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When Spells Worked Magic
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Volume 56 Number 2, March/April 2003
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by Christopher A. Faraone
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In ancient times, a curse could help you win in the stadium or in the courts, and a plea addressed to a demon could bring you the woman of your dreams.
During an emergency excavation at the site of a new parking garage in Rome's Piazza Euclid, archaeologist Marina Piranomonte and her colleagues found the remains of a fountain dedicated to a minor and very ancient Roman goddess, Anna Perenna. Embedded in the layers of mud and debris they came upon a cache of voodoo dolls and lead curse tablets that had apparently been hidden there sometime in the fourth century A.D. Many of the dolls had been placed in lead canisters, one of which yielded a thumbprint, probably of a woman, according to the police fingerprint laboratory. The discovery supports the impression we get from ancient literary sources that women often acted as professional witches. In his novel Metamorphoses, for example, the second-century A.D. author Apuleius describes in vivid and undoubtedly exaggerated detail a witch at work:
First she arranged her deadly laboratory with its customary apparatus, setting out spices of all sorts, unintelligibly lettered metal plaques, the surviving remains of ill-omened birds, and numerous pieces of mourned and even buried corpses: here noses and fingers, there flesh-covered spikes from crucified bodies, elsewhere the preserved gore of murder victims and mutilated skulls wrenched from the teeth of wild beasts. Then she recited a charm over some pulsating entrails and made offerings with various liquids.... Next she bound and knotted those hairs together in interlocking braids and put them to burn on live coals along with several kinds of incense. (Metamorphoses III. xvii-xviii)
Behind this lurid scene set in far-off Thessaly, there are undoubtedly some true-to-life facts, for magic was pervasive in the classical world. Indeed, everything for the ancients, from impotence to political assassination, might be caused by magic. The Roman poet Ovid (Amores III. vii) wondered, in the late first century B.C., if his lovemaking ability had been cursed: "Was I the wretched victim of charms and herbs, or did a witch curse my name upon a red wax image and stick fine pins into the middle of the liver?" The historian Tacitus (Annals II. lxxix) records chilling discoveries made at the time of the death of Germanicus, grandson of Augustus and heir of the emperor Tiberius, in A.D. 19: "explorations in the floor and walls [of his house] brought to light the remains of human bodies, spells, curses, leaden tablets engraved with the name Germanicus, charred and blood-smeared ashes, and others of the implements by which it is believed the living soul can be devoted to the powers of the grave." In the end, Roman authorities executed a woman named Martina for murdering Germanicus, while the senator Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso and his wife Plancina, thought to be behind the deed, were forced to commit suicide. Magic was clearly not something to be trifled with. What, then, was the witch who left us her thumbprint at the fountain of Anna Perenna in Rome doing? There are two strong possibilities: she was engaged either in cursing people or in magically compelling them to fall in love.
Christopher A. Faraone, a professor of classics at the University of Chicago, specializes in the study of ancient magic.
Further Reading
© 2003 by the Archaeological Institute of America
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