Home -> Articoli -> Grecia Fantasmi e magia

The love wheel and the wrayneck

by Eugenia Salza Prina Ricotti

The Rhombos
It was rotating over her head the “Wheel of Love” that he had received from Aphroditis hands that Jason succeeded to conquer Medea’s heart. Everybody knew this contraption and how to use it, and all the young men madly in love with some girl that they spied over the low wall around her house’s courtyard where she was busy with her daily work, or when accompanied by her parents, she was going to some religious ceremony, made the magic wheel, their Lynx, rotate in whirl, and hoped to have the same fortune that Jason had. Many are the “Wheel of Love” that we find in the Greek world.
It is in a V cent. vase that we discover how they were commonly employed and used. Here, on the day of her daughter marriage, an Athenian mother twirl over the couple a lynx inserted on a stick. This lynx rotate to bless their union but at other times it was also used by some one who was in trouble and desperately asked the well known contraption to conquer or reconquer her loved one’s heart. Thus in his poems titled “Farmaquetria”(The witches) Teocritus show us a woman who, abandoned by her lover, decide to ensnare him and again tie him to her by a magic charm. Therefore, having called her maid, she orders her to bring laurel branches and apt philtres, then invoking a certain number of divinities and, obviously, Hekates and Medea, she sing a magic exhortation and accompany it with the twirling of the birds’s wheel
Lynx – sings the young woman – capture this man, my lover.
Others love wheels are found in museums. More or less beautiful these objects are alwys made in ceramic and with ceramic birds they are decorated. All of them must have been very much employed and, when the two young and nice looking people on which it had been used, threw one in the other arms, all of a sudden the numbers of people who believed in the efficacy of the “Wheels of love” augmented.

Bybliography
J. de la GENIERE, Une roue à oiseaux du cabinet des médalilles in Révue d'études anciens 60, 1958, pp. 27-35
PINDARO, Odi IV
TEOCRITO, Farmakeutriai