Magic practitioners – both real and fictional, historical and contemporary – wield many different kinds of magic. Blood and bone magic, necromancy, divination, cleansing magic, manifestation, earth and elemental magic; the list is extensive. But wherever there is magic use, you are likely to find love magic. Spells and incantations to entrap a lover, potions and drugs to enthrall or make one feel amorous – love magic is ubiquitous in our current cultural representations of magic, especially (but not exclusively) when there are women magic-users involved. Curiously, while love magic has been around for millenia, love magic was not always so firmly feminized. And that seems worth digging into.
Transcript: Love and Magic: A History of Violence
Written by Averill Earls, PhD
Recorded by Averill Earls and Sarah Handley-Cousins
Averill: (as Young Sally Owens): “He will hear my call a mile away. He will whistle my favorite song. He can ride a pony backwards.
Sarah: (as Young Gillian Owens): What are you doing?
Averill: Summoning up a true love spell called Amas Veritas. He can flip pancakes in the air. He’ll be marvelously kind. And his favorite shape will be a star. And he’ll have one green eye and one blue.
Sarah: Thought you never wanted to fall in love.
Averill: That’s the point. The guy I dreamed of doesn’t exist. And if he doesn’t exist I’ll never die of a broken heart.”[1]
Sarah: That exchange is, of course, between young Sally Owens and young Gillian Owens in Alice Hoffman’s classic tale of sisterhood, love, and magic, Practical Magic.
Averill: If you quote from Practical Magic, the universe hears and changes your reels algorithm to Practical Magic Core. Probably just by listening to this episode you’re going to start seeing mood board videos for old Victorian houses, elaborate herb cabinets, handmade brooms, and margaritas.
Sarah: But casting a spell on your algorithm is not our goal today. Indeed, we’re interested in a different kind of magic – the kind of magic that Sally Owens attempted as a child and that brought her a handsome sheriff with one green eye and one blue and broke the Owens curse. The kind of magic that Romilda Vane tried to slip to Harry Potter but which Ron Weasley consumed instead, requiring a cure from Professor Slughorn, who then unintentionally poisoned Ron with some cursed mead.[2] The kind of magic that Aladdin’s genie refused to – or couldn’t – grant in the form of a wish.[3] The kind of magic that Victoria’s Secret produced by the bottleful and that thousands – nay, millions – of young college-aged women spritzed themselves with in the early 2000-oughts before going out to the club. You know what we’re talking about: it’s love magic, folks, and it’s everywhere.
Averill: Magic practitioners – both real and fictional, historical and contemporary – wield many different kinds of magic. Blood and bone magic, necromancy, divination, cleansing magic, manifestation, earth and elemental magic; the list is extensive. But wherever there is magic use, you are likely to find love magic. Spells and incantations to entrap a lover, potions and drugs to enthrall or make one feel amorous – love magic is ubiquitous in our current cultural representations of magic, especially (but not exclusively) when there are women magic-users involved. Curiously, while love magic has been around for millenia, love magic was not always so firmly feminized. And that seems worth digging into.
Averill: I’m Averill Earls
Sarah: I’m Sarah Handley-Cousins
Averill: And we are your historians for this episode of Dig.
Sarah: As you hopefully already know, we have a co-authored book coming out on October 15, 2024! We have a lot of people to thank for helping us get to the point of publishing a beautiful, magenta-jacketed book about Spiritualism – and top of that list are all of our Patreon supporters. Our patrons funded research trips to Lily Dale, the purchase of rare and weird books we needed, subscriptions to digital newspaper archives, and writing retreats to get this beauty done. We couldn’t have done any of this without yall – especially our Auger and Excavator level patrons: Lisa, Karl, Karen, Jessy, Maria, Denise, Edward, Lauren, Colin, and Susan! We can’t thank you enough. Listener, if you enjoy what we do here but aren’t yet a patron of this show, it’s easy: just go to patreon.com/digpodcast to learn more.
Averill: Before we begin, we want to acknowledge that each of our episodes relies on the research and writing of historians and other scholars. I’ve been thinking about sex, magic, and witchcraft for a few years now (a class on Witchcraft History is in my regular rotation at St. Olaf College), but the specific circumstances of this episode were really shaped by the works of Christopher Faraone, Laine Doggett, Corinne Wieben, and Jeffrey Watt. You can find a full bibliography, plus footnotes and links, for every episode on our website, digpodcast.org. And don’t forget, if you’re interested in something you heard today, please check out these excellent books and articles!
Also, quick warning: We’re going to be sharing quite a few love spells and love potions of olde; most of them are not very nice, and we do not recommend trying any of these at home, because they are ick in both their intention and, often, ingredients.
Sarah: The first thing to maybe sit with for a minute is that love – especially romantic or erotic love – has a history of violence. Consider, for example, some of the language we use today to describe love. You burn and you fall. You suffer for love – “passion” is, after all, derived from the Latin word passio, which means “to suffer”. Pain, distress, and torture are still a common part of our language for describing love. When love disappoints, it breaks your heart – arguably one of the most important organs in your body, keeping you alive. Why is love, a thing that is supposed to be good, that is supposed to make us feel whole and fulfilled and bring us joy, also so ugly and violent? Well, you probably know why. You’ve loved someone before, you’ve been hurt because of that love, or felt the physical agitation that comes with erotic love. Sometimes it does hurt or just feels weird!
Averill: As Adam Sandler croons in The Wedding Singer, LOVE STINKS. Yeah, yeah.
Of course there are deep historical roots to the language we use to describe love. Love spells from ancient Mesopotamia endeavored to lure or force women from their homes and into the beds of desperate men. Ancient Greek poets described Eros, the god of erotic love, going around flogging people, infecting them with the disease of love. Aphrodite – that capricious, jealous goddess of love – was always helping men ‘seduce’ and bring low powerful women. And even if those currents didn’t survive and we reinvented the wheel for describing love every century or so, the experience of teenage hormone-induced romances would undoubtedly regenerate the language of pains, sorrows, thrills, and chills of “love.” Sexual chemistry, bonded affection, the ache of being apart and the relief and warmth of reuniting – that’s love, baby, for better or worse.
Sarah: We remind you of these common experiences across human time and space because the history of love magic is, in many ways, a history of violence. Love magic has been (sorry for the pun) romanticized in twentieth century fiction and by panty-company perfume. Perhaps these fictional accounts rehabilitated love magic with magic practitioners, because some folks today will even defend love magic, despite its blatantly violent history; as Priestess Hierophant of Inanna/Ishtar writes, “the act of casting a spell and making Magic to attract one’s Heart Desire and Soul Counterpart [is] one of the most serious and divine acts of worshipping the gods in a human being. Just recall a time when you were deeply in love and you will remember how human it felt and yet so close to god(dess)head.” Perhaps this modern-day Priestess of Ishtar is unfamiliar with the longer history of practiced love magic. A lot of these spells were not about putting intentions into the world and hoping love would come to you, but more about coercing someone who didn’t love you into loving you (or, more likely, into having sex with you).
Averill: Take, for example, this ancient Mesopotamian love spell, ca. 2000 BCE:
I have seized you, I have seized you, I will not let you go!
As pitch holds fast to boat,
As Sin to Ur, as Shamash to Larsa,
As Ishtar to Ekur hold fast,
I have seized you and I will not let you free!
May the clothes you are wearing be your bower,
May the bed you sleep on be a tent,
May the bed dump you on the ground!
May the ground say to you “Get up!”
[At the command] spoken by the Capable Lady, Ishtar.[4]
This spell that lays claim over the body of the (female) victim – “I have seized you, I will not let you go”, forces her from her bed and into his waiting, suffocating arms. While there were also love spells that were evoked to bring sexual compatibility to marriages, blessings said at a wedding ceremony and the like, a lot of love magic was like this – coercive and demanding. Possession and ownership continues to be a problematic element in modern (especially heterosexual) sexual and “loving” relationships – which is definitely not something we have time to get into today, but the continuities are remarkable.
Sarah: And while some love potions and drugs were fairly mundane – for example, aphrodisiacs like oysters to the ancient Greeks and Xocolatl among the Aztecs – other ancient love potions were sort of stereotypically gross. Take this 17th century Jewish Italian folk remedy: “For love: take an eye of a frog called ‘boten’ and an eye of crow and mix them with ‘rusṭan’ oil and rub it onto your face and body, and every man will love you and you will find favour in the eyes of all those who see you.” Or this 17th century Jewish recipe from the Levant region: “One more [for love] – cut your nails with a knife and then rinse them in water and give it to drink to whoever you want to fall in love with you or slice up some apple with the nails [put the nail into the apple] and give it to eat.” Gross. In medieval Europe, love potions often included some kind of bodily scrapings: menstrual blood, a bit of pubic hair, or, apparently, fingernail clippings. Bits that might have erotically charged undertones, but when mixed into a drink that you slip your intended victim, still quite gross.
Averill: I do also wonder how one safely cuts their nails with a full-on knife. I am thankful now for the inventor of the nail clipper.
But even the not-gross spells were about coercion. An ancient Greek love spell seeks to infect a woman with the disease of love: “Burn, torch the soul of Allous, her female body, her limbs, until she leaves the household of Apollonius. Lay Allous low with fever, unceasing sickness, incomprehensible sickness.”[5] This guy wanted the target of his affections to be made sick until she left her husband, so that the spellcaster could have her.
And this Hebrew cabbalistic charm from the 17th century (which is the same time period as both the nail clippings and frog eyes potions) used mirrors and ritual to try and trap a lover:
For love – take a clear and good mirror and say to the mirror: ‘Look at my figure and I will look at your figure and you look at her figure and you will make her fall in love with him.’ Do this for three consecutive days and lie on it (the mirror) for three nights and she will love you.
So, again, this magic is not about declaring intentions to the universe or the goddess and saying “Please let love come to me freely and willingly” or “Set me on a path that will lead me to my one true love.” All of this magic is about using magic to bend someone to your desires. And just as often as love magic was used to bless recently wedded couples it was used strife in marriages.
Sarah: According to Christopher Faraone, a scholar of ancient Greece, love magic was common in fifth century BCE poetry, plays, and even the histories of Herodotus. Poet Pindar tells of how Aphrodite taught Jason how to use a magic charm and incantations to set Medea “aflame with desire for him.”[6] In the plays, characters use drugs or incantations to orchestrate love affairs and/or disrupt existing relationships.[7] In Euripides’ Hippolytus, the Nurse says:
It just dawned on me, in the house I’ve got enchanting charms for passion which will put an end to this disease of yours without any shame or damage to your mind—if you do not become cowardly. We’ve got to get some token of that man you desire, either a lock of hair or a thread from his cloak, and then fit together one benefit from the two.
The use of aphrodisiacs showed up in Herodotus’ description of Queen Ladike’s prayers to Aphrodite, and in the sensational biographies of ancient Greeks and Romans written by the likes of Cornelius Nepos, Plutarch, and Suetonius.[8]
Averill: According to Faraone, love magic shows up in one way or another in the literature of every epoch of ancient Greek history, from Homer to the spread of early Christianity. The Iliad and Odyssey feature stories of love magic, from Aphrodites’ magical belt as a tool of seduction to the Siren’s song as an erotic incantation.[9] Ancient Greek brides-to-bed consumed charmed (or cursed) apples, pomegranates, quinces, and other fruit to kindle marital affection for their betrothed – a practice echoed in Hippomenes’ seduction of Atalanta. (Side note: I read a bunch of Katee Roberts’ Dark Olympus spicy romances – which are basically if the gods were around today, what would they be like and how would the sex be – and the Atalanta story is in there, though I don’t remember any apples. Maybe I need to re-read it.)
Sarah: We are fortunate to have so many writings of these ancient artists and scholars preserved.[10] Of course, as Faraone argues, some scholars of ancient Greece would overinflate the weight and influence of the philosophers and playwrights like Aristophanes or Xenophon, whose writings make light of love magic, seeing it as a joke or obviously something that ‘reasonable’ people wouldn’t do. But the intellectual elite of ancient Greece were not the average Athenian, Spartan, Cathaginian, or Trojan. In many cases, these texts poke fun at what the authors perceive to be the foolishness or superstitious behaviors of the common person.
Averill: Archaeologists and historians have uncovered all kinds of magic ephemera that reinforce just how much magic use, including love magic use, was part of the everyday in the ancient world. We have evidence of ancient Greek love spells written out on lead tablets in the 1st century CE, nearly 500 years after the plays of Euripedes were written and performed and Herodotus compiled his Histories.
. . . take away the sleep of that woman until she comes to me and pleases my soul . . . lead [blank space] loving, burning on account of her love and desire for me . . . force her to have sex with me [blank space] . . . impel, force her to come to me loving, burning with love and desire for me [blank space] . . . drive [blank space] from her parents, from her bedroom . . . and force her to love me and give me what I want.[11]
This lead tablet, found in the city of Carthage, is a spell for a man to ensorcell a woman. The blanks left for the name of the target and the caster, which the purchaser of this particular tablet failed to fill-in, suggests that these kinds of spells were so common that magic providers had ready-made spells on the shelf, waiting for customers to come buy it.[12] Love magic was very much a part of everyday life in the ancient world, as it would continue to be for centuries to come.
(Makes me think of Taylor Swift – “I’ve got a blank space baby, and I’ll write your name.” Naming is a core element of magic practices around the world, and has been for centuries. Is “Blank Space” actually a love spell?)
Sarah: Court records and fictional accounts suggest that from the ancient to the late medieval period, love magic practitioners were both men and women. According to Faraone, men in ancient Greece had a monopoly over spells used to coerce and “induce erotic infatuation.”[13] Erotic love – that commanded by Eros – came in the form of spells like these:
Bring to perfection the [content] of this binding love spell . . . in order that Theodotis, daughter of Eus, may never have experience of another man than me alone, Ammonion, she being enslaved, driven mad, flying through the air in search of me, Ammonion, son of Hermitaris, and so that she bring her thigh to my thigh and her “nature” to my “nature”for intercourse always for the entire time of her life.[14]
The spellcaster here seeks to “enslave,” and “drive mad” the intended victim, and prevent her from ever being with another man. There’s a definite erotic charge to this spell – she bring her thigh to his thigh in probably very boring missionary style, so that they’d bone in that sealed position for all time. Then you have the real gem of a guy who uttered these words to try and ensnare – through magic – the woman he had the hots for: “Drag Heronous by her hair and by her guts to me, Poseidonios, every hour of time, by night and day, until Heronous comes to me, Poseidonios . . . Now, now. Quickly, quickly.”[15] This one is even more clearly violent: beseeching a god to drag this woman by the hair and guts and bring her to him. These are kinds of love spells attributed to men in ancient Greece. As we’ll discuss in a bit, coercion and violence continued to be the character of love magic as practiced by men well into the early modern period.
Averill: Conversely, women in ancient Greece tended to wield spells that increased affection from those they were already involved with–their spouses or lovers–or that is more like the magic that our modern-day Priestess believes in.[16] For example, this spell is an incantation to be recited when the husband of a woman is angry with her:
“I call on you, O Ishtar . . . because he does not tell me the words of his heart, because he is angry and does not talk to me.”
The rite is accomplished (as follows): You weave together into a single strand the tendons of a gazelle, [hemp,] and red wool; you tie it into fourteen knots. Each time you tie a knot, you recite the (i.e., preceding) incantation. The woman places this cord around her waist, and she will be loved.[17]
Note that “she will be loved” not that “Marco will love her.” In stark contrast to the love magic of men, this spell seeks to repair something that already existed, and even then it doesn’t command anyone to do anything. It’s harder to identify a victim of this love magic, because there is no specific target.
Sarah: Interestingly, by the medieval period, the gender parity of love magic use continued, but not straight-forwardly. In her work on late medieval Lucca, Italy, Corinne Wieben examined four court cases that involved love magic: two in which women were accused of using magic to seduce married men, and two in which priests were accused of using magic to seduce married women, all between 1352 and 1361. By the medieval period, love magic had been relegated to “natural magic,” which was typically a feminine domain. Secular authorities were worried about women who used magic, but especially love magic, because love magic might give women control over men’s behavior, and usurp the rigid patriarchal system.[18] In its 1359 case against Bartholomea, widow of Fedone of San Lorenzo a Vaccoli and daughter of the late Bartholomeo of Florence, the episcopal court stated that for two years Bartholomea
in grave peril to her soul, [risking] the loss of her salvation and causing the inestimable harm of blame and reproach to Ciucchino del fu Vanucci and his wife Bella . . . as a magician and enchantress [tanquam malefica et incantatrix] remained and cohabited with Ciucchino, committing adultery with him day and night often and continuously, and by him she conceived and gave birth to a daughter, and she is said to be pregnant now.
Bartholomea performed harmful magic and other enchantments [fecit maleficia et alias incantationes], on account of which Ciucchino, like one accursed [tanquam maleficatus] did not and does not wish to remain with his wife, but has expelled her from his bed and home, and lives with Bartholomea as has been said. And he has often visited harsh and intolerable beatings on his innocent wife Bella.[19]
How this case came to the courts’ attention is unclear, but Wieben suggests that the high-visibility of the affair – which resulted in 2 children – was enough to cause public outrage and force the authorities to intervene. As Wieben puts it, “the accusation takes issue not with magic per se, but with the resulting marital and social discord.”[20]
Averill: The only men in Lucca, Italy, in this period who were accused of performing love magic were priests. Priests – who were, of course, technically men – were not quite masculine men by medieval European standards. According to Wieben, in the 14th century,
Judicial officials acted on allegations of magic when it facilitated adulterous sex, which destroyed the order of the household and, by extension, civic order. Anxieties about magic focused on women or clergy potentially using magic to alter the social or political order. Women using magic to control men’s behaviour inverted the proper power relationship between the genders. Priests using magic to steal women away from their lay male parishioners exacerbated the competition for masculine authority between clergy and laity. If, and when, these judicial officials feared magic, it was because they feared its power to disrupt and overturn the proper order of things.[21]
In the 4 cases Wieben found in Lucca for the late 14th century, the concern was less the magic itself and more the use of magic to destroy public order. Of the four cases, only one case resulted in a death sentence, and their sentence was more because they fled the law than because their verdict demanded death. Both of the priests bore minimal consequences for their alleged love magic-use and confirmed affairs with married women, a far cry from those found guilty of wielding magic 150 years later.
Sarah: The late medieval and early modern European perception of love magic, and any kind of magic, began to shift in the 14th and 15th centuries. The 1376 Directorium Inquisitorum, written by Nicholas Eymerich, a Roman Catholic theologian and inquisitor in Medieval Catalonia, identified two kinds of magic practitioners – “those who practiced chiromancy (palm-reading) only and those who ‘to predict the future or to penetrate the secrets of hearts, grant to the devil a cult of worship (latria) or veneration (dulia)’. According to Wieben, “On the subject of love magic, Eymerich is unusually terse. He briefly addresses ‘those who administer love potions to women’ simply by commenting that ‘these potions are frequently prepared by demon-worshippers that go so far as to take a vow of chastity in honour of the devil’.”[22] Eymerich’s perspective had no immediate effect on places like Lucca, Italy in the decade after his publication, but that kind of thinking – lumping everything except palm reading in with devil worship – would start to bear fruit in the early modern period.
Averill: Ancient and medieval magic did not link love magic with ‘witchcraft’ or the diabolical the way Europeans would starting in the 15th century. In medieval Europe, love magic was typically a combination of sacred worship, including prayers to god(s), and the occult. In the 14th century Lucca case of Niesa and Nicolosa, Niesa–the practitioner–helped Nicolosa seduce a married man. They used a candle buried with a virgin boy, an “Our Father” and a “Hail Mary,” and incantations that the court scribe opted not to commit in writing because they should “not be spoken of.”[23] Though Niesa and Nicolosa’s love magic was viewed very much as being disruptive to public good and order, the court did not assume that they were in league with the devil. A hundred years later, the same circumstances would have produced very different results, as evidenced in the case of Mateuccia Francisi, whose association with love charms and healing arts led to her being accused of “Night-Doings” with Lucifer. Still, as Wieben points out, while the interpretations of magic-use changed significantly from the late medieval to the early modern period, in both of these cases, Europeans perceived any mixing feminine sexual desire with magic as problematic and disruptive to the public good.[24]
Sarah: For much of the duration of the witch panic across Europe – the 15th through the early 18th centuries – most magic, regardless of intent, was viewed with suspicion. Love magic, particularly when practiced by women, was labeled diabolical, attributed to the influence of the devil on feminine sexual desire. In Lucca, that axiety about demonic love magic waned, and by 1628, a court case involving love magic did not mention the devil at all.
Averill: According to Jeffrey Watt, popular belief in love magic – and its eventual correlation to maleficia, or malicious magic associated with demons and ‘witches’ – was evident in 17th century Italy. When Laura Coccapani seemed plagued by demons whenever in the presence of her new husband, community members believed her woes were brought on because a Franciscan had cursed her with love magic. Coccapani had had an affair with the Franciscan, Valerio Trionfanti, and Modena’s Inquisition authorities launched an investigation. They found that Trionfanti had in his possession several items belonging to Coccapani, including several of her pubic hairs, which were well-known to be used in love magic.[25] Though, as Wieben demonstrates, there was a significant change in the ways that magic and especially love magic were perceived in Italy from the 14th to the 17th centuries, ultimately Trionfanti was acquitted and bore no consequences for his alleged love magic, much like those cases Wieben examined in 14th century Lucca.
Sarah: Though ubiquitous across time, societal perceptions of love magic changed over the centuries. In ancient Greece, love magic might be a gift from capricious or helpful gods, or a potion provided by a health care provider to ease someone’s suffering. In 14th century Christian Italy, it was common and natural magic, which might include some light necromancy combined with Christian prayer and other incantations. By the 17th century in Italy, love magic was likely to be associated with demons and diabolical magic, because magic performed outside the sacred and sanctioned rights of the Christian churches was a threat to Christian domination of spiritual life.
Averill: But what all these uses of love magic have in common, and what comes through in all the artifacts we have preserved from these times that tell us about love magic, is how love magic was frequently about control and domination. We can certainly see this in the language of men’s spells from ancient Greece highlighted by Faraone, and in the 14th century Italian court cases. In the 17th century Coccapani and Trionfanti case, she said this of why she thought her issues were caused by Triofanti:
I had a suspicion concerning this Fra Valerio because I had a relationship with him for five years, during all of which we maintained a secret familiarity. And I believe that he also was thinking of impeding me [from forming another relationship] for the future. But when he saw that I was promised to another and lost the hope of being with me, I suspect that he did these evils to prevent me from living with my husband, perhaps thinking that he could freely have my in the future, even though I never had carnal commerce with him, nor did he every try to have it with me.[26]
Like the examples from earlier eras of Mediterranean history, there is generally a “victim” of love magic – in this case, Coccapani – and a perpetrator. The implications are, I think, pretty evident.
Sarah: In so many of these ancient and medieval relics – spells carved on lead tablets, court documents, and other ephemera of daily life – the perpetrators seem to be somewhat equally divided between men and women. In the ancient Greek literature, both men and women – and male and female divinities – were the purveyors of love magic. Aphrodite gave out her favor in the form of magical objects that cast love spells, or taught men like Jason the incantations to exert his amorous will. Eros – the god of erotic love – dispenses the bodily experience of love, which is often painful, torturous, or like an ailment. In a Sappho poem, “Eros shakes my heart, as a wind falls upon the trees,” or melts, burns, or strikes (as with a hammer) his victims. Love magic, divine in myth and practiced by many, was not necessarily gendered as such in the ancient period, either in fiction or in reality.
Averill: Curiously, by the medieval period, it seems that there was a shift in the fictional representations of love magic. In both 14th and 17th century Italy, men and women were accused and found guilty of using love magic. But, as Laine Doggett shows, medieval French literary depictions of love magic and healing magic overwhelmingly represent women as the sole purveyors of love magic.[27] Even in 14th century Lucca, Italy, love magic was natural magic, and thus associated with women. That priests were practitioners did not, for whatever medieval masculinity reasons, usurp that notion. Though there isn’t a study of the longue duree of the gendering of love magic, the scholars of medieval and early modern Europe that I consulted for this episode seem to all agree that by the late medieval period, magic was being feminized and, significantly, demonized.
Sarah: That’s not to say that men, priest or otherwise, stopped practicing magic after 1400. John Dee, a university-educated alchemist and magician, famously worked for Queen Elizabeth I, using his renown as a conjurer to position himself as one of Elizabeth’s most trusted advisers, giving her advice in war and exploration. Across continental Europe during the witch panics, men were just as likely to be accused of witchcraft – maleficia – as women (though British persecution of women skews the overall “European” numbers). But love magic – in contrast with ‘higher’ magics like astrology or alchemy – was feminized. Men might practice it, but then their masculinity might be challenged. Women might practice those “higher” magics, but in far fewer numbers.
Averill: The eventual gendering of “witches” as feminine in the early modern and then modern periods parallels this shift. Patriarchal systems across Europe – both religious and secular – that sought to control women made love magic punishable by death. In the late 19th and 20th centuries, when magic was once again relegated in Europe to superstition, peripheries, and a lack of ‘modernity,’ the witch was rendered powerless. She was either a toothless hag or a sexy enchantress, and while Europeans and Americans – especially Americans – had lots of anxiety about sex and women’s ability to control men through sex (very much like the 14th century Italians), belief in the power of love magic and magic in general waned. Not everywhere, of course. In Lithuania, for example, the use of menstrual blood in love magic persisted well into the 21st century. A drop in a drink, occasionally mixed into food – as practiced 400, 800, and 2000 years ago – menstrual blood is still considered sacred or powerful in some places. Monika Balikiene and Vytautas Navickas interviewed 323 people between 2000 and 2020 and the vast majority knew about the use of menstrual blood for love magic, though some thought it was stupid, and others thought it was dangerous and immoral.[28] But in most of Europe, the potential of love magic has been diminished significantly.
Sarah: Today, love magic is light-hearted, silly even. Few ‘practitioners’ of love magic are dropping clots of menstrual blood into their husbands’ Bloody Marys. Now, in the age of WitchTok and white ladies self-styling themselves Priestess Hierophants of Ishtar, love magic is manifestation and placing a crystal in a bowl to bring love into your home. Most folks, even most of those in Lithuania who know about blood-based love magic, don’t believe in love magic as a thing that will get results. They aren’t, in earnest, beseeching dead gods to force their crushes to notice them and leave spouses for them. Sure, plenty of people do other things to make their crushes notice them – I too was a wearer of the Love Spell by Victoria Secret – and maybe that’s a kind of modern love magic, but where it was once frightening enough to carry a death sentence – to be evidence of women’s power over men – love magic is now the purview of little girls and fictional wizarding joke shops.
Averill: Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Weasleys joke shop love potions are, in the Harry Potter books, marked under the “WonderWitch” brand. JK Rowling, who has revealed herself to be a gender-policing TERF, falls neatly in line with the patriarchal categorization of feminine-coded love magic as harmless, stupid, and useless.
Sarah: Like we said at the start of this episode, love – and love magic – has a long history of violence. The majority of love spells and potions employed in the ancient, medieval, and early modern world were intended to force someone to do something – fall in love, leave their family, reject or accept their spouse – against their will. The tone and language of the love magic in the ancient and medieval world doesn’t hide that violence. The 2nd and 3rd century spells we shared tore at the guts and bones of unwilling women, enslaved them and drove them mad. Love magic is a curse, and its targets were victims.
Averill: And yet, in the 20th and 21st centuries, when love magic was firmly associated with the feminine, it has been framed as sweet and good. A little girl’s spell for true love that invites a happy ending, the joke-shop facilitation of a love-drunk ginger haired wizard, the domestic bliss of a 50s husband and housewife with a twitchy nose. In this era, where love magic is coded as feminine, love magic – a woman’s power – isn’t something to fear.
That’s a problem on many levels. First obviously I rage against anything that tries to diminish women’s power. Like the ancient Greeks who laughed at the play Lysistrata, where Greek women force their husbands to stop a war by withholding sex. The Greeks laughed because the idea that women would have that kind of power was funny to them. So if love magic is feminine, then I want it to swell and crush the world. (I’m kidding. Mostly). But that’s not even quite it, right, because love magic wasn’t always the exclusive domain of women. Marketing it that way coded women magical practitioners as outsiders or, by the 15th century, demonic or in league with (and fucking) the devil. That too, like the 20th century marketing of feminized love magic as silliness, as a little girls wish to never fall in love and die of a broken heart, as a joke shop product, as harmless, has been a way to remind women of their place and their powerlessness.
But it’s also not that simple. Because marketing love magic – no matter the practitioner – as harmless does not make love magic harmless. I say this because I think probably you don’t want to be messing with love magic, because that’s giving nonconsensual, and we really need to be in a place of enthusiastic consent when it comes to love and sex. So maybe it’s time to deromanticize love magic, and see it for what it is: a curse that will only do more harm to women.
[1] Alice Hoffman, Practical Magic.
[2] Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Warner Brothers).
[3] Aladdin (Disney).
[4] Benjamin R. Foster, From Distant Days: myths, tales and poetry of Ancient Mesopotamia, (CDL Press, Maryland, 1995) 339.
[5] SM 38 (2d cent. c.e.); PGM O[strakon] 2 (2d cent. c.e.); SM 40 (3d cent. c.e.), all found
in Egypt, qtd in Christopher Faraone, Ancient Greek Love Magic, (Harvard UP, 2009) 3.
[6] Faraone, Ancient Greek Love Magic, 6-7.
[7] Faraone, Ancient Greek Love Magic, 7-11.
[8] Faraone, Ancient Greek Love Magic, 10.
[9] Faraone, Ancient Greek Love Magic, 6.
[10] Radcliffe G. Emonds, Drawing Down the Moon, (Princeton UP) 3.
[11] Qtd. in Faraone, Ancient Greek Love Magic, 4.
[12] Faraone, Ancient Greek Love Magic, 4.
[13] Faraone, Ancient Greek Love Magic, 96.
[14] SM 38 (2d cent. c.e.); PGM O[strakon] 2 (2d cent. c.e.); SM 40 (3d cent. c.e.), all found
in Egypt, qtd in Faraone, Ancient Greek Love Magic, 3.
[15] SM 38 (2d cent. c.e.); PGM O[strakon] 2 (2d cent. c.e.); SM 40 (3d cent. c.e.), all found
in Egypt, qtd in Faraone, Ancient Greek Love Magic, 3.
[16] 96-102.
[17] Scheil (1921) 21-27 no. 17 col. Iii.10’-14’, qtd. In Faraone, Ancient Greek Love Magic, 101.
[18] Corinne Wieben, “The Charms of Women and Priests: Sex, Magic, Gender and Public Order in Late Medieval Italy,” Gender and History Vol.29 No.1 April 2017, 141–157, 143.
[19] Wieben, “The Charms of Women and Priests,” 144.
[20] Wieben, “The Charms of Women and Priests,” 144.
[21] Wieben, “The Charms of Women and Priests,” 153.
[22] Wieben, “The Charms of Women and Priests,” 148.
[23] Wieben, “The Charms of Women and Priests,” 147.
[24] Wieben, “The Charms of Women and Priests,” 149.
[25] Jeffrey Watt, “Love Magic and the Inquisition: A Case from Seventeenth-Century Italy,” The Sixteenth Century Journal , Fall 2010, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Fall 2010), 675-689.
[26] Watt, “Love Magic and the Inquisition,” 681.
[27] Laine Doggett, Love Cures: Healing and Love Magic in Old French Romance. (Pennsylvania State UP, 2009), 1.
[28] Monika Balikiene and Vytautas Navickas, “Love Magic: Spells Using Menstrual Blood in Lithuania,” Folklore, v6, i8, 163.
Bibliography
Monika Balikiene and Vytautas Navickas, “Love Magic: Spells Using Menstrual Blood in Lithuania,” Folklore, v6, i8.
Laine Doggett, Love Cures: Healing and Love Magic in Old French Romance. (Pennsylvania State UP, 2009).
Radcliffe G. Emonds, Christopher Faraone, Ancient Greek Love Magic, (Harvard UP, 2009)
Gyorgy Endre Szonyi, John Dee’s occultism : magical exaltation through powerful signs
Jeffrey Watt, “Love Magic and the Inquisition: A Case from Seventeenth-Century Italy,” The Sixteenth Century Journal , Fall 2010, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Fall 2010), 675-689.
Benjamin R. Foster, From Distant Days: myths, tales and poetry of Ancient Mesopotamia, (CDL Press, Maryland, 1995)
Corinne Wieben, “The Charms of Women and Priests: Sex, Magic, Gender and Public Order in Late Medieval Italy,” Gender and History Vol.29 No.1 April 2017, 141–157.
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