Love magic

Love magic is the attempt to bind the passions of another, or to capture them as a sex object through magical means rather than through direct activity. It can be implemented in a variety of ways, such as written spells, dolls, charms, amulets, potions, or different rituals.

Love magic has been a branch of magical practice, and a topos in literature and art, for many centuries. It it attested on cuneiform tablets from the ancient Near East, in ancient Egyptian texts, in the Greco-Roman world, the Middle Ages, and up to the present day. It is used in the story of Heracles and Deianeira, also in Richard Wagner's opera Tristan and Isolde, Donizetti's The Elixir of Love (L'Elisir d'amore), and Manuel de Falla's ballet El amor brujo (The magic of love).

The earliest attestations of love magic derive from the ancient Near East, dating to ca. 2200 BCE. Cuneiform tablets preserving rituals of erotic magic have been uncovered at Tell Inghara and Isin (present day Iraq). Similar rituals are attested in ancient Egypt, for instance on an ostracon dated to the twentieth dynasty (twelfth-eleventh centuries BCE).

Spells of erotic attraction and compulsion are found within the syncretic magic tradition of Hellenistic Greece, which incorporated Egyptian and Hebraic elements, as documented in texts such as the Greek Magical Papyri and archaeologically on amulets and other artefacts dating from the 2nd century BC (and sometimes earlier) to the late 3rd century A.D. These magical practices continued to influence private ritual in Gaul among Celtic peoples, in Roman Britain, and among Germanic peoples. Erotic magic reflected gender roles in ancient Greece and dismissed modern misconceptions about gender roles and sexuality. Christopher Faraone, a University of Chicago classics professor specializing in texts and practices pertaining to magic, distinguishes between the magic of eros, as practiced by men, and the magic of philia, practiced by women.

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