A reexamination of the defixio (Defixiones, Part 1)
While visiting Bath, we went to the Roman ruins there. To be frank, my expectations were not high; at street level, the town center is all gray Palladian orderliness built around an insect-in-amber Gothic abbey. Neither does the museum’s entrance offer much promise, feeling like the sleek modern update of a Victorian hotel lobby. But then you step through into a secret garden.
You arrive rather abruptly on a balcony overlooking the Great Bath. Generally, the largest pool in a Roman bath is the natatio (“swimming pool”), which is typically neither as large as Bath’s nor heated, where this one is fed with water from the hot spring. So it is simply designated the Great Bath. Then, as I described of another in situ archaeological museum, you proceed downward through the strata of history, viewing the excavations of the site, together with displays of the artifacts found there.
There were some elements I had not seen before, showing the intermingling of Roman culture and that of the native Celtic Britons. Being familiar with some of the other materials in no way dimmed my enthusiasm. In fact, they told the story of just how much of their way of life the Romans brought with them even to this distant outpost of their empire, as well as how modern in many ways these people were.
As to this last point in particular, there was a lead ingot which had all the characteristics we associate with such an object; a trapezoidal bricklike shape, a standard weight, a raised edge at the top of the casting to show it was whole. This is similar to what is done with coins—if material was scraped off, this raised area is visibly uneven, allowing such thefts to be detected. And it bears an inscription telling us under whose authority it was cast. Each ingot weighs 155 pounds and reads:¹
IMP[eratoris] HADRIANI AUG[usti]
[property of] Emperor Hadrian Augustus
And on the topic of this metal, and unexpectedly, I learned the collection of defixiones at Bath is actually one of the largest yet found, and definitely one of the largest and most important in the archaeology of Roman Britain.
Defixiones, sometimes called curse tablets, are sheets of lead varying in size, with the smallest around 1×1¾ inches and the largest 4¾×10¼ inches (roughly 2.5×4.4/ 12.1×26.1 cm). These sheets were typically inscribed and sometimes drawn on, then folded or crumpled, sometimes with a lock of hair or other component enclosed within, and sometimes pierced with nails.
The most common place to find them in this state is buried in graves or tombs, which is one reason I would not have expected to see them in the thermae and associated temple at Aquae Sulis—the name for the Roman walled town where modern Bath now stands—which did not contain a necropolis or any other such structure. But, as I learned, wells and pools were another place in which defixiones could be deposited—basically as places proximal to the chthonic powers such bodies of water were thought portals to.
As with many things relating to Mediterranean antiquity, I ran across the defixio researching Gods & Heroes. I read many books, both from the actual traditions and modern archaeological texts. The second category in particular continues to grow: some 1600 separate items identifiable as defixiones have been discovered so far, and there is a great deal of continuing scholarship on the topic. Furthermore, the materials I read focused mainly on the corpus of defixiones from the Italian Peninsula during the Republic, while these artifacts appeared across the Greco-Roman World, from Africa to the Rhineland, for the entire millennium between the fifth centuries BCE and CE.
In short, it was a great opportunity to return to the topic.
Looking backwards a bit, the continuity from Greek κατάδεσμοι (katadesmoi, singular katadesmos) is clear. Plato describes them thus:²
ἐάν τέ τινα ἐχθρὸν πημῆναι ἐθέλῃ, μετὰ σμικρῶν δαπανῶν ὁμοίως δίκαιον ἀδίκῳ βλάψει ἐπαγωγαῖς τισιν καὶ καταδέσμοις, τοὺς θεούς, ὥς φασιν, πείθοντές σφισιν ὑπηρετεῖν.
[I]f a man wishes to harm an enemy, at slight cost he will be enabled to injure just and unjust alike, since they are masters of spells and enchantments that constrain the gods to serve their end.
Matthew Dickie examines the attitudes of Tacitus toward various forms of magic shown in his Annals, finding:³
Tacitus conspicuously does not like foreign cults. Yet his disdain for foreign religious practice significantly does not extend to the cults of the Greeks; they are treated with respect and are not dismissed as externae superstitiones as are Egyptian rites and the religious practices of the Celts, Germans, Jews and Christians.
In fact, many of the earliest Roman defixiones continued to be written in Greek, seemingly as part of the ritual until eventually Latin came to dominate.
Winding the clock back still further, there is a clear mutual influence between Egyptian and Greek magic rituals. Friedhelm Hoffmann notes,⁴
The late Egyptian magical papyri show also signs of contact with Greek magic, which in turn was influenced by Egyptian magic.
So much so papyri, written, as the name implies, on the expensive material imported from Egypt, became all but synonymous with magic spells in Greek culture. The Egyptians also had a tradition bearing similarities to that of the curse tablet; the execration text. These texts also seem to have worked by analogy, being written on items of clay or stone, sometimes even figures of bound captives, which were destroyed and buried.⁵
Moreover, we find as soon as there is written language, it is used for magical formulae, some apotropaic, but just as often meant to harm others. In Sumerian, one particularly cold curse runs:⁶
Namt’il nikkikkani khena
May life be his illness!
In any case, the Greeks and then the Romans widely adopted these practices. Pliny discusses the magic arts, but devotes a full chapter to “The Origin of the Magic Art”, in which he decries its ubiquity, as well as the frauds its practitioners perform, concluding:⁷
natam primum e medicina nemo dubitabit ac specie salutari inrepsisse velut altiorem sanctioremque medicinam, ita blandissimis desideratissimisque promissis addidisse vires religionis, ad quas maxime etiam nunc caligat humanum genus, atque, ut hoc quoque successerit, miscuisse artes mathematicas, nullo non avido futura de sese sciendi atque ea e caelo verissime peti credente. ita possessis hominum sensibus triplici vinculo in tantum fastigii adolevit, ut hodieque etiam in magna parte gentium praevaleat et in oriente regum regibus imperet.
That it first originated in medicine, no one entertains a doubt; or that, under the plausible guise of promoting health, it insinuated itself among mankind, as a higher and more holy branch of the medical art. Then, in the next place, to promises the most seductive and the most flattering, it has added all the resources of religion, a subject upon which, at the present day, man is still entirely in the dark. Last of all, to complete its universal sway, it has incorporated with itself the astrological art; there being no man who is not desirous to know his future destiny, or who is not ready to believe that this knowledge may with the greatest certainty be obtained, by observing the face of the heavens. The senses of men being thus enthralled by a three-fold bond, the art of magic has attained an influence so mighty, that at the present day even, it holds sway throughout a great part of the world, and rules the kings of kings in the East.
That’s the background and tradition against which the defixio is set—the tradition is so pervasive the power to “bind and loose” given to Saint Peter according to Matthew 16.19 can only be understood in this context.⁸
Addendum
I had been looking for, but failing to find, a good citation showing Greek magical practices incorporated those of the Near East to a large extent, which I knew to be the case. I finally found one in Gordon and Simón’s Introduction to Magical Practice in the Latin West:
In the late Republic, individuals such as the Pythagorean Nigidius Figulus (pr. 58 BCE), who almost certainly studied abroad, had access to a range of Greek occultic sources, themselves mediating material from Babylonia and Egypt.
It seems to be a well enough known fact it is simply taken for granted.
Read subsequent articles in the Defixiones series
Part 4: Bargaining with the Gods
Part 6: More Than Money Can Buy
Part 8: Hellenism, Schmellenism
Part 9: The Celtic Undercurrents of Bath
Notes
- Roman Inscriptions of Britain (RIB), RIB 2404.14, 117–38 CE.
- Πλάτων (Plato), Πολιτεία (Republic), 2.364c, ca. 375 BCE, my emphasis. Paul Shorey’s 1969 translation. Κατάδεσμοι is translated as “enchantments”, while the other term translated here as “spells” is ἐπαγωγαῖς.
- Matthew Dickie, “Magic in the Roman Historians”, in Magical Practice in the Latin West, Papers from the International Conference Held at the University of Zaragoza, 30 Sept.–1 Oct. 2005, Richard Gordon & Francisco Marco Simón, eds., 2010. The Publius Cornelius Tacitus work referred to is Ab Excessu divi Augusti Historiarum Libri (“Books of History from the Death of the Divine Augustus”), ?–116 CE, commonly referred to as Annales because of its year-by-year structure.
- Friedhelm Hoffmann, “Part I, Antiquity”, The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West: From Antiquity to the Present, David J. Collins, S. J., ed., 2015.
- Ibid.
- Neo-Sumerian Texts, Urnammu no. 28, ii 13–14., cited in Graham Cunningham, Deliver Me from Evil: Mesopotamian Incantations, 2500-1500 BC, 1997.
- Gaius Plinius Secundus (Pliny the Elder), Naturalis Historia (Natural History), 30.1, 77–79 CE. John Bostock’s translation, 1855.
- Seon Yong Kim, “Ancient Binding Spells, Amulets and Matt 16.18–19: Revisiting August Dell’s Proposal a Century Later”, New Testament Studies, 2016.
- Gordon & Simón, “Introduction”, Gordon & Simón, eds., 2010.
Deru Kugi 