Tag: curses

Love Magic and the Dark Art of Ancient Curse Tablets

Love Magic and the Dark Art of Ancient Curse Tablets

by fnmanning ♥ 1 Comment

Love sick and struggling to get over an old flame? What if you turned to magic?

This sounds like the start of a dark fantasy romance novel, which is a much safer place to put the the curse tablets that ancient Greeks and Romans used. Probably best not to take after them.

Ancient practitioners hammered lead into delicate sheets, then carved their deepest desires and darkest intentions into the malleable surface with bronze styluses. Archaeologists have uncovered approximately 1,600 of these tablets, known as defixiones in Latin or katadesmoi in Greek.

Photo: Arnaud 25

The words they etched weren’t meant for mortal eyes. Messages targeted the gods of the underworld, deities who controlled fate and could bend reality to match human will. Hecate, Persephone, Charon. Lead connected the curse to Pluto’s realm since the metal belonged to the underworld, making it the perfect messenger between worlds.

Folding the tablet trapped the target’s fate within its creases.

Nails bound the magic tight, ensuring the gods couldn’t ignore the petition.

This love magic had a bite, seeking to bind the target’s will, create obsessive thoughts, or cause physical discomfort until the victim surrenders to the petitioner’s desires.

Personal items often accompany the tablets to strengthen the magical connection. Strands of hair, bits of clothing, or even bodily fluids from the intended target create a sympathetic link. These items contain the target’s essence (ousia), establishing a magical bridge between the tablet and victim. This connection ensures the curse finds its mark, regardless of physical distance.

Practitioners deposit tablets in locations where the boundary between the living and dead grew thin. Graves, wells, temple foundations, and underground springs became repositories for longing and desperation. Wells and springs provide access to underground water systems that connect to the realm of the dead. Temple foundations rest on sacred ground where divine power concentrates. Crossroads were good too, spaces where multiple worlds intersect. Using graves let petitioners recruit the restless dead as supernatural messengers, carrying their requests to underworld deities.

Here is one example of a tablet for love magic from Papyrus Stories, this one written by a man about another man. I like the poetry of it and how it’s like part magical spell, part stream of conscious desperation.

If he stands you will not let him stand, if he sits you will not let him sit, if he sleeps you will not let him sleep! He will seek after me from village to village, from city to city, from field to field, from land to land, until he comes to me and he subjects himself beneath my feet – me, Apapolo, the son of Nooe – his hands filled with all good things, until I fulfil with him the desire of my heart and the request of my soul in a good desire and an unbreakable affection, now, now, quickly, quickly, do my work!”

Curse You

Photo: -JVL-

If you have ever experienced gender norms about men and women, it won’t surprise you that men were more likely to try inducing passion while women asked for affection. However, the sample size isn’t very big. And not all of the discovered artifacts were created for romance since, you know, they were curse tablets.

Court cases inspired many curses. Litigants bound their opponents’ tongues and minds to ensure victory. Victims of theft created tablets naming stolen items and cursing unknown thieves. Athletes and performers cursed rivals before competitions.

Many tablets contain specialized vocabulary or voces mysticae. Magical words and phrases believed to carry supernatural power. These mysterious utterances appear to be nonsensical combinations of Greek, Egyptian, and Hebrew sounds that possibly represented a special language only demons could understand or words more appropriate for conversing with gods than human language. Not sure why but I love the idea of writing gibberish and then calling it a super special magical language.

Sources

The World of Roman Women

Bartered History

Antiquity Reconsidered

Curse Tablet Wikipedia

Witchcraft in Ancient Greece and Rome Wikipedia

Midas Touch: The Mythology That Inspired My Fantasy Novel

Midas Touch: The Mythology That Inspired My Fantasy Novel

by fnmanning ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Where does inspiration come from? 

And what inspires me to write? For some reason, I feel like I should have a cool answer to questions like these. Just like every superhero needs an epic origin story, maybe novels deserve the same. 

The truthful answer is I just think about things. Then I think about more things. 

All those things become a giant list of maybes until eventually the things I’m tossing around in my head stop being ideas and I actually get attached to them and then have to turn them into a story. It’s not a glamorous process.

My contemporary fantasy novel Strikes Twice is one of the rare exceptions where I actually had a clear starting concept.

Have you heard about the Midas touch or the Greek myth about King Midas? He wished that everything he touched turned to gold. Naturally, this went terribly. For example, food and people are two things that don’t do well as gold.

This was the inspiration for the novel. Except instead of turning things to gold, anyone the cursed character touches gets a zap. Sometimes a big zap.

But it turns out that King Midas has two Greek myths associated with him, which have almost nothing to do with each other. I had absolutely no idea about this until recently. It’s actually an amusing and very weird story.

More to Midas

In the other story, Pan the nymph with wooden pipes and the god Apollo competed to see who was the better musician because apparently the gods had nothing better to do. Most people liked Apollo’s lyre playing best, because in addition to his archery skills, he was also the god of music.

But Midas picked Pan as the winner, and Apollo concluded he must have an ass’s ears (burn?) and so Midas’s ears transformed into a donkey’s ears.

As if this myth weren’t strange enough, Midas wore headgear to cover his ears and swore his barber to secrecy. The barber needed to spill the tea, so he dug a hole near a river and whispered the secret. The reeds that grew by the river then started whispering the secret and telling everyone that Midas had donkey ears.

From gold to donkey ears. The moral of both stories is a warning about what happens when mortals get involved with the gods. Another acceptable moral is that Greek myths are weird.

Shocking Curses

So the starting concept for Strikes Twice was a cursed man shocks everything he touches. Kind of like the Midas Touch where everything Midas touched turned to gold.

That’s the basic premise, but I write romance novels, so it also needed a romance aspect and it turns into something like this:

If a dangerous electrical curse were attached to man you found nearly impossibly to resist, how long would you remember to keep your hands to yourself?

Unlike Midas’s other myth, everyone in Strikes Twice keeps their regular ears. The main character Marty has enough trouble trying to lift Az’s curse without getting zapped as their growing attraction makes distance difficult. 

Strikes Twice features enemies to lovers, an understandably grumpy shifter, an optimistic wizard, action, steamy scenes, cruel curses, and love triumphing against all odds. This the second novel in the Elementally Yours Series, and each book features different characters and can be read as a standalone.