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Spell binding wax figurines

by Eugenia Salza Prina Ricotti

Enchantments of love were many in the Greco-Roman world and many were the one put in use to bewitch the object of love and make her to yield to the desires of her suitor. One of them was called “Ares and the girl”. For putting it in practice the young man had to fashion two figurines: One that looked as a kneeling girl and the other as Ares with a drawn sword set at her throat as if he wanted to cut it. Then on the girl legs the suitor had to write the names of quite a lot of demons. When this was done he had to take 13 bronze needle and drive them one by one in the figurine’s legs every time saying “I’m stabbing you (and here the girl name) so that you must have always me in your mind”. After this he had to write certain magic formulas on a leaden plate and at this he had to tie the waxen woman statuette with a string which had 365 knots, one for every day of the year, thus he would be certain that she must stay tied with him forever. At last to conclude the spell he had to bury both the tablet and the figurine tied to it in the tomb of someone who died young, or, if he didn’t find such one, in the grave of a person who had been killed.
This ceremony was a very shocking one, but the rite was still not finished, because then the suitor had to read a very long enchantment addressed to the infernal gods. People believed that if all this had been perfectly done the girl would have been his for life and death: However we feel sure that if the girl had known what had been done using her name and the figurine representing her, she would have found very difficult to fall in love with someone who did such horrors to her: It is quite sure that she wouldn’t have lost any time to send him to hell.
Other love enchantments are sometime found: Thus in Germany, found in an excavation, there were two coarse waxen figures tight in an erotic embrace. The man had a brown color and the woman a clearer one. With them was a papyrus sheet with a spell in which Teon madly in love with a certain Eufemia asked the infernal gods to make the woman love him: “Demons, force Eufemia to love me....... Now! Now! Right away! Right away!”
We don’t know how this story ended.