You know the feeling, hearing about a talk or lecture which you know you cannot miss. There it was, an email invitation which said, “Join us for a presentation by Jessica Lamont, Yale University, on ‘New Work on Ancient Greek Magic.’”
At the time, I reflected that after a fabulous walking field trip through the Barnes Arboretum with my colleague Konstantinos Nikoloutsos and a band of thirty SJU Latin students, followed by a birthday party for “Antiqua et Aeterna Roma,” settling in for the Friday Colloquium sounded just right.
Bryn Mawr advertises, “The weekly Classics Colloquium provides an informal meeting for the College’s lively community of undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and alumnae who are interested in Classical subjects.
“Each year, the series includes a number of distinguished speakers on a variety of literary, archaeological, and historical subjects.”
And, in the case of Friday, April 21, I did not move from the edge of my seat for a full forty-five minutes, plus the Q&A.
Professor Lamont, currently in residence at The Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C., was nothing short of spectacular, demonstrating her gift of storytelling, engagement, and all you would want to know about lead curse tablets.
According to the Yale Department of Classics webpage, Professor Lamont’s first book, “In Blood and Ashes: Curse Tablets and Binding Spells in Ancient Greece” (Oxford University Press 2023) provides the first historical study of the development and dissemination of ritualized curse practice, documenting the cultural pressures which drove the use of curse tablets, spells, incantations, and other “magic” rites.
Lamont’s project “expands our understanding of daily life in ancient communities, showing how individuals were making sense of the world and coping with conflict, vulnerability, competition, anxiety, desire, and loss, all while conjuring the chthonic gods as well as the powers of the Underworld.”
In researching traditional histories of Archaic, Classical, and early Hellenistic Greece, the project “draws out new voices and new narratives to consider: here are the cooks, tavern keepers, garland weavers, helmsmen, barbers, and other persons who often slip through the cracks of ancient history.”
Because I was too enraptured to take notes, for a basic understanding, I quote here from Christopher A. Faraone, Edward Olson Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Classics and the College at the University of Chicago, “The problem is that we have what survives, and lead tablets are just a lot more likely to survive.
“The hundreds of curse tablets we have from Classical and Hellenistic Athens were all written on lead, and in order to empower them you had to physically place them in the ground.
“Usually they were put in graves, wells, cisterns, or occasionally in temples of chthonic gods like Demeter. And just the act of putting a lead tablet in the ground preserves it archaeologically.
“If you look at the surviving evidence in a naive way, you might say, ‘We have found hundreds of lead curses in Athens but only a few amulets, therefore we can conclude that the Athenians were very fond of cursing but they did not wear amulets.’
“Such an argument is, of course, highly problematic, because it does not take into account the media on which these texts were inscribed.
“Because the curses were written on lead tablets and immediately hidden in graves or wells, they survive archaeologically, whereas amulets were inscribed on more valuable metals, for example, gold and silver, and were carried around by the person who used them.
“Those amulets were so valuable that sometimes they were handed down from parent to child, and it is not as likely that they would have been left somewhere undisturbed.
“The upshot is that certain kinds of evidence from magical practices do not survive. We have this huge corpus of so-called magical papyri. We have four or five very lengthy papyrus rolls that have translations of how to get a girl, how to raise a ghost to learn about the future, and how to cure rheumatism.
“You name it, and they have rubrics, ingredients, and incantations. But all of these come from Egypt.
“Is this because there were only professional magicians working in Egypt? No. It is because papyrus very rarely survives anywhere outside of deserts, so in Qumran and other places you have papyri which have survived.
“The reason why we have so many lead tablets in Athens is not because the Athenians were particularly inclined toward magic, but because lead is a byproduct of the refining of silver.
“In the Classical period, one of the things which made Athens so wealthy were the silver mines which were discovered very near to the city.
“They worked those mines to death and by the end of the fifth century B.C., they had mined out all the silver, but in the process of doing this they created a lot of lead, so much that they used small lead tablets as a very cheap, and reusable, medium to write business letters and various other things.
“That is why we have such a large number of curse tablets during the Late Classical period, during and just after the mines were in operation, and much fewer in the later periods.
“It seems that eventually this stockpile of lead ran out and the Athenians began to write their curses on more available materials, such as wax and papyrus, both of which do not survive when they are buried in the ground.”
So back to the witches of Professor Lamont.
I believe that the Greek-lettered gobbledygook, pseudowords, which appears on the lead tablets could reflect an approximation of what the witches were uttering through a phenomenon called “glossolalia,” the unfettered tongue spewing nonsense syllables resulting from a highly agitated state.
On the lead tablets, there is also a patterning of the sequence of syllables which mimics the Greek and Latin epic meter called dactylic hexameter, employed in the Iliad and Odyssey. My reaction to that observation is that within the gobbledygook, there would need to be a very deeply-embedded series of sounds to accomplish at least two goals.
First, to add a degree of recognize-ability and credibility within the highly competitive market of industrialized witches, and second, to dig deep into the psyche of the reader, or listener, with a meter so old, so imbued that, in the end, it convincingly promised a mystical effect on the accursed.
Mary Brown, Executive Director of The Classical Association of the Atlantic States and Penn Museum Docent in the Ancient Mediterranean area, has authored the 3-Act play “Apollonius, King of Tyre.”
