Message #184134

[Vlad the Impaler]

When Spells Worked Magic
Volume 56 Number 2, March/April 2003
by Christopher A. Farone

In ancient times, a curse could help you win in the stadium or the courts, and a plea addressed to a demon could bring you the woman of your dreams

During an emergency excavation at the site of a new parking garage in Rome's Piazza Euclid, archaeologist Marina Piranomonte and her colleagues found the remains of a fountain dedicated to a minor and very ancient Roman goddess, Anna Perenna. Embedded in the layers of mud and debris they came upon a cache of voodoo dolls and lead curse tablets that had apparently been hidden there sometime in the fourth century A.D. Many of the dolls had been placed in lead canisters, one of which yielded a thumbprint, probably of a woman, according to the police fingerprint laboratory. The discovery supports the impression we get from ancient literary sources that women often acted as professional witches. In his novel Metamorphoses, for example, the second-century A.D. author Apuleius describes in vivid and undoubtedly exaggerated detail a witch at work: