An Incorporating Practice: Memory, the Body, and the Female Subject in Ancient Binding Spells
This memory-body link found in the “Forget Me Not” spells divulges something significant about the construction of a particular kind of female subject in ancient binding spells of attraction.
Christopher Faraone has observed that the vast majority of “spells for inducing uncontrollable passion” - which he calls Eros spells - feature men as users (i.e., spell agents) and women as victims (i.e., spell targets). Where women appear as spell users in these ritual scripts, they usually occupy sexually aggressive (i.e., masculinized) social roles, such as that of the courtesan or prostitute. Correspondingly, when men appear as spell victims, they typically are located in feminized social settings, such as a household or natal home. In almost all cases, the desired effect of the spell is to induce an erotic reaction of such intensity that it destroys all existing social ties.[742] These patterns are borne out in all of the binding spells featuring memory in the Papyri Graecae Magicae, including a single example in which a woman is identified as the spell-user.[743] In that case, the woman (a certain Capitolina) performs the rite of inserting the papyrus spell into a grave in order that her victim, a man named Nilos, might “forget (emXpop) parents, children, and friends,” and attend only to her.[744] In all the other cases I have cited, however, it is a woman who is placed in the role of victim and whose body, memory, and social ties are (all together) claimed and redirected by a male spell user.Yet, with regard to the spell commissioned by the woman Capitolina, it is noteworthy that the body of her male victim, Nilos, is never mentioned. Instead Capitolina calls upon the daimons to “take away the mind (von$) of Nilos.”[745] By stark contrast, the binding memory spells directed by men against women focus almost obsessively on parts and pieces of the female body - eyelids that should not be glued together in sleep;[746] lungs, livers, spleens, and intestines aflame with desire;[747] [748] thighs, bellies, and pubic areas primed for pleasurable contact; brains, genitals, and hearts bound up in love.[749] This ritual “biopsy” of the female body finds fullest expression in the use of the clay figurine, where each part is separately labeled and then pierced through, like a butterfly pinned to a corkboard in an entomologist’s lab. Similarly, the woman’s gaze of memory is also to be immobilized, fixated only on the spell user himself.[750] In his book, How Societies Remember, Paul Connerton has described the social production of memory in terms of “incorporating practices,” ritual actions that habituate participants in and through their own bodies.[751] This sociological category of analysis may be fruitfully applied, I think, to the performance of “Forget Me Not” spells in antiquity. For both the male ritual agent and his (constructed) female subject, memory came to be “sedimented in the body” to such an extent that to control the latter (i.e., the body) was to manipulate the former (i.e., the memory). [752] On the one hand, for the ritual agent - whether it was a professional who prescribed and performed the rites, or a love-smitten layman who commissioned and then carried them out - such spells supplied a set of tools and practices, a technology, designed to cultivate and constrain memory via bodily means and mechanisms. Cutting up and mixing the ingredients of a recipe, standing and reciting an incantation aloud while facing the moon, molding clay figures with one’s hands - all of these were physical actions through which the practitioner’s body was trained, and through which that body in fact came to remember, how to exert control over the body and memory of another. On the other hand, the very identity of that other - the female subject viewed as a nexus of body and memory - was produced (and continually reproduced) with each ritual performance. The prescribed actions and objects employed in the spell were designed to conscript and retrain - to redirect - the targeted woman’s bodily and mnemonic orientation, in the process redefining her as a mute product of these faculties. Such were the attempts to create a compliant woman. In the end, however, I suspect that this constructed female subject would have proven to be a profoundly elusive creation. As an avatar or surrogate for her real-life Tigerous, she would have remained a haunting absence in the rite, fleetingly glimpsed at the intersection of totemic clay figures and fragmentary body parts, forever hesitating - just out of reach - in the ritualized gap between acts of remembering and forgetting.[753] Works Cited Betz, H. Cavell, Marcia. Becoming a Subject: Reflections in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006. Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Daniel, R. W. and F. Maltomini, eds. 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