Sex/Love/Anti-Love Magic

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the use of love spells. In the annals of Russian magic, interference in the mysterious workings of attraction more commonly took on far darker and more sinister tones. Passion and attraction had little role in the way spousal relationships were imagined and were greeted with even less sympathy outside of marriage. Any use of “love magic” threatened to upend the carefully crafted social order. When used to seduce a married woman into adultery or an unmarried girl into fornication, spells clearly violated the bonds of holy matrimony and of sanctified sexual unions, and such magic was understood as coercive, even abusive. Even within marriages, when an unhappy wife turned to love charms to calm her husband's violent temper and to “make him love me” — that is, to stop beating her and abusing her — her efforts were viewed as subverting the proper patriarchal hierarchy. In the sampling of cases chosen for the chapter, sex rather than love seems to be the primary issue, although the particular cruelty of the “spells for women” shows that emotional as well as physical subjugation was often the goal of magical incantation. Like most spells, the formulas used in love spells were generic, useful for any occasion.