An Oxford don has raised the prospect of producing a cocktail of hormone pills that would help you to fall in love. What an appalling prospect! You might suddenly find yourself consumed with an irresistible desire for Ian Blackford. The ancients knew what was really required: a means of ensuring that the object of your passion fell in love with you.
The ancients regarded an attack of lust as the same sort of experience as falling ill or being afflicted by madness. So a man in love with a woman would write a love spell asking a god or some unpleasant earth spirit to, for example, ‘burn, torch, the soul of X, her female body, her limbs, lay her low with fever, until she leaves her husband’s home and comes to me, now, quickly’.
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David Butterfield
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So common were such requests that a lead tablet survives with blank spaces to be filled in with the name of the woman in question: ‘lead _____ to me, burning on account of her love and desire for me, drive _____ from her parents, from her bedroom and force her to give me what I want.
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