sense that the practice of making deaf exonés would have traveled there with the Romans.
These deaf exonés call upon the goddess Sullis Minerva, a version of the Greek war goddess Athena, specific to the city, to aid in the return of items that were stolen from patrons while they were soaking in the baths and to curse the thieves. They are written in British Latin and are one of few examples of everyday spoken vernacular of the Roman British population, making them very important to study of that linguistic dialect. The text they contain in my opinion is quite label as many people today still have things stolen from them while they're at public pools or gems and still curse the thieves who stole them, although a little less formally. Fests from the Roman Bath seem to have been a common problem as indicated by the sheer number of deaf exonés.
There's also some indication of this in the PGM as it suggests using the cold water pipes from the baths to make light tablets against thieves. Many of the bath tablets state that the object stolen are now under the responsibility of Sullis Minerva and mention things like jewelry, clothing and bronze cups. The defixio mentioning the stolen cup asks that it be quote filled with the blood of the thief, end quote. It must have been a very important cup to the caster.
The tablets are now housed in the National Roman Museum at the Baths of Guy of Clutchon. Another cache of defixioenés was found in a fountain of the goddess Anna Pirena, which was in use between the 4th century BCE and the 6th century CE. The fountain was unearthed in northern Rome in 1999 during an excavation under a parking structure in the Piazza-U-Ceed. The cache contained a number of tablets but also a number of figurines made of wax and flour, all of which appear to have been made in a very similar way.
The figurines were also encased in light canisters, one of which was still marked by the fingerprint of whoever closed to the canister. The canisters have names written on them, sometimes more than one, but are also heavily corroborated which makes reading them difficult. The most legible name is Antonio's. After modern fingerprint analysis, it was found that the print likely belonged to a woman.
This discovery was taken by many researchers as evidence for female magical practitioners being the professionals when it came to defixioenés. In literary sources from this time period, females are more often mentioned as professional practitioners of curses than men, and this fingerprint seems to support that. However, the figurines are still being analyzed and cleaned, so only time will tell if the hypothesis is still supported by this mind. As you can see, the process of making or purchasing defixioenés and then placing them was quite complex.
It required a specific formula and likely other ritual processes. The tablets were believed to work as indicated by the ambulance created to stop people from being cursed and literary sources mentioning severe punishments for those who made them. One reason defixioenés may have been illegal is that they were thought to work. This gave any individual from any level of society power and control greater than that of the ruling class and the government.
It was a serious threat to those in power and therefore something they likely wanted to prevent or at least control. But did defixioenés actually work? Probably not, so why would they thought to be so effective? Dr.
John Gager, retired professor from Princeton University, suggests that creating a defixioené made a person feel in control and allowed a transfer of emotion. They might also represent the universal human practice of swearing during moments of anger, frustration, uncertainty, and competition just more formalized than modern swearing. Also, if word got around that someone had cursed you, you might be so paranoid or scared that whatever effect a tablet demanded, such as losing a court case, might actually happen due to the fear distracting you, which would lead the caster to believe their curse was effective. Even if they didn't actually work, defixioenés were believed to work by the people of Ancient Greece and Rome, giving them immense power.
That belief, along with the sometimes disturbing text and pierced figurines that went with them, is what causes cursed tablets to spark our curiosity. The more biciriosity podcast was produced by H. Lloyd. If you'd like to get in touch or suggest a more bicopic for me to talk about, you can tweet the show at more bepakass or find us on Facebook and Instagram at more biciriosity podcast.
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