Ancient Binding Spells (Agogai) Designed to Manipulate the Memory of Another
Having briefly surveyed this evidence for the production of memory spells (mnemonikai) in antiquity, let us now return to our friends Tigerous and Hermeias. In the binding spell of attraction commissioned by Hermeias, the ritual manipulation of memory is again on display.
Here, however, the aim of the rite is not to enhance the mnemonic prowess of the one performing it; rather, the spell practitioner targets the memory of an uncooperative object of sexual attraction. Hermeias seeks to make himself the exclusive object of Tigerous’s remembrance, regardless of whether she is awake or asleep. Other binding spells in the corpus of Papyri Graecae Magicae underscore the way that such ritual agents sought to conscript, delimit, and redirect the memory of their unsuspecting targets. In one instance, a man named Th eon conjures both daimons and “boys who have died prematurely” to search for a woman named Euphemia and to take sleep away from her until she “comes before his feet and loves him with mad love and affection and intercourse.” The spell is designed to bind her bodily members (“her brain and her hand, and her intestines and her genitals, and her heart”), thereby causing her to “forget” all other rivals.[733]In the case of Hermeias and Tigerous, and of Theon and Euphemia, we have examples of spells commissioned by and for specific people, and therefore we are supplied with the names of the principals. However, the majority of binding spells that survive still have blank spaces in the text where the relevant names could be filled in later. As such, they give evidence of a standardized spell script involving both the suppression and cultivation of memory - a script that ritual experts (i.e., “magicians”) would have adapted and made available to local clientele for purchase and personalization. Characteristic of this script is an attempt by a male ritual agent to effect a state of forgetfulness or oblivion in a female victim with respect to all other social ties, and/or to cultivate memory in that subject only with respect to the spell-giver himself.
Here I want to highlight two papyri that perhaps best conform to this particular subset of binding charms (agogai), a type that I will refer to as “Forget Me Not” spells.The first example is a “Commendable love charm” that enjoins the preparation of a jarred mixture containing olive oil, a beet plant, and olive branches and the recitation of an incantation, to be repeated on seven different occasions while facing the moon.[734] The final words of the incantation epitomize the primary goal of this kind of “Forget Me Not” spell: the spell-giver intones the words expressly so “that she (i.e., the target) may love me and do whatever I wish [and] so that she may forget (emXaGpTai) her father and mother, brothers, husband, friend, so that, except for me alone, she may forget (emXaGpTai) them all.”[735]
The second example, a “Wondrous spell for binding a lover,” makes this theme even more explicit. It begins by instructing the ritual agent to “take wax [or clay] from the potter’s wheel and make two figures, a male and a female.”[736] The male figurine is to be modeled after the war god Ares, armed with a sword that is poised to plunge into the female figure’s neck. By contrast with this modeled posture of power, the female figure is depicted in a position of humiliation and bondage, on her knees “with her arms behind her back.”[737] After a series of mysterious names are inscribed on different body parts,[738] thirteen copper needles are stuck in the figure’s brain, ears, eyes, mouth, midriff (2), hands, genitalia (2), and soles of the feet. While performing this action, the practitioner recites, “I am piercing such and such a member of her, (insert name here), so that she may remember i'onM<... pqqoGq) no one but me, (insert name here), alone.”[739] This evidence for the manufacture and use of dolls or figurines in ancient magical spells is not an isolated case. A whole cycle of binding charms making use of this ritual technology has been documented by David Martinez, and quite a number of actual figurines have been recovered from Greek and Egyptian gravesites, sometimes with texts that offer close variations on this same spell.[740] One well-known example, probably from the area around Antinoopolis and preserved at the Musee du Louvre in Paris, comes replete with thirteen needles strategically placed in the figure’s head, eyes, mouth, ears, chest, hands, feet, vagina, and anus.
This statuette was notably found in a terracotta vase along with a small sheet of lead inscribed with an incantation that repeats the PGM IV spell almost verbatim.[741] While such figurines often have been likened to Afro-Caribbean “voodoo dolls,” in the context of the ancient Mediterranean world this set of paraphernalia had its own distinctive ritualized function - that of binding the agency and autonomy of a female victim. In the case of this “Wondrous spell for binding a lover,” one sees the close link this spell technology forged between the controlled (female) body and the manipulation of memory.E.