Greco-Roman Magic: Curse Tablets, Papyri and the Magoi

Greco-Roman magic is the body of ritual practices used in the Greek and Roman world, from archaic Greece to the late Roman Empire, to bind rivals, attract lovers, heal, protect, foretell the future and commune with gods and the dead. It is known from thousands of inscribed lead curse tablets, engraved gems and amulets, the handbooks of the Greek Magical Papyri, philosophical defences of theurgy and the hostile portrayals of witches in poetry and law.

Magoi, Goētes and the Greek Vocabulary of Sorcery§

Classical Greek had several words for what we call magic. Mageia derived from the Persian magoi; goēteia was associated with lamentation and the conjuring of the dead; pharmakeia covered drugs, poisons and spells alike, since a pharmakon could heal or kill. The Hippocratic treatise On the Sacred Disease (late fifth century BCE) attacked "magicians, purifiers, begging priests and charlatans" who claimed to cure epilepsy by rites, and Plato's Laws proposed penalties for those who harmed others with spells, binding tablets or wax figures.

These texts show that magic was already a contested category: practitioners presented themselves as experts in divine matters, while critics accused them of impiety, fraud or both. Fritz Graf has argued that Greek magic was defined less by specific techniques than by its private, often secretive and self-interested character. The broader ancient context is introduced in What Is Ancient Magic?

Curse Tablets and Binding Spells§

The most common surviving magical artefact of the Greco-Roman world is the binding tablet. A practitioner inscribed a thin sheet of lead with the names of the targets and a formula that "bound" their tongue, mind, limbs or activities, then rolled or folded the sheet, sometimes pierced it with a nail, and deposited it in a grave, well, spring or sanctuary of the underworld gods. Hermes the Restrainer, Persephone, Hecate and the restless dead were frequently invoked.

The earliest tablets come from Sicilian Selinous and Attica in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, and over the following millennium the practice spread throughout the Mediterranean and into Roman Britain. John Gager grouped them by purpose: competition in the theatre and circus, litigation, commerce, love and appeals for justice. A large group from the sacred spring at Bath, in England, mostly asks the goddess Sulis Minerva to punish thieves who stole cloaks, rings or money. Small figurines with bound or pierced limbs sometimes accompanied the tablets. The legal and social history of curses is followed further in Maleficium, Curses and Protective Magic.

Love Magic and Literary Witches§

Erotic magic (agōgē, "leading" spells) was common. Many tablets and papyri seek to make a named person burn with desire and come to the one who commissioned the spell, often in harsh and coercive language. Literature dramatised such rites: in Theocritus's Second Idyll (third century BCE) the abandoned Simaetha spins a magic wheel and burns barley and laurel to draw back her lover, and Virgil reworked the scene in his eighth Eclogue.

Greek and Latin poets also created the enduring image of the witch. Homer's Circe transforms men into swine; Medea, the Colchian princess of Euripides, Apollonius of Rhodes and Ovid, commands herbs, the moon and the dead; the witches of Thessaly were said to draw down the moon. Roman writers made the figure more grotesque: Horace's Canidia haunts cemeteries, and Lucan's Erictho, in the sixth book of the Pharsalia, reanimates a corpse to prophesy the outcome of civil war. Such portraits are exaggerated, but they shaped later European ideas of witchcraft and necromancy.

The Greek Magical Papyri§

The richest evidence for how magic was taught is the corpus now known as the Papyri Graecae Magicae (PGM). Many of its most important rolls were bought in Egypt in the early nineteenth century by the collector Giovanni Anastasi and probably came from a single find near Thebes. Karl Preisendanz edited the Greek texts in the 1920s and 1930s, and an English translation edited by Hans Dieter Betz, including Demotic spells, appeared in 1986. Most date from the second to the fifth centuries CE, though they reuse older material.

The papyri contain spells for almost every purpose: love, victory, favour, sending dreams, binding, healing, protection, finding thieves, summoning a divine assistant (paredros) and divination with lamps and bowls. They invoke Helios, Hermes, Aphrodite, Hecate-Selene, Egyptian gods such as Osiris and Typhon-Seth, the Jewish God as Iao and Sabaoth, and angels. They use voces magicae, unintelligible names of power, palindromes and vowel series, and charaktēres, abstract signs often ending in small circles. The long "Great Magical Papyrus of Paris" (PGM IV) includes a ritual of ascent that scholars have nicknamed the "Mithras Liturgy". The papyri also show close links with the religious world of the Corpus Hermeticum and with the Egyptian figure of Moses as magician.

Theurgy: Philosophers and Ritual§

From the second century CE some Platonists embraced ritual as a path to the divine. The Chaldean Oracles, hexameter verses traditionally associated with Julian the Chaldean and his son Julian the Theurgist, taught of a supreme Father, intermediate powers and the soul's ascent, and became sacred texts for later Neoplatonists. Iamblichus, in On the Mysteries (around 300 CE), defended theurgy against Porphyry's doubts, arguing that the gods themselves had given ritual symbols that lift the soul beyond what reason alone can reach. Proclus later continued this tradition in Athens.

Theurgists insisted they did not compel gods as sorcerers did, but their opponents, Christian and pagan, saw little difference. The texts are listed in the catalogue as the Chaldean Oracles and Iamblichus's On the Mysteries. Theurgy became the ancestor of later ideas of white magic, in contrast to goetia.

Magic and Roman Law§

Rome legislated against harmful magic from its earliest written law. The Twelve Tables (traditionally 451–450 BCE) prohibited singing an evil charm (malum carmen) and enticing a neighbour's crops into one's own field. The Lex Cornelia de sicariis et veneficis of 81 BCE, under Sulla, targeted murderers and poisoners, and jurists later extended it to magical rites. Astrologers and magi were periodically expelled from Rome, and treason trials under emperors such as Tiberius sometimes included charges of consulting diviners about the emperor's death.

The most famous accused magician was Apuleius of Madauros, author of the novel Metamorphoses (The Golden Ass). Around 158–159 CE he was charged with using magic to win the hand of a wealthy widow, and his surviving defence speech, the Apologia, mocks his accusers while revealing what educated Romans considered magical. Late antique law, collected in the Theodosian Code, made penalties for magic and divination harsher still, and Christian emperors gradually merged the condemnation of magic with the suppression of pagan cult. These developments are traced in Black Magic: A History.

Frequently asked questions§

What is a curse tablet?§

A curse tablet is a small sheet of metal, usually lead, inscribed with a formula binding a named person and deposited in a grave, well or sanctuary. Greeks called them katadesmoi and Romans defixiones. They were used in lawsuits, sports, business, love and to seek justice against thieves.

Who wrote the Greek Magical Papyri?§

They were written by many anonymous scribes and ritual specialists, mostly in Roman Egypt between the second and fifth centuries CE. Their authors were probably connected with Egyptian temple culture and were literate in Greek, Demotic and sometimes Coptic.

What is theurgy?§

Theurgy, "divine work", was a ritual practice developed by late antique Platonists, especially Iamblichus and Proclus. It used sacred names, symbols and rites to purify the soul and unite it with the gods, and its practitioners distinguished it sharply from sorcery.

Was Apuleius really a magician?§

Apuleius was a philosopher, orator and novelist interested in religion and initiated into several mysteries. He was acquitted, as far as we know, and his Apologia denies the charges, but later Christian writers treated him as a famous pagan wonder-worker alongside Apollonius of Tyana.

Sources and further reading§

• The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation — Hans Dieter Betz (ed.), 1986
• Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World — John G. Gager, 1992
• Magic in the Ancient World — Fritz Graf, 1997
• Magic and Magicians in the Greco-Roman World — Matthew W. Dickie, 2001
• Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A Sourcebook — Daniel Ogden, 2002
• Ancient Greek Love Magic — Christopher A. Faraone, 1999
• Magika Hiera: Ancient Greek Magic and Religion — Christopher A. Faraone and Dirk Obbink (eds), 1991
• On the Mysteries — Iamblichus, c. 300 CE
• Apologia — Apuleius, c. 158–159 CE
• Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus — Gregory Shaw, 1995