Cursing the Competition in Sports, the Courts and Sex

Curse tablets were written to “bind” all kinds of rival targets, but the most popular arenas were sports, legal battles and sex. Chariot races, for example, were absolutely huge in the Greco-Roman world—as was gambling on chariot races—and people were fanatical about their local teams and star charioteers.

“They would get into fights and start riots when their team didn’t win,” Stratton says, which is not so different from today. A typical curse tablet from Syria in the second century A.D. reads:

“[N]ow attack, bind, overturn, cut up, chop into pieces the horses and the charioteers of the Blue colors.”

In ancient Athens, lawsuits and criminal trials were held in public, and the outcomes of cases often hinged on the oratory and rhetorical skills of the opposing parties. An Athenian curse tablet from 300 B.C. targeted the public speaking abilities of a lawyer named Lampias:

“I bind the tongue and soul and speech that he is practicing, and his hands and feet and eyes and mouth. All of these I bind, I hide, I bury, I nail down. If they lay any counterclaim before the arbitrator or the court, let them seem to be of no account, either in word or in deed.”

While “true love” was occasionally the goal of curse tablets, most romance-themed curses were intended to neutralize the competition and compel the target’s physical affections, as expressed by this semiexplicit curse tablet from second century Egypt:

“Make use of this binding spell, employed by Isis, so that Theodotis, daughter of Eus, may no longer try anything with any other man but me alone, Ammôniôn and may be subservient, obedient, eager, flying through the air seeking after Ammôniôn, son of Hermitaris and bring her thigh close to his, her genitals close to his, in unending intercourse for all the time of her life.”

Did Curse Tablets Work?

To our modern sensibilities, curse tablets are easily dismissed as superstition. But the fact that curse tablets were used for at least 1,000 years is evidence alone that ancient people really believed that they worked, writes John Gager in his book, Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World.

To the Greco-Romans, the effectiveness of a curse tablet started with the wording of the curse itself. A popular curse formula was to use what Stratton calls “analogical language.” An example might be, “Just as this lead is cold and useless, so let my enemies be cold and useless.” Or, “Just as this corpse is speechless, so let my adversary be struck dumb.”

When the analogy is spoken out loud, says Stratton, “the magic is effected through a kind of ‘performative utterance.’ So you recite the ritual, you bury the lead tablet, and that itself is what activates the curse.”

Where the tablet was physically deposited was also critical to its success. To the Greco-Romans, the best locations to stash a curse tablet were “liminal” spaces like tombs and bathhouses that sat on the borderline between the realms of the living and the dead. A lot of curse tablets were found in the tombs of the “restless dead”—people who died young or violently and whose souls still wandered the earth.

“These souls followed Hecate, the goddess of the underworld, who was a popular addressee of curse tablets,” Stratton explains. “Maybe the restless dead could deliver the message directly to Hecate or even enact the curse themselves.”