Chapter 3 (Curses for All Occasions) focuses on curses, our most plentiful body of evidence, and analyzes the data with both substantive and functionalist criteria (the questions of what, when, and where; why and how).
As we have already encountered in previous weeks, there are four categories of evidence:
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literary depictions (Apuleius, Ovid, etc.)
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historical references (Cicero, Plato, etc.)
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Among the historical references, Edmonds gives the example of Tacitus' story of Germanicus' death in his Annals (56). However, I hesitate to class this text as precisely historical — while it is told as a historical event, it seems likely to be at least somewhat dramatized. Not only does Tacitus have a bias, he was not even born at the time of the event in question (Tacitus was born in the 50s CE, Germanicus' death was around 20 CE, and the Annals were published in the early 100s, just from a quick Google search). If we treat the Tacitus example as a literary depiction rather than a historical account, does it change our understanding of the place of curses in the ancient world? Is this a pointless quibble?
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recipes such as we find in the PGM/GEMF
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tablets themselves
Of course, I'm drawn to the fuzzy edges. Even curses, which seem at first glance to be easily categorized as "magic," can have a complicated relationship with the supposed boundary between religion and magic. Edmonds draws attention to the existence of curses performed in public as opposed to those performed in secret (65). The existence of these public curses raises the question: do curses have to be done in secret to count as magic? Do we still call them "curses" if they are part of normative religious practices? I'm also curious about the relationship between curses and oaths. Conditional curses, which tend to be public, can serve to strengthen the power of an oath (66-67). Is there a conditional curse inherent in any oath, regardless of its verbalization? Conversely, is there an oath inherent in a conditional curse?
The example on 66, drawn from Aeschines, further stokes my curiosity about the relationship between curses as magic and normative religion. The curse described by Aeschines has an effect on normative religious practices — the sacrifices made by the target group will not be pure nor favorably received by the gods. Later examples, which Edmonds brings up in their connections to the agonistic context of the ancient world, are also related to religious practices. Curses placed on rival performers and directors of tragedy and curses placed on rival athletes are also inherently interfering with normative religion, since the production, performance, and attendance of tragedies were part of religious festivals (okay, everything in the ancient world is arguably inseparable from religion, but it is far easier to see the connection to religion with tragedy and athletic competitions than it is with everyday commerce). What does the ubiquity of curses in these contexts tell us about the relationship between curses and normative religious practices? Though no one will admit to engaging in curses (69), it was obviously a common practice. Is there anything we can meaningfully conclude about the average person's relationship to or conception of their religious practices/the divine from their proclivity towards cursing, even when those curses interfere with normative religious practices? I'm not sure I'm articulating this clearly. As we've discussed previously, the average person doesn't reflect on theology the way that I'm doing here. Perhaps it's a nonissue for them.
The "judicial prayers" interest me for similar reasons (71-73). What, really, is the difference between a prayer and a curse? Is a curse a subtype of prayer? (Spoiler, I think they are, but as we've read, it's far more complicated than that simple generalization makes it out to be.) What about the earliest curse tablets, which only consist of a name (80)? Or those that "register" the target to a deity (71)?
What of the overlap between poetry and magic? Curses and other written spells, as noted by Edmonds and others, share rhetorical techniques with other written works in the same cultural tradition (87-88). Indeed, some of the PGM include quotations of Homer, Aeschylus' Erinyes sing a curse in the tragic mode, and the vocabulary used to discuss magic and poetry overlaps significantly (carmen in Latin and ἐπῳδός in Greek, just to name a few). We know there's overlap between poetry and religion (festivals of tragedy, the Latin word vates as poet and priest, instances of poets being treated as having a special relationship to the divine…). I'm not sure where I'm going with this, exactly, only that there is more to explore in these intersecting categories.