The idealized and romanticized way of looking back on ancient Greece as the unique and unsurpassable source of classical thought, beauty, and noble ideals, which was prevalent at least until the beginnings of the twentieth century,...
moreThe idealized and romanticized way of looking back on ancient Greece as the unique and unsurpassable source of classical thought, beauty, and noble ideals, which was prevalent at least until the beginnings of the twentieth century, overshadowed effectively any early attempt to recognize and approach other, commoner aspects of the eveyday life of the ancient Greeks, thus impairing our ability to conceive and evaluate all the parameters and variables operating within the society which produced the Greek wonder. In the latter part of the twentieth century, however, important archaeological discoveries in combination with scrutinizing philological research and the recent development of new anthropological approaches penetrated the thick, shiny and indeed blinding surface layer of the impressive Greek cultural, intellectual and artistic achievements, revealing in the process a darker core filled with a fluid mixture of earlier and more “primitive”, but also ageless and omnipresent, underlying elements, structures, beliefs, customs and practices, and thus challenging the fabricated myth of an “all-perfect”, super-human society. One such aspect of basic human behaviour involves the belief in and the practice of magic.
This paper engages an interdisciplinary study of the binding curse tablets in ancient Greece, including examination of etymology and definition; review of ancient testimonia and literary sources on magical spells, curses, and practices; study of the geographical distribution and chronological development of the curse tablets; taxonomical analysis of the binding formulae; examination of the materials used for the tablets; study of the
secret places of deposition, the function and role of chthonic gods, daemons, and the dead; reconstruction of magical rituals; social contextualization and thematic taxonomy of the curse tablets.
Τhe curse tablets eventually developed into a legitimate device in their agonistic social context. Such offensive magic was inexorably stigmatized by renowned philosophers and orators as a marginal, malevolent, impious and harmful practice, bending the borderlines of moral orthodoxy. On the contrary, binding spells, curses, and magic had already infiltrated literature much earlier, where they flourished on terra firma in the poetic verses of Homer and Pindar, or the tragic stage of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Magical binding was widely practiced by the common people, to judge from the literary accounts, the sheer number of curse tablets and effigies discovered, their prolonged time-span and wide spatial distribution. In contrast to contemporary philosophical notions, therefore, magical binding in the eyes of the average person was not a contemptible or ill-famed religious behaviour, but a resourceful agonistic mechanism, primarily used by the weaker against more powerful opponents in an unfavourable agonistic situation or in a context of crisis, in an effort to counterbalance their disantvantage and even the odds. The binding spell on the curse tablet is in effect nothing but a ritualized, thus more powerful and efficient, “borderline” prayer addressed not to the Olympic gods but to the chthonic deities. It was this very agonistic dimension, as well as the apparent reluctance towards homicide, that generated social acceptance which, though far from being catholic, validated ipso facto the practice of magical binding and legitimized the use of curse tablets and effigies in the margin of public conscience, thus allowing them to remain well within the rules of the game and the walls of the organized and civilized city-state.
Given the strong connection between athletic, theatrical, judicial and political competition in ancient Greece, which provided interrelated arenas for personal, guild, and intertribal rivalries within the polis, victory or defeat in litigation, athletic or theatrical contests carried the special weight of a parameter and indicator of one’s popularity, influence, and political power; in this light, therefore, the curse tablets and binding spells transcend the narrow boundaries of an act of personal rivalry, and acquire the dimensions of a legitimate agonistic mechanism within the framework of a larger pattern of fierce socioeconomic and political competition, characterized by the perpetuous and omnipresent agonistic spirit of the ancient Greeks.
