Hex files: ‘Curse’ tablet recalls an ancient mode of score-settling

It’s an object that is small but mighty — and a remnant from a time when archrivals didn’t just get mad at each other. They got even.

Known as a “curse tablet,” which was acquired five years ago by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, is actually a thin sheet of lead about the size of a playing card. On it are inscribed 10 lines of ancient Doric Greek script that curses four different men who were involved in a lawsuit in the courts of ancient Sicily around 450 BCE.

These days, Jessica Lamont, a social and cultural historian at Yale, uses the tablet in her classical antiquity classes, including seminars on Greek and Roman magic, epigraphy, Greek history, and the ancient Greek language.

There’s no telling who came out on top in the legal case memorialized on the tablet — the curser or the cursed — but belief in the efficacy of curses was strong enough that these tablets were offered up to the gods of the underworld by ancient Greeks and Romans for some 1,000 years, says Lamont, an assistant professor of classics and history in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

“These were very charged, aggressive, powerful ritual objects that were meant to transform threatening situations, anxiety-filled circumstances, professional rivalries, and personal relationships that had soured or gone awry,” she said. “It was a way of gaining an edge over an opponent, of using ritual and the divine to improve one’s circumstances.”

And lawsuits in Greek antiquity were especially high-stakes moments in which “everything hung in the balance: reputations, inheritance claims, money, citizenship,” she said. Someone who stood to lose any of those things might hire a professional speechwriter to craft a persuasive lawcourt speech, in addition to a professional curse writer to create a curse tablet, or possibly even try their own hand at such a malediction.

Some curse tablets contained “binding spells,” which were used to bind, incapacitate, or restrain an enemy, a lover, or a rival.

The Greek script on the tablet was etched into the soft lead with a stylus, then likely orally recited. The tablet was then folded over several times, so it would be more easily concealed, and deposited in an underground conduit to the underworld: wells, cisterns, Roman baths, sanctuaries, and, very often, graves. The tablet at the Beinecke most likely was deposited in a grave in a Doric Greek town in southern Sicily.

“We often see gods and goddesses from Greek and Roman mythology invoked, figures that were associated with traversing between the mortal worlds and the underworld, deities like Hermes and Persephone,” Lamont said. “It was thought that these were the agents who would bring the curse to pass.”

In addition to targeting legal opponents, curses were also used to gain an edge in business rivalries and athletic competitions, such as foot and chariot races, or to exact revenge on an enemy of any sort.

Curses were part of broader practices of magic that thrived in classical antiquity and form the focus of Lamont’s first book, “In Blood and Ashes: Curse Tablets and Binding Spells in Ancient Greece,” published last year by Oxford University Press. Related ritual practices included protective incantations, amulets, and curse effigies (similar to voodoo dolls). 

Beinecke has just this one curse tablet, but worldwide more than 2,000 such objects have been recovered for study, Lamont said. In addition to ancient Greek, they were written in Latin, Phoenician, Punic, Iberian, Celtic, and other languages. They are a valuable resource for classical scholars because even though curse tablets were so widely used, they are rarely discussed in literary sources from that time.

“We’re dependent upon these inscribed texts and material assemblages to really understand these magical practices, and all the different people who populated these places,” she said. “We find a lot of women in curse tablets and various sorts of workers, from barbers to garland-weavers to sex workers. So many different voices are captured in these objects that we don’t otherwise find in contemporary Greek historical and literary texts.”

These were people who dwelled within an agonistic, competitive culture, and considered within that context, curse tablets also likely served a helpful social and psychological purpose, Lamont has come to think.

“Whatever frustrations, fears, anxieties or vulnerabilities you had, you were ritually exorcising them by inscribing them and banishing them to a grave or other subterranean conduit — perhaps the process helped individuals to work through those feelings and emotions in a way that was contained,” she said. “It wasn’t directly antagonizing another member of the community — it was confined to this ritual channel.”

Kind of like journaling, but with a jinx.