In the 4th century CE, an Egyptian man named Hermias recorded his erotic frustrations in a curse against a woman named either Titerous or Tigerous. (He calls her both.) He complains to the gods (Tr. Betz.):

Anubis … assume all your authority and all your powers against Tigerous, whom Sophia bore. Make her cease from her arrogance, calculation, and her shamefulness,

and attract her to me, beneath my feet, melting with passionate desire at every hour of the day and night, always remembering me while she is eating, drinking, working, conversing, sleeping, having an orgasm in her dreams, until she is scourged by you and comes desiring me, with her hands full, with a generous soul and graciously giving me both herself and her possessions and fulfilling what is appropriate for women in regards to men: serving both my desire and her own unhesitatingly and unabashedly, joining thigh to thigh and belly to belly and her black [pubic hair] to my black, most pleasantly.

Hermias’ fantasy of Titerous asks for more than just sex: he demands her submission. He wants her humbled, whipped, and obsessed with him; he wants access to her body, her property, her emotions, even her dreams; he wants her to be punished for not already being his. And she had better be happy about it.

The form of Hermias’ spell is ancient, but the aggrieved entitlement is all too familiar. The ambivalent language of love curses — sometimes violently misogynistic, sometimes almost wistful, has eerie modern parallels in the discourse of the so-called manosphere: MRAs (“men’s rights activists”), “incels” (“involuntarily celibate”, a moniker adopted by some bitterly anti-feminist groups who feel women unfairly withhold sex from them), MGTOWs (“men going their own way”), PUAs (“pick up artists”), and similar groups loosely affiliated with the alt-right, who are having something of a moment here in 2018. (Alek Minassian, the driver who killed 10 people with a van in Toronto in April, identified as an incel.)

The description of Titerous as arrogant, calculating, shameful, and unwomanly for not being interested in Hermias seems out of place in the modern MRA movement only because of its restraint. Compare this post on the late and unlamented r/incels subreddit, which catalogues “Reasons why women are the embodiment of evil”. (r/incels was finally banned by Reddit in November 2017 for inciting violence.) Whiny dudes, it seems, whine in much the same way across the millennia.

As someone specializing in Greco-Roman magic, I’ve recently started to reevaluate ancient love curses like Hermias’ thanks to MRAs and their ilk. How do we understand a spell that both demands that a woman be burned, dragged by her guts, or whipped, and that she enter a long-term relationship with the spellcaster? Sure, it’s at least partly metaphorical, in the same way that we can talk about a burning passion without literally envisioning people on fire. But the way these curses linger lovingly over the imagery is disquieting — and, if you can forget the distance which 1,700 years lends and step into Titerous’ place, all too recognizable. Men are more likely to invoke Roosh V than Anubis these days, but the 21st century manosphere can show us some rocks to look under in antiquity.

Sex wasn’t the only reason for casting curses in antiquity: Hermias’ spell was part of a well-established tradition of binding spells, as they’re usually called in English (a translation of katadesmoi in Greek or defixiones in Latin, both of which connote binding or fixing in place). Most were written on sheets of lead, not only because it was an easily available and durable material but also because it’s frankly kind of creepy. Letters scratched into a sheet of lead stand out, silvery and fluid, against the dull grey surface, while the sheet is cold, heavy, and dull, all properties which the curses themselves mention. (“Just as this lead is worthless and cold,” reads one, “so let that man and his property be worthless and cold.”)

Roman defixio (curse tablet) wishing death on “Rhodine” (mid 1st c. BCE). © Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons

The Greeks began writing curses on lead in the 5th century BCE, probably borrowing earlier traditions from the Near East. From Greece, they spread throughout the Roman empire. The spellbooks that survive from Roman Egypt include recipes and sample texts for creating curses, and when Hermias wrote his plea the standardized wording he uses shows that he probably had access to such a recipe, provided with handy blanks into which to insert his and Titerous’ names. Not all of the curses deal with love: many seek to punish thieves and murderers, put competitors out of business, silence witnesses in a lawsuit or keep the wrong team from winning a chariot race. They were common enough that some have been found that were clearly pre-written for clients, with names squeezed awkwardly into the blank spaces later. Love spells, however, are a very common type.

Here’s where I digress briefly into magical theory to say that it’s common to talk about magic as a thing that people do in desperation when technology or society have failed them. That’s a very broad brush (and anthropology offers plenty of counterexamples of magic that isn’t used as a last-ditch effort to solve a problem), but it is a way to start thinking about why people might turn to supernatural remedies for a problem instead of more ordinary means. An ancient cancer patient might as well apply to magicians when doctors failed to provide a cure, and an enslaved Roman afraid of being consigned to a workhouse might appeal to gods to curse her mistress — who else would help this most marginalized of Romans? Some of the more anguished curses are those that try to avenge murders, thefts, and other unrighted wrongs.

This explanation doesn’t really apply to love curses, though. The magicians who worked out of the ancient spellbooks were not the least-privileged members of their communities: for one thing, they were literate, and for another, the spells are often quite elaborate, and practicing magicians must have had leisure, the money for expensive ingredients, and privacy in which to work. Professionals certainly wrote curses for illiterate clients, but even so, love curses frequently show us people with more social power trying to enspell people with less. Again, there are counterexamples, but broadly speaking, a man casting a spell on a woman probably had more social clout than she did.

I say “a man casting a spell on a woman” here because this is both the most common type of love spell and because these are the curses which contain the type of gendered toxicity which I’m interested in discussing. However, the ancient love spells show every combination of genders: men attracting women, women attracting men, men attracting men, and women attracting women, in about that order of frequency. Men attracting women with love spells are easily the most well-represented variety, and many of the “recipes” for curses found in spellbooks treat this configuration as the default, while we have only a tiny handful of female-female love spells. Curses in which women attract men are reasonably common but tend to be less violent.

Should we consider the love curses to be one of those cases in which desperation loses its explanatory power? I think it’s worth considering, instead, whether more privileged people might deliberately choose to use a tool of underdogs. The free men of antiquity had plenty of potential sexual partners — spouses, slaves, prostitutes, other free men and women. Yet faced with a particular target who was unavailable or unwilling, they rhetorically position themselves as helpless and occasionally even as victimized.

“Bring success to him who is beset with torments,” implores one man, innocently appealing to restless ghosts to haunt the object of his affection into insomnia until she falls in love with him. “Bring her wracked with torment — quickly!” If he is tormented, why shouldn’t she be? In another example, a man seeks to attract a woman by invoking Aphrodite’s help in a hymn, in which he recounts an occasion when the goddess drew an unwilling man to her bed. The reversal of genders in the invocation flips the female figure from target to aggressor and the male figure from predator to prey. If love is a woman, then simply to feel desire means that the man has already been attacked — and turnabout is fair play.

The men of MRA and MRA-adjacent forums congregate online to recite their wrongs, vent about women and feminists, and to indulge in power fantasies in which they imagine reclaiming their rightful political and social dominance. (A few charming examples include this article on Return of Kings, a post on /MGTOW, and Google dudebro James Damore’s anti-diversity memo.) Many of these are startlingly vicious.

Few of these people — well, I assume few; maybe that’s unreasonably optimistic — can actually believe that legal guardianship for women or the repeal of the 19th amendment is on the horizon. The point isn’t to seriously advocate for or to predict such things; it’s to commiserate, to posture to a sympathetic audience, and to reaffirm a worldview in which men are downtrodden and misandry is rampant.

Deprived of websites full of other men stewing in resentment, ancient magicians instead poured out their complaints to the gods. The language of the love curses is often highly aggressive, as the magicians imagine dominating, controlling, and punishing women until they behave as desired. One wishes “wretched care and fearful pain” upon the female target; another says to “take away her sleep and put a burning heat in her soul, punishment and frenzied passion in her thoughts,”; the same spell gives alternative language for sickening or killing her if that’s preferred. One asks “If she wishes to fall asleep, spread under her knotted leather scourges and thorns upon her temples,” (PGM XXXVI.134–60); another “inflame her and turn her guts inside out, suck out her blood drop by drop,”; a third comments that a woman should be attracted “to the bed of love, driven by frenzy, in anguish from the forceful goads”.

The figurine from Supplementum Magicum 47 (4th c. CE; Louvre). © Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons

One of the better-known curses, aimed at a woman named Ptolemais, reads “Drag her by the hair and her heart until she no longer stands aloof from me, Sarapammon …” and was accompanied by a clay figurine of a woman, kneeling with her hands bound, pierced with thirteen bronze pins (pictured left). We also have a spellbook that gives the recipe for this curse, which is why we know that a second figure depicting the man as Ares, holding a sword and threatening to stab the woman in the neck, is missing.

Many spells are explicitly about bringing women under control — “Charm to fetch an unmanageable woman” is a common title in the spellbooks, as are images of women enslaved and subject to the sort of assaults inflicted on the enslaved, like whipping and hair-grabbing. A recipe describes how a magician can create an attraction spell by engraving a magnet with a picture of Eros’ wife Psyche, with Aphrodite riding her and clutching Psyche’s hair while Eros burns her with his torch, as if she is an animal being tamed.

In many ways, the love curses seem to be less about actually winning a woman than about allowing men to visualize what physically and mentally controlling her would be like. Perhaps the magicians of the papyri do, ultimately, mean the whipping and scorching and stabbing and other tortures they want inflicted on their target as metaphorical pains, emotional rather than physical. I’m not sure it necessarily matters. Assuming that we don’t believe ghosts are actually going to haunt a man’s spell targets into lusting after him, the real satisfaction of the exercise for him lies in articulating the daydream.

While MRA discourse is aimed at other men, as they bond over a shared sense of ill-use, the ancient magicians primarily have as an audience themselves and the gods. We might see the magician himself as the ultimate target of the spell. Having described himself as helpless and transgressed against, he can then envision himself in utter, cathartic control. Titerous may have been blissfully ignorant of Hermias’ spell, but I wonder how the casting of it colored Hermias’ outlook on life, women, sex, and himself.

So where does considering MRAs and incels alongside ancient spell texts get us? It’s easy to over-rationalize history, and to believe that people act from a reasonably accurate vision of the world and their place in it. The last few years, however, have been a salutary reminder that people are often not logical. Social, political, and religious dominance do not necessarily prevent people from complaining about their oppression, whether out of genuine obliviousness or as a rhetorical stance. I’m less interested these days in the actual social position of ancient magicians than in how they saw themselves, or at least presented themselves.

The dichotomy that I’ve suggested here between the magician’s or the MRA’s claim to be a helpless victim of women’s charms, forced to resort to underhanded methods like erotic spells or roofies, and the magician’s fond vision of himself as dominant, overpowering, and the unquestioned master of his erotic target is not a contradiction: the sense of grievance, real or feigned, is what justifies the aggression. As someone who thinks a lot about Greek and Roman magic, I see some interesting new approaches to how we talk about ancient love curses. As a woman who has been on the internet in 2018, I find the guys writing them tiresomely familiar.

Britta Ager is a lecturer at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She works on ancient magic, agriculture, and the senses, and is currently finishing a book on the uses of scent in ancient spells.