In ancient Greek and Roman cultures, magic was a common tradition, with practitioners using spells to “bind” people up to different outcomes in various aspects of life. Private magic was practiced throughout these cultures, as well as among Jews and early Christians of the Roman Empire. Primary sources for studying Greco-Roman magic include the Greek Magical Papyri, curse tablets, amulets, and literary texts such as Ovid’s Fasti and Pliny the Elder’s Natural.
In Ancient Rome, magic spells and rituals focused on various subjects, including protection against enemies, fertility, and crop growth. The main traditions were those of the Greeks, who used curse tablets and protective amulets to achieve desired outcomes through supernatural means. Magic included spoken words, gestures, and actions, as well as physical, material forms like curse tablets.
Private magic was practiced throughout Greek and Roman cultures, as well as among Jews and early Christians of the Roman Empire. Common practices during the Republic and Imperial periods included curse tablets, binding spells, ritual incantations, enchantments, and love spells. Romans believed in various forms of magic, including love spells, curses, and binding spells.
Ancient examples of magic can be loosely grouped into two categories: “black” magic, largely associated with inflicting harm, and “white” magic, which was associated with guiding individuals through life. The study of Greco-Roman magic is essential for understanding its cultural significance and the various forms of magic practiced in ancient Greece and Rome.
📹 How They DidIt – Magic, Spells, & Curses in Ancient Rome DOCUMENTARY
In this How They Did It documentary episode we dive into the history of magic in ancient Rome. We begin with a discussion of how …
Who was the smartest god?
Apollo, a Greek and Roman god of knowledge, is associated with wisdom, strategy, and cunning. Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, is associated with strategy. Coeus, the Greek Titan of intellect, is associated with inquisitive minds. Hermes, the Greek god of cunning, is associated with good counsel and planning. Metis, the Greek Titaness of good counsel, is associated with good counsel, advice, and planning. Mnemosyne, the Greek Titaness of memory, is associated with memory and remembrance.
Phoebe, the Greek Titaness of oracular intellect, is associated with forethought and crafty counsel. Prometheus, the Greek Titan of forethought, is associated with forethought and crafty counsel. In Roman mythology, Apollo is associated with knowledge development, while Egeria, a Roman nymph, is associated with wisdom. Mercury, the Roman god of cunning, is associated with wisdom. Mens, the personification of the mind and consciousness, is associated with Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom.
Does magic exist in ancient times?
Magic in the Ancient World, an online exhibit for Google Arts and Culture, showcases the everyday practices of ancient Egyptians, highlighting the lack of distinction between magical and practical remedies. The exhibit, curated by Foy Scalf and arranged by Matt Welton and Tasha Vorderstrasse, features objects and digital images from the Oriental Institute Museum’s collection. Texts by Robert Ritner, Kiersten Neumann, Kate Grossmann, and Tasha Vorderstrasse are adapted from Oriental Institute Publications, including “Between Heaven and Earth: Birds in Ancient Egypt”.
Who was the Roman god of magic?
Hecate, a goddess in ancient Greek religion and mythology, is often depicted holding torches, keys, snakes, or accompanied by dogs. She is associated with various aspects of life, including crossroads, night, light, magic, protection from witchcraft, drugs, the Moon, graves, and ghosts. Her earliest appearance in literature was in Hesiod’s Theogony in the 8th century BCE, as a goddess of great honor with domains in sky, earth, and sea. She had a popular following among the witches of Thessaly and an important sanctuary among the Carians of Asia Minor in Lagina.
Her oldest known representation was found in Selinunte, Sicily. The Hecate Chiaramonti, a Roman sculpture of triple-bodied Hecate, is a testament to her power and influence in ancient Greek mythology.
Who is the Roman god of witchcraft?
Hecate, a goddess in ancient Greek religion and mythology, is often depicted holding torches, keys, snakes, or accompanied by dogs. She is associated with various aspects of life, including crossroads, night, light, magic, protection from witchcraft, drugs, the Moon, graves, and ghosts. Her earliest appearance in literature was in Hesiod’s Theogony in the 8th century BCE, as a goddess of great honor with domains in sky, earth, and sea. She had a popular following among the witches of Thessaly and an important sanctuary among the Carians of Asia Minor in Lagina.
Her oldest known representation was found in Selinunte, Sicily. The Hecate Chiaramonti, a Roman sculpture of triple-bodied Hecate, is a testament to her power and influence in ancient Greek mythology.
What is the oldest magic word?
Magic is a powerful force that can be manipulated through various words and phrases, including abracadabra, which has been around since the second century BCE and has been featured in the Harry Potter series. These words, including hocus-pocus, alakazam, and voila, are used when magic is at work, even in card tricks at home. Some of these words have crossed over into entertainment magic or originated from older commands that called upon higher powers to influence the material world.
Whether called hexes, hymns, prayers, or spells, these words require an intangible force that can be universally described as magic. A magical quiz can help determine if magic is real or if it’s just a bunch of hocus-pocus. By examining these words and phrases, one can determine if magic is truly a powerful force that can work its will.
What is the ancient magic spell?
Ancient Magic is a powerful spell in Hogwarts Legacy that deals significant damage to enemies when at least one segment of the Ancient Magic Meter is full. Unlocked during the Welcome to Hogsmeade quest, it is used to defeat Armoured Trolls. As you progress through the game, you can increase your Ancient Magic meter by casting spells and dealing damage to enemies. Once the meter is full, you can unleash an Ancient Magic Finisher, which decimates most opponents. The main character can execute various finisher moves, some of which are exclusive to specific enemies.
What is the oldest form of magic?
In ancient Egypt, the magician Dedi performed the first known conjuring effect (balls) around 2700 B. C., along with other effects like decapitating a bird and reattaching its head. However, there is no evidence that Dedi performed these effects for anyone, and the Westcar Papyrus does not mention him performing the cups and balls.
In ancient Greek myths, magic was prevalent among the classical founding pagan cultures of Europe, connected to Egyptian and Persian cultures. Magic, divination, and necromancy were intertwined with chthonic Gods, monsters, oracles, and heroes.
In ancient Rome, the Acetabularii performed the Cups and balls using stones and small vinegar cups, a group of magicians specializing in the effect. However, there is no certain evidence for the existence of the cups and balls during this period. The Beni Hasan tomb painting is considered unlikely to represent the effect, and the Westcar Papyrus does not provide any evidence for the Cups and Balls.
What was magic in ancient Rome?
Magic in classical antiquity was a powerful practice that involved spoken words, gestures, and actions, as well as physical objects like curse tablets, effigies, amulets, and gems. These objects have survived in the archaeological record, revealing that ancient communities used ritual to conquer fear, uncertainty, influence individual lives, improve current circumstances, and transform the future.
Cursed tablets, found in locations from Roman Britain to Egypt, contained spells, prayers, and curses aimed at various individuals, including lovers, politicians, charioteers, craftsmen, enslaved persons, and sex laborers. These tablets were created by both amateur curse writers and ritual professionals with expertise in the sale of spells, charms, curses, and purifications.
After a binding curse was inscribed on a thin lead tablet, it was folded or rolled up, pierced with a nail, and deposited in a grave, well, or fountain. Subterranean sites served as spatial conduits, carrying the incised object to the realm of the dead and underworld divinities. The process of casting a curse or binding spell in antiquity could involve collecting small bits of the target’s person, such as hair or fingernail clippings, and manipulating these bits to focus the curse against that specific victim. Other lead curse tablets were interred with wax, wood, and clay effigies, indicating that the act of incising the curse onto lead was just one part of a larger ritual process.
What were witches called in Rome?
The Latin language is rich in terms describing witches, with various titles such as cantatrix, praecantrix, sacerdos, vates, maga, venefica, malefica, lamia, lupula, strix, or striga. This diversity suggests that Latin made clear linguistic distinctions between various witch types. However, this expectation of semantic and morphological concordance remains unfulfilled. This paper proposes to demonstrate the inaccuracy of the Latin vocabulary in articulating functional differences between various witches and assert the essential uniformity of witch characters.
The modern term “witch” conveys only a rough sense of a woman’s possession of supernatural abilities and is an imprecise label for determining a character’s nature, disposition, or motivation. This polyvalence of the term “witch” is also found in other languages, such as Italian strega, Spanish maga/bruja, French magicienne/sorcière, and German Hexe.
The term “witch” refers to a female character with various powers, such as the ability to effect reversals of natural phenomena and changes in interpersonal relationships, knowledge and/or use of materia magica, efficacious language, or gestures (the evil eye). These women are characters whom multiple scholars have repeatedly and consistently labelled as witches, such as Circe, Medea, Deianira, Simaetha, Canidia, Dipsas, Acanthis, Meroe, Pamphile, Petronius’ strigae, Martina, and Erictho.
The Latin vocabulary is an invaluable catalogue of the Latin witch vocabulary, but it is necessary to use the word “witch” repeatedly to avoid awkward periphrases. The assembled material is an invaluable catalog of the Latin witch vocabulary, providing a comprehensive understanding of the various witches and their roles in ancient societies.
What was witchcraft in Roman times?
Private magic was a practiced supernatural practice in ancient Greece, Rome, and other cultures, including ancient Egypt. It was not under the oversight of official priesthoods attached to state, community, and household cults and temples as a matter of public religion. Primary sources for studying Greco-Roman magic include the Greek Magical Papyri, curse tablets, amulets, and literary texts such as Ovid’s Fasti and Pliny the Elder’s Natural History.
Pervasive throughout the Eastern Mediterranean and Western Asia until late antiquity, the term “magician” was influenced by Greek goēs, which included astrology, alchemy, and other forms of esoteric knowledge. This association was a product of the Hellenistic fascination for (Pseudo-)Zoroaster, who was perceived by the Greeks as the “Chaldean” and inventor of both astrology and magic.
Authors William Swatos and Peter Kivisto define magic as “any attempt to control the environment or the self by means that are either untested or untestable, such as charms or spells”.
What did Romans call wizards?
The Romans had a comprehensive list of words for male magicians, with the chief being magus, a term borrowed from Persian and Greek. This portrayal differed significantly from that of witches, and the Romans used different language to describe wizards and other male magic users. The close connections between magic and other aspects of Roman life were evident, as the Romans saw the wrong sort of magic as unRoman and originating from outsiders from the East. The use of the term magus highlights the Romans’ perception of male magicians as outsiders and outsiders from the East.
📹 An introduction to Roman Magic
Magic was highly prevalent throughout the Roman world. But, despite its prevalence, Roman law often attempted to regulate and …
Belief is a powerful thing. I once cast a “curse” on a childhood classmate who intentionally ripped up my homework. In actuality all I did was mutter a few words under my breath and tell them that they’d be cursed with bad luck until they apologized. Their mind did the rest, from that point forward every bad thing that happened to them was the result of my “curse”. They apologized after a few weeks and since they were no longer anticipating bad things, it seemed to them like the “curse” was lifted. To this day they still 100% believe I’m a witch who actually cursed them with real magic.
Are we not even gonna talk about how curses in the greco-roman world were powered by the dead? Necromancy was powerful, in the sense that burring your curse tablet with the corpse of someone who was known to have a vengeful spirit could cause that spirit to act out the punishment. Another common type of spell were threshold spells. These spells were inscribed on the threshold of a home. It’s been a while, but I believe that one of the most common threshold spells was to make the previous inhabitants of the house protect it. (basically if you’d bought or moved into a house where someone had died (a common occurrence in the ancient world) you could ensure that their spirit would not take vengeance against you or make mischief in the house by binding it to the threshold, or some other object, at which point, you could placate it, and treat it as a sort of guardian. The article mentions love potions, but doesn’t talk about love curses. There’s a reason why. As you might expect, where intimacy and romantic rivalry are involved, love curses get nasty.
Always kind of interesting how, today, we know that magic doesn’t exist and the spells and cursed chanting didn’t do anything, but often were accompanied by things that ended up causing the desired effect. Like cursing someone by placing rotten remains in their bedroom, the rot attracting vermin and disease which then the target catches, and so becomes ill, which everyone then attributes to the cursed text stored along with the remains as they don’t understand how diseases work. Either that or simple confirmation bias, where a person is cursed to misfortune and they just so happen, utterly unrelatedly, to suffer misfortune, which is then also attributed to the curse. Most good lies, or I guess misunderstandings in these cases, have a kernel of truth.
I love how you’ve made clear that magic was for most of human history not something exclusive to a select few but rather was an everyday, mundane thing for people of all walks of life, whereas magic in alot of popular fantasy fictional settings is a sadly elitist thing, were there’s this bizarre hardline between the magical and the mundane when it was never the case for much of history, it isn’t till modern times that magic is thought of as mostly the realm of an exclusive cast of well…”spellcasters”, often ridiculously overpowered too with no real recourse for those deprived of magic from this modern, arbitrary division.
Wow this was so cool to learn. Thank you! The origins of “Abracadabra” are fascinating too. It was a spell meaning “I create as I speak”. Apparently JK Rowling’s “Avada Kedavra” was also based on that Aramaic word, which originally meant “let the thing be destroyed”, as in the illness or ailment plaguing someone.
As the astute may have noticed. Magic in the ancient world almost always involved writing the hex or curse down. Which is actually fitting if you think about it because “writing” IS magic. I mean think about it as I’m writing this comment I’m sharing my thoughts with anyone who can read English. 2000 years from now someone might read this and even though I would have been dead for thousands of years my thoughts can reach out from beyond the grave and live again in the readers mind.
Sometimes I like to think that we are like Warhammer’s orks and whatever we do and the results we achieve also depends on the amount of people that believe in it. In some Buddhist faiths, they believe that more the people believe in something, more likely it is to happen because of power of belief. Whether it is creation of ghosts, fortune or misfortune.
I once decided to curse a particularly inconsiderate person to suffer from extreme inconvenience forever. I then had an entire week of everything going wrong in the most inconvenient ways possible. I’m pretty sure these things were unrelated, but to be on the safe side I haven’t attempted to curse anyone since.
“Hundreds of curse tablets found in the spring of aqui-soules”.. Sounds like the whole springs was just a frontier to steal peoples clothes if there were that many… The tablets would also just be left there? While others would continue to bathe in the spring? No slave would come and remove it? It’s also interesting the wording of these curses. “I hand to you (name). I deliver to you (target)”, yet they never thought that an evil spirit might question “who are you to grant me authorization to contribute to said targets mishaps”.
what an amazing and rare article thank you for doing it ! Curses are written ln lead tables because lead belongs to Saturn, the planet of death, and were cast on Saturdays, the day of saturn, especially during the dark moon. The boosting spell for animals is cast on silver, related to Mercury, the god of travel and speed, and cast preferbably on wednesday, the day of Mercury
The images of curse tablets in 9:50 is quite interesting. Do they still survive today in Italy or any other part of the former Roman Empire? I remember reading about similar charm-drawings in Malaysia and Indonesia. They’re known as wafaq, generally used for protection or to ensure success in business (although most orthodox Muslims consider them forbidden due to their association with black magic and the demonic).
A Catholic perspective would be that these people indeed were tampering with “magic”, i.e. prayers and invocations of the preternatural which, while still bound by definite rules, supersedes the purely material order. (Although there were also ancient materialists.) Many people today believe the same thing, even though materialism is more popular. We still need to be wary of such “magic”, and we can seek assistance and protection through prayer.
In 396 BC, before the Battle of Veii, Roman dictator Camillus performed an evocatio, promising the Etruscan goddess Uni (Roman Juno) a grand new temple in Rome if she would desert the city of Veii and allow it to fall. Immediately after, the Roman troops climbed through tunnels they had dug under the city without Veii knowing, catching them by surprise and proceeded to slaughter or enslaved everyone inside, thereby ending the 10 yr siege of Veii in one day. The Romans spent over a week transporting everything of value, including the massive statue of Uni (now called Juno Regina) back to Rome and Veii’s many centuries of existence was wiped out. But was the victory due to the evocatio or the surprise battle plan…?
I kind of wish you saved this for April 1st. Or have the same article, i mean it’s a fine article, and just not have this article title. A third great alternative is if it started with party tricks the Romans did with optimal illusions and slight of hand (if they did it at all, if not then it’s a moot point) and then move on to their other magic.
Ironically enough, it was Christianity that brought an end to the use of “magic.” The Christian faith brought with it a revolution in the way we acted. It discouraged seeking to curse your enemies and, instead, understand them and treat them as you would wish to be treated. It was that mentality change that brought about an end of the “magic” of the time. By the end of the Roman Empire, most of these traditions had been slowly phased out. After all, Saint Augustine of Hippo – a 5th century theologian and scholar – said on Witchcraft: “The church has no reason to seek out and persecute any witches because their powers do not exist.”
6:16 This reminds me of a certain pet peeve I’ve had with how various settings have their in-universe societies or cultures deal with magic and that is the stupid idea of one society trying to ban ALL magic within their domain yet never seems to realize they just suicidally handicapped themselves because their neighbors still use and embrace magic. Things like that in a setting really destroy my immersion and makes the wholly token anti magic faction(s) a bunch of idiots just begging to be obliterated by massive AOE firestorms or cursed into oblivion! A society outlawing or trying to regulate the use of certain magics makes sense but a society that forsakes all functional magic is a dumb one, and often the enforcement of such bans seems completely unbelievable. The irony being you cannot enforce an even remotely effective ban on all magic without magic.
Such a good article, but you ruin it with the forced try of a psychological explanation in case of the clothes thief. While there is a ton of evidence for such magic ( for a good part because the justice system in antiquity did more often not work than it did), it was not something encouraged by „polite society” or viewed positively in the sources we have. There were actually a number of legislations against „incantations” with the aim to damage people or their property. So the guy would have been more than bold to deposit a curse tablet with people looking on.
There’s something we left behind from our past that we shouldn’t have, science is a useful practice we have been using for a long time, but it’s limited to the materialistic and what we mostly see in this world. There was a practice in ancient times that uses science and magic In one, it was called alchemy. The study of all living and non living things and how to manipulate matter. The spiritual world is real, and alchemy was used to prove it. Now in modern times, all this seems no different from a fairy tale. People only believe on what we see and what science can prove. Even though science is limited being used by us humans who have limited minds.