by Rev. Michael J Dangler, originally published on his Patreon
In this session, we’re going to talk about key techniques and symbols in Indo-European cultures, regarding magic. We’ll answer:
- Question 5 of Magic for Priests in the ADF Clergy Training Program
- Question 10 in Initiate Magical Theory and Techniques 1 in the Initiate Program
- Question 5 in Magical Techniques 1 in the Magician’s Guild Study Program
When I thought the last one sent me down rabbit holes, I clearly hadn’t looked ahead. I found some deep-seated problems with the question, particularly around “key symbols” and what that means. This was a super hard script to organize, because the question is culturally specific, but the study guide can’t be. I had to find a way to provide a starting point, but not to dive so deeply that I had to make 10 or more individual videos to answer the question in each culture.
So, this one is a bit different, but still good and fun. There’s more to come. I’m excited about tackling the practical questions next!
The basic question prompt is:
Discuss three key magical techniques or symbols from one historical Indo-European culture.
What does the question mean?
So today we’ll be talking about both techniques and symbols. Because this video series is designed to be as cross-cultural as I can make it, we’ll talk about several different techniques and touch on where you can find each of them in multiple cultures. My hope is that no matter which culture you seek to engage with for the question, you’ll have someplace to start. This won’t be a deep dive into techniques in one culture.
So, what’s the question asking?
The question is asking for “key magical techniques” or “key symbols” from one Indo-European culture. Magical techniques are somewhat broad categories of practices that allow us to classify practices through common elements; techniques based on plant-lore or herbalism can be categorized together, as can representative figure magic or apotropaic amulets. Looking at techniques broadly can sometimes help us organize our own experiences.
Key symbols are sort of the opposite: they’re particular signs, symbols, or sigils that are emblematic in some way of the magical practices of a culture. This is slightly problematic for us, as any review of magical symbols will show us that not only do single symbols come with a wide variety of meanings, but the nature of magical tradition tends toward diversity, not uniformity, of symbols and ideas. Encounters with emblematic symbols or unified symbols that represent an entire practice are usually the result of outsiders looking in and imposing their views on a cultural practice. In short, it is most often the result of colonialism, homogenization, and erasure, and we need to recognize that and consider it as we look at source materials.
Curse Tablets (Greece, Rome, Hellenistic, Romano-Celtic)
The first technique we’ll look at is the practice of using inscribed tablets to curse. These tablets were carved not only onto sheets of lead, but also onto seashells and papyri, and then buried into the ground where spirits could find them, such as under a threshold in a house, or in a graveyard. Occasionally, they would be “addressed” to a particular spirit (in the Greek world, usually Hekate, Hermes, Persephone, or Typhon) and the spirits of the space where they were buried would see the intended spirit they were addressed to and carry it along to them. These defixiones and tablets are common everywhere in the Mediterranean, and instruction on their creation can be found in the Greek Magical Papyri.
Romano-Celtic lead tablets found in Bath, England, are generally of a certain type: seeking the return of lost items or revenge on the thief, often requesting the help of Sulis-Minerva. A common formula they use to do this transfers ownership of the stolen item to the deity, which makes the theft from a human into theft from a deity, deserving of divine retribution. Particularly fascinating here are clearly illiterate imitations of writing that make up a few tablets, where people wrote lines of marks and crosses, likely on the understanding that their meaning would be understood by the deity. These were sunk in the spring sacred to Sulis-Minerva.
Amulets & Talismans (Greek, Hittite, Hellenistic, Roman, Persia/Anatolia)
Amulets and apotropaic (or, “evil avoiding”) magic are another broad technique, with talismans the other side of the same coin.
The Greeks used the face of the gorgon, found on Athena’s shield, to repel that which might harm a person. Carrying it, or wearing it, would petrify those who sought to harm you. The Hittites used cylindrical seals, sometimes of diorite or hematite, engraved with mythological scenes. In the Hellenized world and beyond, delicately carved gemstones were carried, depicting gods and myths. In Rome, winged penises were remarkably popular among adults; as were the bullas and lunulas for male and female children, respectively. The modern near east, of course, is full of apotropaic eyes designed to ward off evil, a tradition that dates back to the ancient world. And I can never let a discussion of Amulets go by without reminding everyone that Pliny the Elder says that everybody in the East wears jasper as an amulet, and that magicians say it’s great for improving your public speaking.
While amulets such as these repel or ward off evil or harmful things, talismans strengthen your potentialities and fortunes. The strength of a metal brings you unbending courage, the weight of a dense stone centers and holds you. Again, the carving of gemstones, particularly when set into decoration, is a common application of this notion. In both amulets and talismans, we might think of magic as inherent in the substance of the magical device, not merely associated with it, though gemstones and their colors corresponded to specific magical solutions as well, or even to specific gods: we often find Mars on red jasper, or Ceres on green jasper.
Also, it’s worth mentioning that the word “amulet” is likely related to the Latin word lamella, meaning “little blade” or “thinly layered,” meaning “amulet” and “omelet” have a common linguistic ancestor in Proto-Indo-European, *melh₂-. Tasty!
Representative Figure Magic (Northern Europe, Hellenistic Egypt, Anatolia, Celtic, Greek)
One of the accepted keystone principles of magic is sympathetic magic, and the creation of representative figures that match the target of the work. There’s a tendency in academic or pseudo-academic circles to call these “voodoo dolls” as a result of years of negative depictions of Afro-Caribbean religious practice; I include the phrase here mostly to dissuade you from using the term, and to provide a preferred framing of “poppet magic” or “representative figurative magic” instead.
Certainly, the Indo-European world is full of figural magic: from corn dollies to corn goats in northern Europe, to clay figurines found deposited into the ground in Hellenized Egypt, to wax figures melted away by the Ephesian Artemis to resolve a plague.
Where we have instruction on how to make them, these figures are often connected to their target via a magical essence, or ousia (OO-zia) in Greek, which might be something physical from the person or thing it represents, or a word or phrase, usually their name, carved into the figure directly. The figure is then bound, pierced, otherwise rendered inert and powerless, or perhaps agonized, in a way that disadvantages the target until they do what the sorcerer wants to see done.
We should not, however, assume that the various physical piercings, bindings, buryings, or burnings were intended to happen in the physical world: this is no scene from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Rather, the use of figural magic is most often designed to bind; the sticking of pins is meant to fix the intention, or to direct action against certain portions of the body to lead to the desired outcome.
We should also not assume that figural magic is bad: the offertory work done at the headwaters of the Seine river in France show that Gaulish petitioners made wooden and stone images of body parts, organs, or even whole bodies and sought magical cures through their offerings. A spell from the Greek Magical Papyri (PGM IV 2372) directs the magician on how to call customers to your business with an unheated beeswax figure.
Wordplay (Rome, Greece, Norse, Celtic, Vedic)
Wordplay is a favorite pastime of magicians, from puns to chanting, and there are many traditions that draw on wordplay to examine. I spoke with some depth on palindromes and wing formations in a previous video, but it’s worth mentioning them here as well, because we know that things like the Sator square found in Pompeii and the magical Abalnathanalba (abla-nathan-alba) are common magical techniques.
In the Norse world, much of what we have about myth comes to us through poetry, which is fitting, as a key bit of wordplay that magicians use is the circumlocution of their meaning through poetic discourse; specifically, they use kennings to obscure a concrete, single-word noun with something more figurative. You might call ice the “roof of the waters” because ice floats, or refer to gold as “Sif’s hair,” as that’s what the goddess’ new hair was spun from after Loki cut it off.
The counting of letters as numbers, and finding value in words that can be translated into magical math problems is usually referred to as gematria. The Pythagoreans made extensive use of this alphanumeric system in Greece, and systems like this allow us to decipher things like the Greek Alphabet Oracle as well.
The Sanskrit word, mantra, is best applied to a phrase that is efficacious in its utterance; in the Rgveda, it is clearly in the sense of “invocation,” while later texts move it more toward “incantation.” The recitation of passages from the Vedas are clearly seen to create and order the cosmos in ritual, however, and cannot be overlooked when we speak of wordplay as a magical technique.
Satire is a quintessential use of word-magic in the Celtic world, especially as it appears in Irish. Used to raise boils on the skin of stingy kings, or to kill animals or people, or simply to force others to keep their word, the act of speaking magically to damage another was feared and respected.
Herbalism (Slavic, Celtic, Norse, Roman, Greek)
Herbs play a prominent role in the magic of many cultures as well; the mandrake is the intermediary in Romanian Slavic rites dealing with marriage and love, through whom the Fates are called. The mistletoe is the all-healing plant in the Celtic countries, while it is the killer of Baldr in Norse myth.
We spoke in an earlier video on Trance about the healing Askelpions, where fragrant herbs would be used to induce trance and were occasionally prescribed to resolve illnesses. In Rome, it was not uncommon to see certain plants used in healing, either through their associations with various godden, or through the magic of the plant itself: garlic was a cure-all in Rome. If you have a deep interest in Roman herbalism, you can’t go wrong reading through De Materia Medica, written in the first century, covering about 600 different plants, and the oils, wines, and ointments made from them.
Of course, the most famous use of herbs in lore may be Circe’s transmutation of men into pigs during Odysseus’ homeward journey, and the magical herb Hermes provides to him to counteract the enchantment. Circe provides food and drink mixed with a herbal drug to Odysseus’ men, and they are turned to swine by striking the men with her staff; when Odysseus encounters her with the correct herbal remedy, however, he surprises her by not succumbing to her magic.
Hard-To-Categorize Work (Slavic)
Of course, not all techniques fall neatly into one category. Sometimes, you’ll get something that combines stones, herbs, sympathetic magic, and cursing, converting a potentially dangerous body into something inert, as in the Slavic recipe for preventing a body from becoming a vampire: you place nine stones, nine marble chips, and nine millet grains under their head and speak: “Your mouth, I petrify. Your lips, I marbleize. Your teeth, to millet I transform. So that harm you shall never wreak.”
Key Symbols (Norse, Greek, Celtic)
As mentioned before, the idea of key symbols tends to be reductive, but we’ll cover some items quickly because they’re part of the question. The key problem with key symbols is that in order to understand something as a “key symbol,” you either have to standardize on a symbol from outside the culture, or you have to deal with what the symbol erased when the overculture standardized it.
You could consider something like the Helm of Awe or the Vegvisir in Germanic cultures to be a key symbol. It’s important to recognize that these symbols, while emblematic of Icelandic paganism to us as outside observers, are actually drawn from a 19th century manuscript called the Huld Manuscript. Alternatively, you could look at the Valknut, which appears in at least two different forms in the ancient world: as a trefoil knot or as three linked triangles; additionally, the word in Norwegian refers to a polygon with a loop on each corner, so there’s a great deal of attested variation in the symbol.
You might also consider something like the caduceus, a herald’s wand carried by Hermes in Greek myth, and later appropriated into Hellenistic iconography that spread throughout the known world. In particular, it was transferred to Hermes Trismegistus through a process of syncretization where the Hellenistic overculture impressed itself onto the Egyptian underculture through currents of universalism, which led to the erasure of local traditions.
Another key symbol you might consider is the Welsh “Awen,” three rays that flow down from the heavens. This particular symbol was likely developed in the 17th century by Iolo Morganwg, and then retroactively applied to a number of pan-Celtic ideas, despite the concept of Awen being Welsh in origin.
Conclusion
As you can tell, there are a few minefields to wander through as we try and answer this question. And there are many techniques we could look at that we haven’t; necromancy, stones in general, fire and flame-related magic, spell-songs, and even generalized divination.
I hope this video has been somewhat helpful; because of the nature of the question, it is difficult for us to outright answer it without doing videos for each potential culture you might encounter, but if the broad approach has been helpful in finding your starting place, that fits our goal.
