Power Relations and Hierarchy

This chapter assesses “social magic,” or magic for expressing and for attempting to assuage social tensions. Antagonisms between the lower orders and masters provide the presumptive background for the numerous trials involving the bewitchment of landowners in order to attain their “love.” Spells of this nature represented far more than an effort to curry favor with superiors; for the powerless, they offered the only, desperate shred of hope for staying the hand of a wrathful landlord or cruel officer. The need to carry such spells was obvious to all and was left unstated, underscoring the precarious nature of life for those on the receiving end of hierarchical inequality. Within the genre of “spells to power,” effects were generally invoked either through the affective language of love and kindness, attesting to the highly personalized exercise of power, or, more directly, through inverted tropes of subservience. Ultimately, these intimate dramas reveal the horrors of serfdom in general and of social and sexual exploitation in particular.