Someone had it out for a garland weaver named Karpimē Babbia, a low-status woman who lived in Corinth in the late first or early second century CE. Chthonic Hermes, the goddess Anankē or Necessity, and the justice-exacting Fates are called upon to bring monthly destruction to her entire body, head to toe. Someone – a ritual practitioner with a client, most likely – made this curse by inscribing letters onto a thin lead tablet (Figure 0.1). What they wrote included rhythmic Greek, but also bubbled into a continuous stream of letters and sounds, the meaning of which is still unclear, which scholars call voces magicae: magical utterances. The curse-makers then rolled up the lead and pierced it with a nail, depositing it on or near a pedestal at the sanctuary of the goddesses Demeter and Kore, midway up the Acrocorinth, facing the busy city below and the blue of the Gulf of Corinth beyond.

Figure 0.1 Double curse tablet against Karpimē Babbia, as found. Stroud, The Sanctuary of Demeter and Kore: The Inscriptions, fig. 80 (inscription 125/126).

Photo: Ino Ioannidou and Lenio Bartzioti, American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Corinth Excavations.

The curse or defixio against Karpimē Babbia presumes, theologically, that divinities will work on your behalf. It pleads for justice from the justice-wielding Fates. It uses rhythms and poetics to get the work done. It targets a garland weaver, a worker in leaves and flowers, whose wreaths, donned for celebratory worship, would later wilt. Such garland-weaving women are elsewhere described as both too much and empty – to polu kai kenon, dismissed as people who “cull flower-clusters and the fragrance of leaves, stringing and plaiting them pleasantly enough – but a short-lived and fruitless work,” in contrast to learned men’s work of oratory or piety.Footnote ²

What would happen if we made curses like the one we have just read central to a social history of ancient Christianity? What histories might we write if such objects were central to the stories of those who followed Christ even before the term Christian had been invented, those who sometimes called themselves Jews, sometimes aligned with a particular philosophy, and understood themselves at the same time as Christ-followers? Christians lived among people – they were people – who knew well local and trans-local practices to draw the attention of divinity or divinities. If we make curses central to a social history of ancient Christianity, we find Christ-followers in contexts in which ritual cursing was common. We find them cursing and talking about cursing. And the themes we have just seen – of theological-philosophical chutzpah, justice, poetics, and aesthetics – are part of the practices and concerns of ancient Christians, who of course included women and those of low status.Footnote ³

A focus on curses may seem marginal to the study of ancient Christianity – a minority report, a curiosity. But these were important rituals; these were common acts of religion. They only seem marginal to the study of Mediterranean antiquity and ancient Christianity because of scholarly tendencies to compartmentalize so-called magic from so-called religion. A more accurate history of ancient Christianity would enfold as much data from antiquity as possible, scouring not only the writings of Paul but also the writings found in the dirt at the Acrocorinth that shadowed the Corinthian Christ-followers in the city below. It would consider not only the sermons of John Chrysostom but also a curse deposited into an Antiochene well, which invokes the story of the drowning of the Pharoah’s chariot. A more ethical history would seek to reconstruct the wide material and sonic world of ancient Christians, using curses as well as the crafted prose of Clement of Alexandria. What you hold in your hands or see on the screen is my attempt to write that history, that book: one that focuses on a few ancient curses and discloses the ways in which they help us to understand ritual, justice-seeking, and aesthetics in the early Christian period.

Curses and amulets have often been labeled as magic and shunted to one side in the scholarly world. They are barely recognized by a larger public interested in early Christianity. Yet they are ritual objects of the ancient world and key materials that fall under the disciplinary purview of religion.Footnote ⁴ Those whom we call early Christians were fully engaged in this world of ritual. Some of them produced curses or protective amulets; some of them critiqued others for doing the same. I argue that magic is not a useful term to apply to these objects, to the ritual practices that produced them and in which they were used, and to the religious experts who produced and shepherded them. Yet the terminology of magic, whether represented by a range of vocabulary in antiquity or in scholarly analyses, does point to something important. That is, those in antiquity sometimes used terms that indicated that while curses were ubiquitous, they were also often thought to be deviant, dangerous, even feminized as witchy. They were not perceived to be mainstream ritual practices. David Frankfurter uses the term “alterity”; for him, the use of the terminology of magic in antiquity was part of a larger set of “indigenous strategies to evaluate, censure, render exotic.”Footnote ⁵ Radcliffe Edmonds describes this as a “non-normative religious activity.”Footnote ⁶ Frankfurter explains further: “‘magic’ or ‘magical’ can serve as a quality of certain practices and materials that highlights for our scholarly scrutiny features of materiality, potency, or verbal or ritual performance we might not otherwise appreciate as part of a culture’s religious world, or aspects of the social location of ritual practices we might not otherwise appreciate.”Footnote ⁷

In this analysis, I “get hung up on the language of ritual texts” and am interested in their “theological perspective,” despite Frankfurter’s warning:

In the face of this warning, how can I justify my lavish attention on a few curses, and a few ancient Christian writings, which is what you will find in the chapters ahead? How do I defend my exegetical focus on the language of ritual texts and their idioms and my interest in what they reveal about philosophy and theology? Let me clarify that I have no interest in intention in this book, and a great deal of interest in theology. That is, I do not see the ritual objects of curses as the psychologically fraught rumblings of an individual heart, the fervent and authentic intentions of a troubled mind. They do not provide a window onto some sense of self. Yet the details of their language and their larger ritual functions do teach us something about aesthetics and ethics and theology. I am fascinated with the formal aspects of curses: the very material stuff they are made of, how their inscribed writing appears, what this writing says about their materiality, and how the curses were part of a larger world of incantation, of intonations in community. I investigate how these “actually work on the world” and contribute to “more precision in the study of ritual, ritual power, categories of ritual, and perceptions of ritual in antiquity,” a call that Frankfurter has made for the study of ancient magic.Footnote ⁹

These curses, these ritual objects, had their own technologies.Footnote ¹⁰ They operated by multiple combined parts, including the fragments of ancient poetry or narrative embedded within their texts, the power of their materiality (such as lead) and language (including unknown languages), the sound of incantation and song, and the place of their deposit. The curses were small assemblages operating together to effect the technē or art of the whole. Such objects were also driven by and contributed to the philosophy-theology of antiquity. In the modern academy, theology and philosophy are usually separate disciplines. I hyphenate them together because, in Mediterranean antiquity, they were often linked: we are made in the image of god, says Epictetus (Diss. 2.8), whom we usually label a philosopher. Curses are philosophical-theological objects; they are crystallizations of a variety of ways of thinking about the world and a variety of strategies to gain the attention of god(s) and daimones, even how to draw down the moon.Footnote ¹¹ The aesthetics of such ancient objects – in Greek writings, aesthetics are often described as “varied,” “detailed,” or multi-colored (poikilia) or “variations” or “modulations” (metabolai)Footnote ¹² – illumine in turn ancient philosophical, theological, and even musicological literatures that reflect upon and debate such themes as the efficacy and beauty of voice, the engagement of divinities, attempts to effect justice, and the structure of the cosmos. Kandice Chuh’s The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities ‘After Man’ defines aesthetics as both “sensibility as a crucial domain of knowledge and politics” and “the beautiful and the sublime” as constructed by “Western modernity.”Footnote ¹³ In this introduction and throughout this book, my references to the aesthetics of curses and incantations recalls both beauty (however contested) and epistemology (how to know through aesthēseis or sense perception). I also seek to be sensitive to the ways in which the aesthetics of “Western modernity” has occluded our ability to see a range of aesthetics in antiquity.

Curses are essential parts of everyday theologies in the cities of the ancient world. While personal, they are simultaneously political: they are concerned with power, and embedded in the hierarchical economic, social, and educational frameworks of antiquity. They are even communal: evidence indicates that they are sometimes produced when a petitioning client approaches a ritual expert to commission a curse, and that the expert often uses a template, indicating a larger system of production.Footnote ¹⁴ Through curses, we glimpse the machinations of religious practice that are rich with signs (charaktēres), letter streams that spell nothing we can make sense of (voces magicae); these are objects that play with shape and form. From them we see a theorization of language, sound, form, and ugliness and beauty. Curses show that such theorizations happen not only among elites but also among those of lower status, not only in practices of philosophical conversation in the villa garden or the enslaved scribe penning a sophisticated treatise dictated by his master, but also in the ordinary acts of the making of ritual objects.Footnote ¹⁵ That is, theorization and practice are inextricable. While we generally realize that, say, an ancient treatise on love or fate offers a set of theorizations, we often forget that it simultaneously reveals theorization as a set of practices. The philosophical debate inscribed into a treatise is itself a practice, built from practices: practices of education and inscription, the act of discussion between elite men is a practice, the scribe – likely enslaved – who penned the text engages in a practice. So too, the act of cursing presupposes a set of theorizations about divine participation in the world, about the power of emotion, about a pursuit of (in)justice. The practice of cursing materializes theories and theologies.

My book brings attention to curse tablets and the recipes to produce them, showing how such objects were produced in such a way that they (were thought to have) worked like little machines, to effect (what was perceived as) justice. Components of that machinery included poetics and aesthetics, which operated the curse’s technology – the mechanisms of its technē, its art or craft. The book brings an archaeological eye to such curses, not only studying them as words on a printed page of an edition, but also considering what materials they were made of, how they sometimes used drawings or reversed script, and when possible, their find sites. Because of how we receive these materials, as flattened words on the printed page of an edition, we sometimes forget to consider the fulness of ancient rituals. These rituals involved air pushed through the trachea, the scratching of letters onto a surface, lead or papyrus that is folded or rolled, the sound – whatever that sound was – of tongues, and the movement – whatever the movement emerged from – of the hammering of a nail. These rituals involved the plenitude and limitations of the human body, human engagement with other kinds of beings, and interactions between things and humans: a full and resonating ontology.

My own book echoes these themes of aesthetics, variation, and technology, with each chapter triangulating between a curse, a literary text, and a contemporary work of art, whether visual or poetic, thus creating a new space for the interpretation of ancient ritual practices. I attempt an ethical historiography which highlights strivings for justice; which respects understudied ritual objects as manifesting complex philosophical and theological work and as marshalling complex aesthetics; and which attends to objects and practices usually considered marginal and also to people whose names we only know in passing – a Corinthian garland weaver called Karpimē Babbia, an Antiochene vegetable grocer named Babylas, a very angry Jerusalemite woman named Kyrilla, a legally beleaguered Cypriot named Sotērianos.

These ritual objects help us to better understand texts we label as ancient Christian literature. As we’ll see in the pages to come, 1 Corinthians, a first-century letter included within the Christian Testament, includes at least one curse and emerged in a city in which curses intertwined with cult practice. Justin’s second-century Apology, which claims to be a defense sent to the emperors on the occasion of abuses of Christ-followers, appealed to documentation for justice in a cultural context of sophisticated governance and alternative judicial systems, including the use of curse tablets. Clement of Alexandria’s second-century Protreptikos argued that the New Song which is the Logos is better than the songs of the Greek gods, doing so via Homeric incantation. John Chrysostom, in fourth-century Antioch on the Orontes, sermonizes not only against Jews but also against the use of Jewish scripture to curse, in the very city in which a curse mentioning the drowning of the Pharaoh’s chariot was found.

In the first to fourth centuries CE, the phenomena that historians gather under the term “ancient Christianity” were produced by those who did not always name themselves Christian. Many Christ-followers mixed freely with their neighbors of many cultic affinities, even if we know this primarily from other Christ-followers who critique them for doing so. Followers of Christ, like others in antiquity, improvisationally used ritual words and objects at hand to act and think their way to more intimate connection with the divine. Some forms of Christianity came to gather clout – acclaimed as philosophically sophisticated, for example, or associated with religious leaders who would come to be recognized for their civic leitourgiai or duties, and for their power. Yet, from the historical and critical vantage of post 1492, historians who rightly consider the principally violent effects and colonial legacies of Christianity might forget that earliest Christianities, if we can even call them that, emerged in diverse ways in the busy, bright, bustling, and sometimes violent streetscapes of cities under the Roman Empire. I say this not to imply that the forms of Christianity that existed before it became a religion of empires glowed pure or unproblematic. Rather, I emphasize the ad hoc and experimental qualities of ancient Christian practices, which this book explores.

Ancient religion in the Mediterranean world effervesced with play with voice and signs. It resonated with sounds that, our texts claim, vibrated between earth and heaven; it clattered with objects humble in their leaden or nailed form, whose very substance was essential to their purpose. Through study of these objects and texts, I seek to sketch different ways of being in the world. These ways of being bound humans to other creatures and things – whether divinities or daimones – it’s hard to know how to translate this: spirits, demons, divine powersFootnote ¹⁶ – or objects. These ways of being expressed the assumption that divinities cared or could be made to care about the quotidian; these ways of being assumed that the cosmos was filled with meaning and that there were mechanisms for humans and things to be agents in the world, to transform their circumstances. One might not ethically agree with all the content and strategies of the texts and objects that I discuss in the chapters that follow. I do not. I do not find commendable their sometime use of violent language or imagery to condemn what they perceive to be injustice. Yet, I want to analyze these ritual objects and phenomena in light of Ashon Crawley’s idea of the “otherwise” or “otherwise possibilities.”Footnote ¹⁷ Crawley formulates this idea of the otherwise as resistance against the force of white supremacy. I cannot say that the curses in the pages to come rise to the moral urgency and resistive hope with which Crawley intervenes. Some of the curses are hardly utopian: they seek to harm and to limit others, all in the name of justice and because of a perceived injustice.Footnote ¹⁸ Yet I cautiously take up Crawley’s principle of otherwise possibility because, as we have seen, sometimes phenomena classified as “magic” did represent an alterity in antiquity. They were seen as politically deviant, as dangerous in their ability to rout the normal order of things. Curses were forged in a meaning-filled world, sometimes promising in its hopes and expectations that the divine will manifest to enact justice, sometimes terrifying in its expectation that divinities could be harnessed to punish what the practitioner sees as crimes. It was a world in which ritual practitioners experimented with materiality and with language, toying with the beauty and ugliness of poetry, song, and substance, to link their ritual objects and themselves to the power of spirits and divinities. It was a world, I’m convinced, in which everything, every thing, mattered.

Aesthetics and Artistic Practice

Curses or defixiōnes aid those of us who wish to understand aesthetics and religion in antiquity, as well as the worlds of ancient Christians. Close study of curses calls our attention to materialityFootnote ¹⁹ – the rolled lead, the scratched letters, its placement, often in a shaft – and to a larger world of sound – an incantation and the breath that sustains it, the open float of vowels or the clash of voces magicae. To understand better these aesthetics and how they are essential to the operation of ancient religion, the book turns to contemporary art and poetry, particularly works of Black artists whose works theorize materiality and sound. Some readers will be uncomfortable with this move to the contemporary. Yet I need to show my intellectual debts and respectfully to acknowledge how I got here. These recent paintings, multi-media works, and poems began as a source of pleasure and interest separate from my academic work, and then became central to my thinking about history and injustice. Each artist grapples in their own way with the past and present racism that renders Black stories and people marginal. Thus I engage their art not to say that ancient curses or early Christians are the same as these works of art. That is, I do not argue in some simplistic way we should see ancient ritual practitioners whose work was labelled magic, whether Christ-followers or not, in some analogical relationship to these contemporary artists. Rather, these contemporary artists employ historical fragments and the power of matter and the complexity of language and song in such a way that they helped me to recognize the aesthetic formulations and complex combinations of matter and sound in ancient ritual objects.

Scholars of religion, including religions of antiquity, have often used theorists like Michel Foucault or Judith Butler to make sense of power or speech and performance in antiquity. Some have relied on feminist materialist theorists such as Jane Bennett or Karen Barad to think about matter’s power and agency. Yet, despite scholarly interest in and commitment to the material turn, we have largely not yet engaged art itself as a theoretical framework. One exception is Anthony Pinn, who uses art as a way to theorize religion as a hermeneutic or technology, “to discuss various modalities of the arts so as to highlight the things exposed through religion as a technology.” He “is concerned with the application of religion as a technology to art so as to expose what art says about the nature of ‘things’ and their interaction,” with “things” understood as “vital and vibrant – impactful.”Footnote ²⁰ Tina Campt helps us to understand that some Black artists “refuse to create spectators, as it is neither easy nor indeed possible to passively consume their art. Their work requires labor – the labor of discomfort, feeling, positioning, and repositioning – and solicits visceral responses to the visualization of Black precarity.”Footnote ²¹ Natalie Loveless, among others, also insists that artists are engaged research-creation, a “generative recrafting” that encapsulates “the ways that artistic practices come to be understood as research methods and outputs in university contexts” and encourages “the insertion of voices and practices into the academic everyday that work to trouble disciplinary relays of knowledge/power.”Footnote ²² Artworks and poetry, as research-creations, demand the labor of our attention and open new possibilities for viewing and hearing.

I put into conversation ancient curses which are ritual objects with recent research-creations. Each – whether poem, painting, sculpture, or mixed-media work of Black artists – uses historical fragments. Titus Kaphar’s paintings shred and nail history. The poetry of M. NourbeSe Philip demonstrates the power of the mother tongue and the violence of language as an outcome of historical colonialism; and Tyehimba Jess’s poems play with shape – with reading across a line or two poems as split – even as they recall and revive historical African American song traditions. The canvases of Glenn Ligon offer story – such as Ralph Ellison’s words – and obscure that story; they suggest identification with the narrative of the Invisible Man within a larger stream of conversation in critical theory, conversations about history and power: who gets categorized as Man in the first place, and how these definitions are linked with race, gender, and ability. These art works offer historiographical interventions, sometimes combining documentary evidence to expose abuse of power in the present, sometimes harnessing the detritus of history or the power of language as apotropaic devices.

These artists and their work challenge me as a historian to think about what I am doing in the deployment of my historical materials, with the fragments of quotations, the attempts at smooth prose, the studding of authoritative footnotes, the thrumming ethical questions that drive my project: Who is occluded in the historical record? Is my writing of history sufficient to the injustices of antiquity? Does my historiography at least approach a reparative attempt to foreground the many possible stories of the lives of women, the enslaved, those of low status in antiquity, the circulations of political power and judicial force that curses sometimes sought to disrupt? Or does my scholarship participate in a “crime of non-assistance,” to borrow a phrase from Christina Sharpe’s analysis?Footnote ²³ Moreover, the contemporary artists’ aesthetics and methods help me (help us, I hope) to divine curse tablets as something more than ugly hunks of lead that aggressively attack – think of poor Karpimē Babbia, condemned to monthly destruction – or objects used in solitary and private ritual to undermine another individual. These present-day artists remind us that materiality and sound – the rhythm and force and shape of a poem or incantation – are not epiphenomenal to what an object or a poem does. They give us sharper perception of curses as ancient ritual objects which use, to borrow terms from ancient historian Henk Versnel, “poetics of magical charms” in their work as “prayers for justice.”Footnote ²⁴

My book participates in a larger rethinking of aesthetics in the “illiberal” humanities, to borrow a term from Kandice Chuh. Chuh begins her The Difference Aesthetics Makes with a quotation from Black critical theorist Sylvia Wynter about “accelerat[ing] the conceptual ‘erasing’ of the figure of Man.”Footnote ²⁵ That is, Wynter’s project and Chuh’s inheritance is to expose how concepts of whiteness, masculinity, and colonizing power define the category of Man over and against other humans. The liberal humanities are straitened by a narrow definition of the human, limited by colonialist and racist ideologies. I bring the category of aesthetics to the study of objects and writing that have often been seen as ugly, disruptive, or embarrassing.

The study of late antique religion has begun to enter a conversation that challenges unspoken assumptions regarding aesthetics, a term that evokes both sense perception (often thought in ancient philosophical-theological writings to be dangerously invasive and tempting, an uncertain epistemological source) and beauty (often defined in gendered and raced ways). I engage with the theme of aesthetics to expose and to critique “a white aesthetic regime that circulated and still circulates ideas of the true, the good, the beautiful, the noble … the transcendent,” in the words of Willie Jennings.Footnote ²⁶ The covert aesthetics of one’s academic field – what is considered beautiful, good to study, and the behaviors and practices that govern this attention, from seminar formats to tenure and review processes – often conceal an ugliness: assumptions about what is beautiful that are driven by prejudicial racial and gendered logics. Calls for the beautiful or for completeness or perfection (teleion), both ancient and recent, often do not disclose and indeed actively obfuscate their unjust underpinnings.

(Re)defining Aesthetics

Artist Emma Amos’s Measuring, Measuring (Plate 1) is a research-creation that materializes a critique of aesthetic assumptions. It offers a critical and theoretical rejoinder to aesthetics grounded in whiteness.Footnote ²⁷

Plate 1 Emma Amos. Measuring, Measuring. 1995. 213.4 × 177.8 cm. Acrylic on linen canvas, Kente fragment, batiked hand swatches, African strip woven borders, and laser-transfer photographs.

© Emma Amos, Collection of the Birmingham Museum of Art, AL. Courtesy RYAN LEE Gallery, New York.

The background of Measuring, Measuring is explosive in color, primarily using strong blacks, yellows, oranges, and contrasting blues, and embedding Kente cloth. A laser transfer photograph on the left side of Amos’s work depicts a nude bronze female body which seems to be appropriated from Aristide Maillot; at the same time, this armless sculpture reminds us of the Venus de Milo,Footnote ²⁸ puzzlingly held or propped up by an invisible figure with a hat. The middle figure is a colonial era photo of an African woman. She is criss-crossed with seamstress-style measuring tape in the yellows of yardsticks: literal measuring rods or canons. These measuring tapes sever her at her neck, pudenda, and knees. The curve of her right hip is echoed by a medallion cut from batik cloth.

Of the three figures, the African woman alone is affixed atop a printed essay about Greek art which includes words both clear and obscured. At the outlined point of her severed legs, we can read “male body in action at gymnasiums … experience, and sculptors had … observe its proportions.” Amos collages over an art historical text about what was considered perfect and worth replicating in sculpture: the nude male form, trained as ephebe in the gymnasia of the ancient world. The rightmost image presents one of the canonical objects of art history: the fifth-century BCE Greek “Kritios Boy,” nearly haloed by one of the four hand-in-circle images that Amos places toward the internal corners of the piece. The entire artwork is framed by Kente cloth and allusions to Kente cloth in the form of modern legs, abstracted and stacked into what look like parallel lines, an excess and remainder of the severed or missing limbs of the three central images. Amos engages the Classics and its aesthetics. Measuring, Measuring calls into question what is being measured, how it is assessed as beautiful, and how race, gender, and representation – whether in photograph or statuary – are part of an aesthetic regime.

Aesthetics – sometimes defined in relation to “good or beautiful things” – are a key if covert basis for ongoing tensions within the study of the ancient Mediterranean world. Scholars committed to a strongly philological-“aesthetic”-literary approach (say, the beauty of a Homeric phrase or the theological sublimity of an idea of charis, usually translated grace or gift), stand to one side. On the other side stand those who embrace social, economic, and political approaches that analyze literary texts, sculptures, frescoes, and other remains as evidence of wealth and poverty, enslavement and freedom, gender norms and their queering. Moreover, some scholars of antiquity regularly reflect on how the history of the study of the Classics, Roman history, and ancient Christianity is intertwined with race, imperialisms, and power.Footnote ²⁹ Others do not.Footnote ³⁰ (For me, there is no love for Cicero’s prose that does not also benefit from an understanding of the janky politics of his time. There is no honoring of Seneca or the apostle Paul or the idea of charis that cannot also to speak to white supremacist uses of such figures and terms. There is no attention to Homer that would not benefit from the bright collages of Harlem Renaissance artist Romare Bearden’s Black Odyssey.) These divides depend upon which intellectual-racial inheritances a scholar claims. A scholar’s approach depends upon their (mal)formations from the disciplines of the discipline. A scholar’s approach depends upon whom they consider as ancestor or paterfamilias.Footnote ³¹ What was and is considered good or beautiful in our fields or disciplines is often implicitly defined within ethnic-racial hierarchies, not to mention the able, masculine body: the speech or body of the barbarous barbarian as counterpoint to the beauty of the marble white Greek or Roman.Footnote ³² Earlier, I referred to Ashon Crawley’s idea of “otherwise possibilities”: there are otherwise possibilities available for our conceptualizations of what is central and what is marginal to our traditionally defined fields of study.

The history of aesthetics is generally traced from Aristotle’s work, which defined aesthetics less in terms of beauty and more in relation to aesthēseis, that is, to sense perceptions and their epistemic trustworthiness and utility. As Birgit Meyer and Jojada Verrips put it, “Aisthesis then refers to our total sensorial experience of the world and to our sensitive knowledge of it.”Footnote ³³ Modern conversations about aesthetics are informed by this Aristotelian definition, but also by a definition of aesthetics in terms of beauty. Jacques Rancière states at the start of his Aisthesis, “For two centuries in the West, ‘aesthetics’ has been the name for the category designating the sensible fabric and intelligible form of what we call ‘Art.’” What interests Rancière is how a particular idea of aesthetics forms a “[regime] of the identification of art” built from the “sensible fabric of experience” and “material conditions – performance and exhibition spaces, forms of circulation and reproduction.”Footnote ³⁴ That is, valuations of “Art” are produced by an often unarticulated notion of aesthetics within political, economic, and social conditions of power.

Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Aesthetica (1750–58) is often cited as the foundational text for the current academic genealogy of aesthetics, a book that bridged ancient Greek philosophical discussions of sense perception (often via commentaries on Aristotle’s De anima) and later discussion of aesthetics.Footnote ³⁵ Baumgarten wrote: “[a]esthetics is taken very literally as a defense of the relevance of sensual perception.” This idea of aesthetics contrasts with Descartes’s “rationalization of cognition” and a worldview that understood aesthetic judgments as connected with the emotions and as a “by-product of flawed human cognition.”Footnote ³⁶ This connection of aesthetics with emotion is not surprising.Footnote ³⁷ It is part of the larger Romantic philosophical landscape, and it is linked to the ancient philosophical debate about how sense perception (aisthēseis) are conduits for emotions, what one experiences, or what one suffers (pathein).

These discussions of aesthetics were not only tied to ancient philosophical conversations about the aisthēseis, but also to ancient Greek objects, in the second primary definition of aesthetics: beauty. For example, Hölderin (or perhaps Schelling) wrote: “The idea that unites everyone [is] the idea of beauty… . I am now convinced that the highest act of reason, by encompassing all ideas, is an aesthetic act, and that truth and goodness are siblings only in beauty.”Footnote ³⁸ John Keats manifests this theory in his poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”Footnote ³⁹ It is not incidental that Keats’s beautiful urn that speaks truth, that is truth, is Greek: the neo-classicizing aesthetics of the Romantic period led to an identification with (a particular understanding of) Greece. Keats’s contemporary, the Romantic poet Lord Byron, would even lead forces for Greek independence. Ideas of what is the good, the true, and the beautiful are grounded in ethnic-racial identificationFootnote ⁴⁰ and have political and social effects.

Even as Baumgarten famously presented a theory of aesthetics, even as Keats opined on an ancient Greek object, eighteenth-century German scholar Johann Joachim Winckelmann offered a theory of aesthetics based in a taxonomy of ancient art which haunts the disciplines of the Classics, New Testament Studies, and Art History.Footnote ⁴¹ Rancière points to “the historical moment, in Winckelmann’s Germany, when Art begins to be named as such.”Footnote ⁴² Winckelmann’s 1764 History of Ancient Art set forth four stages of art, with Greekness as the height of aesthetics.Footnote ⁴³ In his third or “beautiful” phase, commenced by Praxiteles, the remaining angularity of the high style came to flow; “grace” was its main characteristic.Footnote ⁴⁴ Winckelmann linked this grace to Ionian artists (Parrhasios and Apelles) and thus ethnically situates this style in the Greek East and in colonies of Athens. The fourth phase is characterized by imitation; with the rise of the Romans, the genius of the past “cramp[ed] the spirit” and led to a mechanistic and derivative art; this imitation was characterized not only by timidity and diligence, but also by a “[decline] into the effeminate.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Roman copies of earlier sculptures were seen as inferior, mechanical, not embodying the “Greek” spirit.Footnote ⁴⁶ Ethnicity and aesthetics are intertwined.Footnote ⁴⁷ Roman art historians have rejected Winckelmann’s interpretation of Roman art as mere copying.Footnote ⁴⁸ Scholars use terms like “emulation” or “repetition” to avoid the derogatory implications of “copying” or “imitation,” evaluative terms which arose from Winckelmann’s hierarchical temporal and ethnic periodization of ancient art.

Yet Winckelmann’s work continues to haunt.Footnote ⁴⁹ The fault was not Winckelmann’s alone; he voiced a larger discourse of his age, found also in the work of painters and sculptors who selected certain ancient art as worthy of replication and imaginative engagement. And Winckelmann himself was perhaps misunderstood: he had a complex understanding of Greek art, as found in his interpretation of the Apollo Belvedere or the Laocoön; he admits that works such as these combine disdain and beauty, agony and gorgeousness.Footnote ⁵⁰ Still, Friedrich Nietzsche criticized Winckelmann and classicism more broadly because “its idealism is a product of modern German idealism and its yearnings.”Footnote ⁵¹ In James I. Porter’s analysis, these “[a]dvocates of the classical ideal knew full well that they were misreading antiquity.” So too Porter states that Friedrich Schlegel, who wrote On the Study of Greek Poetry, “could repeat, rather than divulge, the open secret that ‘everyone has found in the ancients what he needed or wished to find: chiefly, himself.’”Footnote ⁵²

For scholars of the New Testament, the phrase “everyone has found in the ancient what he needed or wished to find: chiefly, himself” may startle. It is an echo of the familiar statement that scholarly quests for the historical Jesus are similar to looking into a well: the face of Jesus reflected back looks startlingly like the face of the historian-authors of those quests.Footnote ⁵³ That is, this “reflection” of Jesus is marked by the gender, race, geography, and status of the interpreter. The fact that this quest for the historical Jesus has been a bourgeois, masculinist, usually white European project has been well discussed – if not yet fully comprehended – in New Testament Studies.Footnote ⁵⁴ In the field of the Classics, Shelley Haley exposed how translators of ancient Greek and Latin texts have erased the beauty of brown and black skin; Sarah Derbew has shown how scholars have ignored or been confused by blackness in ancient texts.Footnote ⁵⁵ James I. Porter describes debates over the classicizing or aestheticizing of the ancient Greeks in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and the subsequent influences of these ideas upon our more recent perceptions of beauty and the Classics.Footnote ⁵⁶

Conversations about aesthetics among classicists are generally driven by a genealogy of and conversation about “Western” thought.Footnote ⁵⁷ Questions about aesthetics and the texts of the ancient Mediterranean world are interpreted through European philosophical discussions and artistic practices involving aesthetics that trace their own genealogies to Greece and cannibalize from and popularize an African “primitivist” aesthetic (e.g., Matisse and Picasso). A normative debate funded by a Western notion of beauty often masquerades as a historical analysis. I write this not to critique the tremendous scholarly work of past decades, the intricate knowledge of the Greek sources and the compelling readings they offer, which are well worth the reader’s time. Rather, I attempt to probe the ecology of our studies: to name the landscape; to question who and what kinds of work can thrive in it; to say that the paths could have been and could be different and should be different. We benefit from naming the fathers, the genealogy of this way of thinking, and wondering what other kinships could yet be produced.Footnote ⁵⁸

The study of the ancient Mediterranean has been haunted by a racialized aesthetic which both constructs and elevates the (putative whiteness of the) Greek as translated through German neo-classical valuations and the putative whiteness of Jesus and his first followers, the “author and the perfector” of pistis.Footnote ⁵⁹ This racialized and racist aesthetic has done and does all sorts of deep damage, constraining our definitions of our fields in ways that have excluded the insights and very bodies of persons of color.Footnote ⁶⁰ Scholars of the New Testament, the Classics, Roman History, and ancient Mediterranean religions benefit by investigating again, together, these aesthetic prejudices and conceptual underpinnings, rather than taking them as common sense or natural.

How, then, might we consider aesthetics differently? The production of art can be understood as a set of practices which are themselves also research/theorizing or “research-creation.” Emma Amos’s Measuring, Measuring crystallizes such a critical inquiry, probing the questions: What bodies are (considered) beautiful? What is the art historical conversation about humanness and beauty, over time, and how is this discourse undergirded by gendered and racialized ideas of beauty, as well as assumptions regarding wholeness and ability? Measuring, Measuring calls into question a racialized aesthetic that has defined as quintessentially beautiful some of the once-painted, now-white marble male sculptures of the classical Greek period. I take Amos’s artwork as an orienting theoretical framework for the themes of my book as a whole: that is, her work does something, laying bare ideas of beauty and raising questions of how we know what we (think we) know.

Magic, Gender, and Political Danger

The aesthetic of the study of Mediterranean antiquity has preferred white marble, alongside elite philosophical or literary writings, and the texts of what we call the New Testament, understood as theologically significant texts and even masterpieces of a sort. This aesthetic subordinates that which is judged less than beautiful, with the knock-on effect that the study of so-called magical texts has not sufficiently been integrated into an understanding of religion, ritual, and cult in antiquity, including ancient Christianity. Moreover, this (theological) aesthetic means that Christian texts have largely been firewalled from the complex and intense world of curses, and, simultaneously, that scholars generally have not plumbed curses as ritual objects that are materializations of theological and philosophical thought and practice.Footnote ⁶¹ It has meant as well that Greekness and poetry have been valued over Romanness and prose, and that the integration of poetics with prose – the improvisational and complex aesthetics of antiquity – has been insufficiently recognized.Footnote ⁶²

Curses have also been seen as private and minor, compared to temple cults or emerging “universal” religions. John Winkler, discussing what he terms “erotic spells,” speaks of “the petulant bravado of these private rites.”Footnote ⁶³ John Gager’s 1992 Curse Tablets begins by calling defixiones “a dark little secret of ancient Mediterranean culture” due in part to the “harmful character of these small metal tablets – not so much the real harm suffered by their ancient targets but the potential harm to the entrenched reputation of classical Greece and Rome, not to mention Judaism and Christianity, as bastions of pure philosophy and true religion.”Footnote ⁶⁴ While Gager himself does not subscribe to this view, and while Winkler’s Constraints of Desire was a tour de force of innovation in its day, the characterizations they replicate – that magic and curses are private, harmful – help us to understand why curses have been marginal to the study of religion and ritual, as well as to the study of ancient Christianity.

Sometimes religion has been characterized as communal and magic as “secret” or private. Even if we have seen that what is categorized as magic often does hold some element of alterity, this dichotomy between the communal and the private, much less the secretive, does not adequately hold. The objects and scripts of so-called magical practices usually indicate, by their very materiality, at least a ritual expert and a commissioner. The fact that many formulae and technologies of so-called magical objects repeat over time and space, as well as the phenomenon of recipes which instruct on how to make such objects, points not so much to individuals as to networks of ritual experts and ritual practitioners.Footnote ⁶⁵ Moreover, their efficacy may be enhanced by gossip or discussion of these rites.Footnote ⁶⁶ The rituals which are sometimes labelled “magic” may often be conducted by the same ritual experts who participated in the nearby temple cult.Footnote ⁶⁷ They were still engaging in ritual, but in a different venue and with a different set of practitioners and worshippers, not mainstream but deliberately different and deliberately marginal. Ritual practitioners who might be associated with both the agora and the temple, both the house and the church, might also be practitioners of what we would call medicine, just as the relation between magic and miracle (thauma) seems to have been mainly a matter of who was evaluating the efficacy of the practice.Footnote ⁶⁸ The term pharmakon can mean medicine or potion or poison; the term sōteria can mean healing or salvation. The priest and the magos could be one and the same, just conducting a different sort of ritual in a different setting – or, in the case of the defixio against Karpimē Babbia with which I started, among many other examples, the curse could also be laid within the sanctuary of a god.

The 1990s brought a revival of scholarly interest in so-called magic and work that saw these materials as relevant to the larger study of religion and ritual. Henk S. Versnel, Richard Gordon, and others explored the possibility that these ancient ritual objects were not merely the products of angry individuals – harmful, cursing their rivals – but were attempts to effect justice and right abuses of power. More recently, David Frankfurter and Esther Eidinow, among others, have emphasized that defixiones, amulets, incantations, and the like should be understood as part of the varied rituals of the ancient Mediterranean world.Footnote ⁶⁹ So, too, scholars have long debated the problems of sequestering magic from religion. What are the criteria by which those culturally or temporally distant from us determine the one from the other? Or do they – that is, are we the ones who introduce the term magic when we find some practice which we think problematic or intellectually underdetermined? How might we be seduced by their polemics into thinking that magic has hard boundaries and peculiar qualities? Do we do better or worse by deploying a range of terms in our own language (e.g., execration, ritual) or by transcribing the terms we find in ancient texts (e.g., mageia, goētia, magia, superstitio)? Some of these cognate terms, although they land on our ear as similar to English terms, cannot be fully indexed to each other: mageia is not magic.Footnote ⁷⁰ Some scholars have moved away from the use of “magic” as a term, preferring more specific terminology such as “binding spells” or “ritual objects,” thus paying attention to details of philology and historical practices.Footnote ⁷¹ As John Gager puts it, “The only justifiable (answerable) historical question about magic is not ‘What are the characteristics of, for example, Greek magic?’ but rather ‘Under what conditions, by whom, and of whom does the term “magic” come to be used?’”Footnote ⁷²

Texts from Mediterranean antiquity that deploy terms associated with magic engage in ancient polemics and invective.Footnote ⁷³ At the end of the first century CE, Pliny, for example, writes:

Pliny expresses alarm regarding place and space – the international nature of magic, with its reach to Britannia and its sometimes derivation from Moses, among others – and about philosophy-theology – the idea of commanding the gods. In the sweep of magic from Persia in the East to Britannia in the northwest, Roman ethnicity shines as pious: “It is beyond calculation how great is the debt owed to the Romans, who swept away the monstrous rites, in which to kill a man was the highest religious duty (qui sustulere monstra, in quibus hominem occidere religiosissimum erat) and for him to be eaten a passport to health” (Nat. hist. 30.4).Footnote ⁷⁵

Pliny characterizes magic as the work of far-flung ethnicities and he conflates the magician with the poisoner; both, after all, use pharmaka. With this, Pliny does not describe but constructs the world of ancient rituals.Footnote ⁷⁶ When we in turn reproduce his language – or that of other ancient writings – as descriptive, and when we add in modernity’s ideas of rationality, progress, and religion and secularism, we often reinforce the prejudices and struggles of Mediterranean antiquity, sometimes wittingly (my orthodoxy versus your magic; my clean Protestantism versus your magical pagan-ish Roman Catholicism), sometimes unwittingly.Footnote ⁷⁷ The line between magic and miracle, as many have argued, is a matter of where you stand and what you see; it’s a matter of how you want to construct an opponent.Footnote ⁷⁸ Someone’s magic is someone else’s religion: that is, the term magic is often used as an invective to critique or to disenfranchise. This categorization of another’s ritual as magic is often inflected with gendered or racial overtones: the magic is from an esoteric land, but might also be conceived of as barbaric, including the use of barbaric words; and it is women who are often characterized as magicians or witches, or the magos is feminized in his attempts to draw power.Footnote ⁷⁹

Curses display some of the technologies of ritual. With the word technologies I may seem to veer too close to an earlier fight over religion and magic. Sir James Fraser distinguished magic from religion and offered a theory of an increasingly rationalistic religion-as-belief, depicting those who engaged in ritual practice as part of a lingering primitive magic.Footnote ⁸⁰ At the same time, other scholars emphasized, as Kimberly Stratton puts it, how “magic resembles scientific techniques in its practical aspects and in the ‘automatic nature’ of its actions.”Footnote ⁸¹ Bronislaw Malinowski and E. E. Evans-Pritchard examined magic in the context of the social world in which it was deployed; the latter termed it a “natural philosophy.”Footnote ⁸² Decades later, this emphasis on the social would bear fruit in John Winkler’s Constraints of Desire, which uses an anthropological framework and emphasizes the construction and maintenance of gender in an investigation of so-called erotic or love spells.Footnote ⁸³ Studying curses and their recipes, and specifically the compendia of so-called Greek magical papyri, Sofía Torallas Tovar and Christopher Faraone emphasize that early German and English translations of these texts assume that “‘magic’ was an emic category for the Greeks” and sometimes mistranslate terms, for example rendering energeia as “magical power.” Torallas Tovar and Faraone instead deploy the term “magic” to mark “private speech-acts and rituals designed for protection, cursing, erotic conquest and divination. As recent scholarship has shown, in the ancient world, at least, all four of these goals could just as easily be accomplished by traditional rituals in the home that we could just as well call ‘religious.’”Footnote ⁸⁴ Torallas Tovar and Faraone’s reflection exposes philological complexities – what word do we use in modern translations? – and ideological complexities – what categories of religion, magic, cult, and practice do we think were operative in antiquity? These are hand in glove: the translation a scholar offers will depend upon whether they think religion is separable from magic.

Ancient invective did from time-to-time associate “magic” with political upheaval or danger; indeed, magic is sometimes characterized as an engine for political resistance, and thus was placed under legal sanction in the early Roman Empire. The Lex Cornelia de sicariis et veneficiis of 81 BCE, passed under L. Cornelius Sulla, probably merely augmented preexisting laws against so-called magic.Footnote ⁸⁵ Yet the dangers of magic to political power were known in the social imaginary.Footnote ⁸⁶ The death of Germanicus in the early first century CE in Antioch, of mysterious circumstances amid a feud with the province’s governor Gnaeus Calpurius Piso and his wife Plancina,Footnote ⁸⁷ is linked to curses and magical practices:

Suetonius (a gossip writer, but still) notes that Augustus burned more than two thousand “prophetic writings (fatidicorum) of Greek or Latin origin [which] were in circulation anonymously or under the names of authors of little repute,” sparing only some of the Sibylline oracles.Footnote ⁸⁹ It is not clear if these were considered “magical” books, but tales of the destruction of magical materials, as well as the risk of holding them, continue to late antiquity. In the fourth century, John Chrysostom tells of a book that lacked even title or binding: it was a sheaf thrown in the Orontes when soldiers scanned the city for magical texts. Chrysostom and a friend happened to grab it from the river and flipped it open to see its contents; they were terrified to find it was a book of magic but were divinely delivered from the situation (Hom. Act. 38).Footnote ⁹⁰

Curses

This ancient idea of magic as dangerous, even politically seditious, is often launched in polemical contexts: You say to-may-toe, I say to-mah-toe; I’m pious, you’re dangerous or degraded or impious in your use of magic. Yet, as we look more closely at the texts and objects often labelled as magic, we can begin to see that some of these rituals might indicate ways of thinking otherwise. That is, they may demonstrate ideas of harnessing divinities and powers that tap into the electric grid of more established forms of cult, and resist some of these official channels.Footnote ⁹¹ These ritual objects are incomprehensible outside of larger instantiations of religion, of eusebeia and thrēskeia, of pietas and religio, but they also differ from aspects of public, civic cult, and this difference is in part what fuels their power.Footnote ⁹²

One ritual object used in so-called magic was the curse tablet – recall the “leaden tablets” deployed against Germanicus, according to Tacitus, or the one against Karpimē Babbia, with which this chapter began. Curse tablets are usually called defixiones – coming from the Latin root “to fix, to fasten” or to make motionless (defigere); the term used in Greek is katadesmoi, which refers to binding. This fastening or binding often has a double sense. The spell is intended to bind someone; and the spell itself is often fixed or fastened, nailed through and/or nailed up. The term defigere is also related, according to Magali Bailliot, to “fixum, fixere: to embed, sink into, pierce.” She emphasizes not only the semantics but also the gesture and symbol, associated with the affordance of the nail: the act of force and piercing that is often typical of these rituals and ritual texts, and the use in defixiones of “a similia similibus formula: that is, expressions that analogized the fate of the victim to that of a sacrificial animal, a nailed tablet, or the deceased person occupying the grave in which the curse was buried.”Footnote ⁹³ One example, found in a second-century CE Gallo-Roman grave, was aimed against lawyers. The two curse tablets were pierced with a nail and the ritual involved seems also to require piercing a puppy with a nail (!). Written in Latin, they read in part: “just as this puppy is (turned) on its back and is unable to rise, so neither (may) they.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Such similia similibus formulae provide “persuasive analogies” which call upon the literary aesthetics of simile and sometimes deploy a fragment of a pre-existing poetic text.Footnote ⁹⁵

Approximately 1,700 binding spells or curse tablets have been found across the ancient Mediterranean world, dating from the fifth century BCE and in use for roughly a millennium.Footnote ⁹⁶ These thin, lead tablets usually contain writing and sometimes contain drawings, and often call upon divine beings to effect something specific. Such tablets are hard to find; on an archaeological dig, they can look like a lump of encrusted dirt. Therefore, we can presume that many more existed. While there are variations and changes in defixiones over the centuries of their use, some indexed to their different languages or locations of deposit, they share remarkably persistent features. They also have an “international and interdenominational” flavor – often borrowing, for instance, from Jewish texts.Footnote ⁹⁷ Defixiones and instructions for producing curses and spells have primarily been investigated by specialized scholars of ancient magic. But these texts-objects are significant evidence for ancient religious practices.Footnote ⁹⁸

In addition to learning from the objects themselves, we can investigate defixiones through “recipes” which detail how to produce such spells.Footnote ⁹⁹ The recipes indicate a broad use of stuff (the lead, herbs, hair, a ring, etc.) that might be needed to produce a curse. They also contain instructions regarding writing these ritual texts. Some recipes and defixiones include voces magicae (known alphabetic letters that do not spell what we would consider human language), charaktēres (symbols which seem to be letters but do not correspond to any known alphabet), text written backwards or in non-normal configurations, or simple drawings.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Defixiones are often discussed in light of J. L. Austin’s idea of the speech act: how to “do things with words.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Curses also do things with their own materiality, reflecting upon the coldness, deadness, or heaviness of their own lead, or the wetness or chthonic nature of their site of deposit.Footnote ¹⁰² They sometimes do things with stories, employing authoritative literary flotsam and jetsam, using a historiola or condensed mythological narrative to make a point, or deploying poetic and rhetorical strategies – rhythm, assonance, alliteration, even embedding within themselves a phrase from Aristophanes or verses from Homer, for example, for incantatory power. Defixiones are engaged in an aesthetics of recombination that stretches over time and place, doing things with words, stories, poetry, and matter. They shore these aesthetic fragments against the ruins of the commissioner, and for ruins of the accursed, using these historical bits to attract the gods’ attention and to enact what is perceived as justice for the curse-caster.

This is the approach I take: to understand these curses as aesthetic assemblages that help us to understand ancient religion, including ancient Christianity. I can only engage in this sort of social history because of the tremendous work that has been done and is being done on the study of ancient magic. Much of this work is contained in specialized editions or digital archives that focus on one language or medium, or that present an edited text but only unevenly discuss the archaeological context or the materiality of the object on which the curse or amulet is inscribed. Collections like Audollent’s Defixionum Tabellae to Preisendanz’s Papyri Graecae Magicae around the turn of the twentieth century gave way to a 1980s–1990s profusion of collections and studies: Hans Dieter Betz’s indispensable The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, John Gager’s Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World, Roy Kotansky’s Greek Magical Amulets, Marvin Meyer and Richard Smith’s Ancient Christian Magic: Coptic Texts of Ritual Power, the many essential articles of David Jordan, among other (Anglophone) scholarshiop.Footnote ¹⁰³ Recently, scholars have issued a call to investigate amulets in the reconstruction of the history of the texts of the New Testament, including Joseph Sanzo’s Scriptural Incipits on Amulets from Late Antique Egypt, Brice Jones’s New Testament Manuscripts Texts on Greek Amulets from Late Antiquity, and Theodor De Bruyn’s Making Amulets Christian.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

These essential studies also demonstrate a challenge of the field: ritual objects are often divided for study into different books, based upon their medium (lead, papyrus, gemstone), or divided by language, by cultic affiliation, or presented separately in archaeological site publications. At the same time, collaborative projects and online repositories have proliferated, some of which reasonably replicate these divisions, such as a database of “magical” gems, Coptic Magical Papyri, a site on the Transmission of Magical Knowledge in Antiquity, a re-launched database of curse tablets, and a website and print publications based upon the work of Christopher A. Faraone and Sofia Torralas Tovar’s The Greco-Egyptian Magical Formularies: Libraries, Books and Individual Recipes (GEMF).Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Important integrative studies of so-called magical materials and religion in antiquity sketch the social world that produces rituals which are then labelled as magic. These include Gideon Bohak’s Ancient Jewish Magic, Andrew Wilburn’s Magica Materia, Derek Collins’s Magic in the Ancient Greek World, Christopher Faraone’s The Transformation of Greek Amulets in Roman Imperial Times, and the work of Jessica Lamont and David Frankfurter, among many others.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Crucial for my study has been the scholarship of Henk S. Versnel; having myself concluded that curse tablets should be considered in light of poetics and as demands for justice, I was both stymied and thrilled to discover his important insights into both. My book builds upon the work of Versnel and others in two important ways. First, it does not duplicate the pattern of “bad” magic versus prayers for justice, suggested by Versnel and adopted by the many who follow him. Second, I attend to literary materials usually labelled as early Christian, as well as to curses.

Morton Smith’s Jesus the Magician long ago engaged the controversial idea that miracle stories associated with the Christ movement should be understood in light of the world of “magical” ritual practices in antiquity;Footnote ¹⁰⁷ individual article-length studies have investigated how literature of the New Testament also uses the terminology of curses. The letter to the Galatians, for example, speaks of “bewitching” (baskeinō: Gal. 3:1 “You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you?”).Footnote ¹⁰⁸ It also contains a curse, articulated twice:

There are also, famously, “magical” scenes in the late first- or early second-century canonical Acts of the Apostles.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles are chock-full of (miraculous) magic.Footnote ¹¹¹

Nonetheless, scholarship in the fields of New Testament and ancient Christianity sometimes thinks of objects like defixiones as “far from the realm of ancient philosophy.”Footnote ¹¹² Yet so-called magical objects such as defixiones and amulets are small and precise distillations into lead, stone, papyrus, etc., of larger ideas and debates about fate, justice, and the gods’ activity.Footnote ¹¹³ Defixiones are an underutilized source for the investigation of ideas of the agency, the will, and the efficacy of human and non-human subjects, whether gods or the materiality of the lead on which a defixio is incised.Footnote ¹¹⁴ We should attend as seriously to a defixio as we would a treatise by Plutarch or a letter of Paul. We should investigate the content of literary and archaeological materials without trying to taxonomize them into right religious versus malicious magic.Footnote ¹¹⁵

So-called magical materials provide evidence of religious practices which are improvisational and ecumenical. They cross what we think of as cultic boundaries, as well as transgressing our categories of curse, prayer, vow, and legal action. Richard Gordon, discussing defixiones, puts it this way: “the principals merrily combine all the rhetorical means – that is, the ideas, claims, images, metaphors – at their disposal in order to get the message across the boundary to the Other World.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ Naomi Janowitz rejects the language of magic and mysticism in relation to spells or ascent practices; she insists instead that we think of them as rituals which were considered efficacious in late antiquity.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Avigail Manekin-Bamberger reminds us that amid the complex semantics of ḥerem, qorban, and anathema in biblical, rabbinic, Pauline, and other late antique texts, including Aramaic incantation bowls, the distinguishing line between vow and curse was sometimes non-existent, and that such practices of vows engaged in acts of power that blurred the line between legal and extra-legal harm.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Defixiones often are practices that address the power of Fate or other gods and beings in order to correct a present situation and/or to address a past wrong.Footnote ¹¹⁹

Curses and amulets as ritual objects escape our neat scholarly categories of magic, religion, vow, legal action. They also inhabit spaces between our limiting categories of “pagan,” Christian and Jew, which we often wrongly treat like hermetically sealed categories in antiquity. Curses commingle Isis and Iaō: that is, the Egyptian goddess so popular across the Mediterranean world and vowels usually associated with the Jewish name for God. Curses which were likely written by non-Jews draw on stories from the Jewish Bible. Curses help us to dissolve the boundaries of what we often label “Christian” or “Jewish” and to question ancient rhetoric of orthodoxy and heresy, or right religion and wrongful magic.Footnote ¹²⁰

Curses are valuable data amid the better known elite philosophical-theological debates about how language and beauty and matter operated in the world to link humans and non-humans and to effect wishes and even pleas for justice. They help in historical reconstruction of those of low status, insofar as we can know them from humble curses and from early Christian texts, who materialize and engage their own aesthetic theory through these objects and through these writings. These curses are small, diverse material instantiations,Footnote ¹²¹ replete with their own aesthetics and evidencing their own theories of how to make contact with divine and daemonic realms – and to seek justice from and against fellow humans.

Looking Forward

Seeking to balance these ideas about the racialized aesthetic of scholars and the complex aesthetics of ancient ritual, my book falls into two parts. The first two chapters of the book treat materiality. They focus on substance and story, and how these are deployed to effect justice and to effect change. Chapter 1, “Making Justice: Curses, Justin Martyr, and the Nailing of Documents,” probes Justin’s second-century CE Apology and its appended document(s) in relation to other contemporaneous strategies and materializations of justice-seeking: appeals and imperial rescripts, which were often nailed up in public spaces or published in stone inscriptions. Justin’s call to the Roman emperors to become “guardians of justice” (1 Apol. 2.2) is launched amid contemporaneous discourses and practices of legal argument and documentation. These include a cache of curses from Amathous, Cyprus, some nailed or affixed within a shaft, which call upon daimones and divinities to right legal wrongs. A framework for understanding history and justice can be found in Titus Kaphar’s To Be Sold, which takes a painting of a document of sale of enslaved persons belonging to Princeton’s President Finley, rips it into ribbons, and affixes this document of sale with nails to the mouth of a duplicated portrait of the president. Nailing and affixing, publishing documentary evidence, and exposing injustice: these are the themes of Chapter 1.

Chapter 2, “Substance and Story: A Greengrocer and the Pharoah at Antioch,” focuses on fourth-century Antioch. There, someone scratched words on both sides of a sheet of lead and tucked it in a well, cursing a greengrocer named Babylas. They did so by embedding a narrative into the curse: a historiola or crystallized story of the Pharoah’s chariot drowning in the sea. Just as the Pharoah’s chariot drowned, so too the curse should be drowned in the well, so too Babylas should be destroyed. The accursed person is assimilated to the curse tablet and to the well and to the Pharoah. This chapter explores the ethics and the emotions – two related concepts in ancient philosophy-theology – that are evident in this fragment of evidence, and how these fit with the use of the story of the Pharaoh and the sea in the writings of fourth-century John Chrysostom, much of whose life centered on Antioch. Justice is again a theme here: the perceived injustice of Babylas, the ethical injustices of curses, according to Chrysostom. The chapter also explores what it means to use historical-literary fragments and a condensed narrative, opening this investigation by observing the procedure, layout, and content of artist Glenn Ligon’s engagement with the first lines of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.

An Interlude bridges the two parts of the book. Amulets and curse tablets from antiquity, including the recipe books that were used as guides to producing such ritual objects, contain what are to us puzzling materializations of letters, language, and sound which are more visual and sonic than denotational. Sometimes we find charaktēres, symbols that look like letters, but are no known alphabet. Sometimes we find streams of vowels on their own or arranged into shapes. Sometimes we find a word that reduces by two letters per line, minimizing itself into the shape of an inverted triangle until the word disappears. These appear on papyrus, gems, and a stone wall. Language’s denotational function erodes and its semiotic function blossoms, abstractly. The material and the poetic converge.

The final two chapters of the book focus on sound, song, and language. Linguistic communication can manifest in glossolalia, or speaking in tongues; song or incantation can ensure the efficacy of a ritual or an idea. Chapter 3, “Tongues, Breath, Stutter: 1 Corinthians and a Corinthian Curse,” treats the famous verse: “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a bronze resonance or a clanging cymbal” (1 Cor. 13:1). These words were read aloud to an assembly of Christ-followers in Roman Corinth in the 50s CE, likely as they stood below a rocky Acrocorinth that would come to shelter defixiones or curse tablets. At least one of the eighteen defixiones that has been found there includes sequences of known Greek letters that nonetheless make no sense to us. This chapter takes up the topic of speaking in tongues in the context of such curses, and in the context of ancient thinkers like Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Aristides Quintilianus who were theorizing beauty and ugliness and their connection to the human trachea, mouth, teeth, and breath in rhetoric, composition, and music. M. NourbeSe Philip’s poem “Discourse on the Logic of Language” helps us to understand how the mother(’s) tongue can be supplanted by a master and colonial tongue that is both legal and violent, how language can stutter and break apart, how the tongue can also comfort and nurture. Glossolalia might be a justice-seeking endeavor.

Chapter 4, “Incantation: Sound and Song as Curse, Cure, and Gospel,” begins with a late third- or early fourth-century CE curse found in Jerusalem which contains a half line of dactylic hexameter: “bring to perfection this perfect incantation.” This poetic, incantatory phrase, among others, rang out from the fourth century BCE to the fourth century CE. Why? To answer this question, I turn to Braxton Shelley’s analysis of the vamp in Black Church sermon and song, a “repetitive musical cycle” which, “[t]hrough its combination of reiteration and intensification, … turns song lyrics into something… potent” and “generates emotive and physical intensity.”Footnote ¹²² Clement of Alexandria’s late third-century Protreptikos, alongside Julius Africanus’s Kestoi and discussions of music from Aristides Quintilianus to Iamblichus’s On the Life of the Pythagoreans, reveal song and sound not as background tunes in antiquity, but as powerful sites for philosophical, theological, and medical intervention. The chapter simultaneously asks what music is justly or unjustly redeployed. Chapter 4 uses the vamp, on the one hand, and ideas of song and the exploitation of singers in Tyehimba Jess’s Olio, on the other, to explore how song and incantation suffused Greco-Roman antiquity and shaped the experiences of everyday religion, including the use of repetitive poetic incantatory phrases.

Even as I write on ritual objects which contain within themselves assemblages and which originally were likely part of assemblages, even as I write on some art works which are assemblages, so too I am aware of my chapters as assemblages. I risk sounding pretentious, but the chapters are self-consciously concatenations. I don’t always start in the same places: sometimes a curse foregrounds the story, sometimes a poem, sometimes a work of art. But I gather these items together in each chapter because, for me, they together constitute something powerful. I do not intend merely to juxtapose or to compare modern art or poetry with an ancient object and then a literary text or two from Mediterranean antiquity. Instead, in the triangulation of these materials chapter by chapter, insights about aesthetics, power, and justice emerge.

With these chapters, with this book, I hope to show that we cannot understand early Christ-followers without also understanding what has been called “magic” – the common, everyday religious practices of curses and incantations. For those who study ancient Christian literature, this book insists upon reading these texts anew in light of curses and incantations, and models a practice of treating these objects with the same exegetical tenderness we usually reserve for scripture or philosophical-theological texts. For those who study ancient “magic,” this book insists upon the relevance of ancient Christian materials, showing overlapping aesthetic strategies and theological ideas. The book’s theoretical framework demonstrates how art and poetry provide more than mere illustrations or comparisons. These artworks are materializations of research practices and provide resources for thinking about the use of historical fragments in the work of seeking justice. Throughout, I am guided and informed by feminist and womanist hermeneutics that seek to reconstruct the lives of women, those of low status, and to reroute the aesthetics of mainstream scholarship.Footnote ¹²³

Poet and Classicist Anne Carson writes:

My book takes the whisper of the curse on the ribbon of lead and tries to retell its story – not only the words, but also the aesthetic experimentation that produced it, not only the aesthetic experimentation, but also the gesture and the intimacy of acts of religion which are simultaneously acts of power within human community, acts of calling upon divine beings, acts that name and critique perceived injustice, acts that use the material world – stone, chisel, papyrus, pen, lead, stylus, well, nail – to effect change. Can you sing your way to healing? Can you get justice by dropping a lead tablet into a well? Can you speak with the tongues of angels? Some people in antiquity thought you could, and this book brings the reader into the promises and problems of these practices.