Love magic
Cuneiform tablets preserving rituals of erotic magic have been uncovered at Tell Inghara and Isin (present-day Iraq).
[1] 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 artifacts dating from the 2nd century BC (and sometimes earlier) to the late 3rd century A.D.
[4] These two types of spells can be connected directly to the gender roles of men and women in Ancient Greece.
[3] Eros spells were mainly practiced by men and a small selection of women, like prostitutes, and were used to imbue lust into the victim.
Often, clay dolls or written spell scrolls would be hidden in the altar at churches, or holy candles would be lit in the rituals.
[8] This feminine attribute is reflected within the literature such as the Malleus Maleficarum and in the trials of the Holy Office in which most of the cases brought before the council were women accused of bewitching men.
[9] According to historians Guido Ruggiero and Christopher A. Faraone, love magic was often associated with prostitutes and courtesans, but this has been questioned by other scholars such as Catherine Rider who, in a study of late medieval Western European pastoral manuals and exempla, especially English, argues this was a development that happened around the time of the early modern witch trials and may have been influenced by the fact that the women who were most often tried for love magic were women of ill-repute, in illicit relationships, or both.
In the early Middle Ages, it was married women who were solely portrayed as practicing love magic on their husbands.
For instance, in the works of Regino of Prüm, Burchard of Worms, and Hincmar the practitioners of love magic are usually gendered as female.
Heinrich Kramer wrote within his book that, "All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which in women is insatiable.
[12] Demographically, they suggest that the largest age group that practiced love magic were younger men targeting young, unobtainable women.
There are a variety of explanations for why the literary world contrasted reality in this area, but a common interpretation is that men were trying to subtract themselves from association.
A famous treatment of the subject is in Richard Wagner's 1865 opera Tristan and Isolde, which in turn goes back to the same epic by Gottfried von Strassburg.
However, this belief is rooted in the fact that most authors from this time period were men, meaning women’s narratives are absent.
Male authors often wrote women as magic practitioners to distance men from it since it was very problematic and controversial in the Christian community.
