When people talk about love binding, they tend to think of modern practices or, at most, the rural magic of their grandparents. In fact, the oldest documented root of these rituals in the Mediterranean world lies in the defixiones, the "fixing" tablets that spread across the Greek and Roman world over many centuries. Knowing them helps us understand where the very idea of "binding" someone comes from, and why later tradition felt the need to rethink it.
What defixiones were
Defixiones (in Greek katadesmoi, "bindings") were thin sheets, mostly of lead, inscribed with names, formulas and requests addressed to underworld deities or to the spirits of the dead. The sheet was often rolled up, sometimes pierced with a nail, and then placed in locations considered to be passages to the underworld: tombs, wells, springs, sanctuaries.
Lead was not a random choice. A cold, heavy, grey metal, it was associated with Saturn and with death: its symbolic task was to make things motionless, to "fix" the situation described.
Not only love: the purposes of the tablets
Scholars who have catalogued them distinguish several types of tablet according to their purpose:
- Judicial, to weaken an opponent in court.
- Competitive, against rival charioteers, athletes or horses.
- Commercial, against competitors at work.
- Prayers for justice, asking for a thief to be punished.
- Erotic, to attract or hold on to a beloved person.
It is worth noting that love tablets were only one part of the phenomenon. The underlying logic was the same for all of them: someone who felt powerless sought an invisible ally to bend reality in their favour.
The Greek Magical Papyri and attraction spells
Another valuable source is the so-called Greek Magical Papyri, collections of formulas from Roman-period Egypt. They contain texts called agogai, literally "spells that lead", designed to make the desired person come to the practitioner. Some call for figurines of wax or clay, divine names in several languages, and invocations to Hecate, Aphrodite, Eros and Hermes.
A female clay figurine pierced with pins, found in Egypt and now in the Louvre, is one of the best-known examples of this practice: together with an inscribed lead sheet, it shows concretely how the ancient world imagined erotic "binding".
A view of love very far from ours
Reading these texts today can be unsettling. Many formulas ask that the beloved be unable to eat or sleep until they have yielded. Desire is expressed as conquest, sometimes as outright coercion. There is no trace of reciprocity.
This is where history becomes a lesson. The defixiones show clearly what happens when the bond is conceived as domination: the other person becomes an object to be immobilised. Later esoteric reflection, especially the philosophical thought of the Renaissance, gradually shifted the emphasis from possession to affinity, from "fixing" to "attuning".
What survives of the defixiones in tradition
Some elements of the ancient tablets survive, transformed, in later love magic:
- The name at the centre of the ritual: writing a person's name remains a powerful symbolic gesture.
- The knot and the wrapping: rolling, tying and closing are gestures that cross the centuries.
- The place of deposit: the idea of entrusting the intention to a natural element, such as water or earth.
- The repeated word: the formula as a tool to give stability to desire.
What serious tradition has abandoned, however, is the claim to subjugate. Studio Esoterico Cornelio looks at defixiones as a historical document to be studied carefully, not as a model to imitate: they bear witness to a real human need, but expressed in a form that we now recognise as contrary to respect for the person.
Why they are still worth studying
Curse tablets are a rare window onto the intimate lives of ordinary people in antiquity: craftsmen, slaves, women, rejected lovers. They give us their fears and desires without literary filters. For anyone approaching love binding, they are also a useful mirror: they force us to ask whether what we seek is truly a shared bond or merely the need to control uncertainty.
In short
- Defixiones were inscribed lead sheets placed in locations linked to the underworld.
- Erotic tablets were only one category, alongside judicial, competitive and justice tablets.
- The Greek Magical Papyri contain attraction spells known as agogai.
- The ancient view of the bond was often coercive, far from today's ethics.
- Tradition has kept the symbols, name, knot and word, while abandoning the logic of domination.