Binding & Release

The Curse Tablet, Turned on a Bad Habit

Also called Defixio, Katadesmos, Bath curse tablet, Binding tablet

Romans and Greeks scratched curses on thin lead sheets, folded and pierced them, and gave them to the gods. This is the history, and a safe modern adaptation that binds a bad habit of your own instead of a person.

TraditionGreco-Roman binding magic (history); modern adaptation

RegionRoman Britain and the Mediterranean

Era5th century BC to 4th century AD

Moon☾ Waning moon

DaySaturday · Saturn

ElementEarth

Difficulty●●○ Moderate

Time30 minutes

Tonight's moon is read when the page loads.

The working

Name the habit you want bound: smoking, doom-scrolling, road rage. This adaptation never targets a person.
Cut a palm-sized sheet of foil and press it flat on a magazine.
Scratch the habit's name and a short formula in your own words, for example: I bind this habit, its hand and its tongue, so it cannot move me.
Roman writers sometimes wrote backward to 'twist' the target; you can write the habit's name back to front.
Fold the sheet in half twice, then push the nail straight through all layers.
Bury it in the garden, in a pot of soil, or drop it in the trash on your way out, saying it is handed over and finished.
Each time the urge comes, remember it is buried and nailed, and do something else for ten minutes.

Take care: Do not use real lead; it is toxic to handle and to soil. Use aluminum foil and handle the nail carefully. Never write the name of a real person; this adaptation binds only your own habits.

Versions across time and place

Bath: letters to Sulis Minerva

Roman Britain · 2nd to 4th century AD

About 130 tablets were found in the sacred spring at Bath in 1979 to 1980. Nearly all ask the goddess to punish a thief and return stolen property, often a cloak, a ring or a pair of gloves, sometimes listing suspects. One is in a British Celtic language, the only surviving text of its kind. They were inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World UK register in 2014.

Uses: Lead-tin sheet, Stylus

Recorded in: R. S. O. Tomlin, Tabellae Sulis, in B. Cunliffe (ed.), The Temple of Sulis Minerva at Bath, vol. 2 (1988); UNESCO Memory of the World UK register (2014)

Uley: petitions to Mercury

Roman Gloucestershire · 2nd to 4th century AD

Excavations at the temple of Mercury at Uley in 1977 to 1979 found the largest cache of curse tablets in Britain. Petitioners asked Mercury to take back stolen cows, bees and tools and to punish the thief. Around 45 were folded and offered blank, perhaps by people who could not write, which shows the act of offering mattered as much as the words.

Recorded in: R. S. O. Tomlin, The Uley Tablets: Roman Curse Tablets from the Temple of Mercury at Uley (Oxford University Press, 2024)

iii

Athenian lawsuit bindings

Classical Greece · 5th to 4th century BC

Greek katadesmoi often aimed to 'bind' an opponent's tongue and wits before a trial, a chariot race or a stage contest. They were dropped in wells or slipped into graves, where the dead could carry them below. Gager's collection shows how routine the practice was in Athens, used by ordinary litigants and tradesmen.

Recorded in: John G. Gager, Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World (Oxford University Press, 1992)

History

Curse tablets, defixiones in Latin and katadesmoi in Greek, were thin sheets of lead inscribed with a request that a god or the dead 'bind' someone. They spread from Greek cities in the 5th century BC across the Roman world. The writer named the target, sometimes the body parts to be bound, rolled or folded the sheet, often pierced it with a nail, and placed it in a grave, a well, a spring or a temple. Lead was chosen because it was cheap, soft and cold.

Britain has almost 300 Roman curse tablets, two-thirds from Bath and Uley. Unlike many Mediterranean examples aimed at rivals in love or law, the British tablets are mostly prayers for justice after theft. Roger Tomlin's translations of the Bath tablets in 1988 and the Uley tablets in 2024 opened them to readers. This catalog records the curses as history; the steps above turn the same gesture against a habit, never a person.

Sources

Bath curse tablets · Wikipedia
The Latin Curses from Uley and Other Sanctuaries in Britain · Roger S. O. Tomlin, 2021
Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World · John G. Gager, 1992
Tab.Sulis 117. Curse tablet · Roman Inscriptions of Britain

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