Unlike today’s more practical world, where magic and lore are reserved to excite the youth and entertain the masses, there was a time in the ancient world when the existence of magical powers was a nearly universally accepted belief. Many people, from every walk of life, would spend their Sunday afternoons trying to summon demonic forces to procure their magical prowess.
It is, of course, unlikely that these spells worked, but it surely didn’t stop people from trying them out. Let’s face it, if you were born a millennia ago, you probably would be summoning demonic forces for some spells or seeing your neighbor do the same. People in that era believe all sorts of wild stuff that would have us rolling our eyes in the modern day. Let’s take a trip through the past and explore the 10 ancient magical spells that people actually believed to be real.
Ancient Magical Spells That People Actually Believed
1. Voodoo Dolls Of Love
When we think of voodoo dolls, it conjures the thoughts of tribal shamans or cajun witches crafting doll representations of humans to inflict suffering born of visceral desires for vengeance. However, the ancient Greeks and Romans utilized magical dolls too, though they weren’t always used for suffering, the idea was not dissimilar. They would sometimes make those for people they loved. Of course, you wouldn’t really be flattered if you found out that someone was making one of you. These were used to cast love spells.
Men believed that they simply had to use this ancient Greek magic of making a woman fall for them. The dolls were not made of fabric rags as voodoo dolls would be but were simple male or female-shaped clay figurines. The figurines of males held a likeness to the Greek god Apollo, while female figurines would be portrayed on their knees.
The male figurine would also be chopping off the female one’s head. How is that for a dark twist? The next part of the spell involved piercing the likeness of one’s true love’s brain with bronze needles while screaming “I pierce your brain!” This prodding would continue in every part of the body, explaining the same piercing call, ending with “I pierce your anus!”
The conclusion of the spell involves writing a message to Pluto on a lead tablet asking him to prevent the woman from drinking or eating until she has no choice but to give herself over. In essence, it would be dragging her by her hair, guts, and soul. Then the table would be tied to the figurines and placed on a gravesite of a murder victim. It was believed that your true love will come to you and will be forever yours. More likely than not, she would find any possible method to stay away from you.
2. The God Summon
Need some answers from the divine? Here is a helpful hack that you can do from the comfort of your abode. This easy set of steps could help you summon a dark messenger from the beyond to take your message to the gods. Obtaining an olivewood table, one that has never been used before, and placing it in a room covered with a tunic is central to the spell. Under the table, four bricks are to be stacked with a clay incense burner in front of them. The next step is to obtain goose fat and myrrh, pounding them into balls.
The next step involves essential incantations that must be spoken loudly. The first is “I invoke thee who are seated in the invisible darkness” and then “Send up to me this night thy archangel Zebourthanuen,” with the latter repeated three times while staring at the table, then remain silent until dawn.
Those who followed the steps just right should have been rewarded with an archangel, one with a nose on his feet, appearing and divulging many secret truths that were never meant for mankind to hear. Once the archangel leaves, writing one’s goals on a tablet of reading hours is the final step. Once written, it should be placed on the prepared bricks, allowing all the spells to manifest all of the wisher’s twisted desires for mankind into reality. Sounds pretty simple, right?
3. You Can’t See Me Spell
People have strived and wrestled for generations with how to achieve the superpower of invisibility. Perhaps they should have looked to the 1,170-year-old spell for a very easy solution. According to it, all one must do is say “Assesouo, dim the eyes of every man or woman when I go forth until I achieve as many things as I wish!” Then, collect some essential ingredients, of which “oil with crocodile dung” is the most important, and cover your face in it.
It’s unlikely that we can test the spell’s viability today as some of the words of the spell are illegible, but those who wrote it obviously believed it. It also means that someone actually tried it out. Those who think this is just pure stupidity should consider what they would do if a man covered in crocodile dung walked into a store, and started taking things off the shelves while proclaiming himself to be a ghost. Chances are, you wouldn’t want to look in their direction at all, proving them, in a sense, right about being invisible.
4. Win Any Chariot Race With Just A Spell
Is it unethical to use magical curses by athletes in the Greco-Roman world to win get some assistance in winning, or is the knowledge of their wielding just a competitive advantage? In the ancient world, it turns out, performing hexes to gain a leg up on your opponents was seen as a big ethics violation. During the Olympics in ancient Greece, organizers kept a careful eye for anyone using magical hexes against fellow chariot racers, believing that the practice was quite rampant.
Sometimes the spells that were used were not just advantageous, but rather brutal. For instance, the book of ancient Greek magic has a spell that would put the competitors’ opponents through hell, inflicting them with tortured thoughts and dysfunctional senses. Those who were really into the practice would sometimes go as far as to request that the magical spells pluck out the eyes of their foes.
Believe it or not, that was the mild stuff. Another spell called for the death of the entire team of opponents by summoning everyone from Jewish angels to Egyptian Gods to cause the fall and to cast down the other team. Surely for the sake of clarity, the spellcasters would insist that the gods should smite and drag their opponents off the backs of the chariots.
Milder spells of just slowing the others down existed too, of course, but when one wanted an assurance of victory in a race they were determined to cross the finish line first in, missing eyeballs and mid-race death would be more effective.
5. Love Potions
Love potions were very common in the ancient world, but this particular love potion would need to be drunk by someone who loved you enough to do it. The recipe for this Greek spell requires drowning a scarab in milk for 4 days, then removing it from the milk, and cutting it in two.
The left half would be bound to the spellcaster’s arm with saffron and myrrh, while the right would be combined with the nails from the caster’s right foot, nine seeds from the core of an apple, and bound with as much of one’s urine as it takes into a sphere shape. Once combined, the fingernail, beetle, and urine ball would need to be dropped in one’s glass of wine.
The wine is to be served to the subject of the spell who must consume it. Then there is the final step. Before falling in love, the woman who consumed it must sleep with the caster. That’s all there is to it; get a woman to drink your urine and fingernails, then have sex with you, and she won’t be able to resist you for eternity.
6. Giving People Seizures
It takes a sociopath to place a spell on another human that would induce seizures, but this particular spell took someone certainly a few beers short of a six-pack. In a spell that makes one wonder what the person who came up with it was thinking, the first step is to decapitate a donkey and place his head between one’s feet.
The feet need to be covered very specifically too; the right with “set stone of Syria” and the left with clay. Then the caster’s right hand must be placed in front of them, while their left is placed behind them. Keep in mind, that the hands are covered in donkey blood, which will then be used to pour the blood into the caster’s mouth.
As the blood fills the mouth, the caster must exclaim: “I invoked thee who art in the void air, terrible, invisible, almighty, god of gods dealing destruction and making desolate!” In case the god of gods has questions about the blood-filled mouth’s rhetoric, simply state that you have been wronged leading you to these things.
Ancient Greeks believe that if you were willing to do this, the gods would get back at your enemy by giving them a seizure. Of course, one seizure for someone you loathe so much would not be enough, would it? Be prepared to execute this rabid spell several times daily!
7. Spells Of Death
If seizures are just too mild a punishment, there was always the option of inflicting magical death. The previously described seizure spell could be modified to become a death spell by taking it a bit further. For instance, the spell would need to be performed 14 times. Additionally, the caster would need to lie about a mat of palm fibers in their penis that was itchy. Yes, getting the gods to murder someone for you took a lot of work, but it was done.
Sheets of lead engraved with death spells have been located by archaeologists. One spell called for the god Mercury to drive several enemies to the “greatest death” which implied that the caster’s foes should experience non-stop, excruciating suffering and agony, not moments of health or sleep, and nothing but torment until their death.
So what made this particular caster so angry as to delve into such morbid magic? Researchers believe the targets of the spell had it coming. After all, they stole the poor guy’s cows.
8. The Dog Bite
The ancient Egyptians believed that dog bites were filled with venom and to deal with it, they would turn to mystics and sorcerers to remove its deadly effects. Turns out, the solution was simple and involved only gargling with a mouthful of a dog’s blood, along with a declaration of: “I have come forth from Arkhah, my mouth is full of the blood of a black dog. I spit it out!” To make the spell take effect, you’d need to rub garlic intensely into the bite wound, and yell the declaration at it daily until it heals.
The folk remedy of treating dog bites with garlic lives in the modern day, leading to the belief that there is some truth to it, but contemporary health professionals insist that there is no scientific evidence to support it as a viable treatment. But the Egyptians that would spill the blood of the offending dog that bit them would certainly assure that dog would know its place.
9. The Nonsense Magic
The first evidence of medical proprietorship points to ancient Mesopotamia where how the world approached medicine would be forever altered. People were triaged, diagnosed, and treated with previously proven methods. But as with most things in the ancient world, the understanding of medicine was rudimentary, and those things which were not understood were generally explained by magic.
In the ancient cultures of the Assyrians and Babylonians, many believed in the mystic power of the spoken word, especially if it was repeated multiple times, irrespective of that word’s definition. Sometimes the words that ancient medical professionals would repeat were ones that they understood, such as in the case of eye diseases when the doctor would chant the words that meant “eye” and “open”, or “Igi bar, igi bar, bar igi bar.”
In other situations, however, the words were utter nonsense, so as when the chant would be something like “En ni ip pa ah min ki ri ni ip pa ah”…which translates into English as exactly the same babble that it was in the ancient world. Those were simply sounds of nonsense.
Of course, these medical practitioners would not be considered reputable doctors if they did not achieve some results. So after the ridiculous chants, they would engage in the practice of actual medical care. If they needed to pull the debris out of someone’s eyes, they would inquire with the spirits to do it first before engaging in the act of carefully removing it themselves.
10. The Best Magical Power Is Your Own
While we can’t speak to its efficacy, ancient Persian books of magic would encourage and teach the improvement of one’s own magical prowess and the ability to greet divine powers through visions, and that led to people trying out some crazy things. This wasn’t an overnight skill either. Persian sorcerers were taught to hone their magical powers for 90 days. This preparation included perpetual staring at the ground, consumption of very little food, and speaking only in magic words, all while residing in a room that women had never been permitted to enter.
Other required activities in the room included sewing together patchwork cloaks, crafting a triad of magical amulets, and memorizing the names of every known angel. The final 30 days had to be spent fasting, with small amounts of food only being permitted in the nighttime hours. Once the 90 days in the room lapsed, the practicing sorcerer would need to come out, walking around a seven-stone pile several times, and then, oddly, pull a cat’s tail and out of the bottle, looking through it to see if they could spot the tail coming out on the other side.
After that kind of experience of endurance, we bet anyone looking for that tail would have surely seen something. Though these Persian mystics would have saved themselves a lot of time had they had some LSD readily available to them.
Conclusion:
belief in magic and spells has been a part of human culture for centuries. The ancient civilizations believed in the power of incantations and ritualistic practices to achieve their desired outcomes. The top 10 ancient magical spells listed were believed to bring good luck, protection, love, and healing. Despite the lack of scientific evidence, these spells continue to captivate people’s imagination and evoke a sense of mystery and wonder.
Since you finished reading this amazing article of the TOP 10 Ancient Magical Spells That People Actually Believed, we suggest to you to check this one: TOP 10 Abandoned Settlements That Are Now Underwater
Frequently Asked Question:
what was Harry’s magic spell sidemen?
Harry Potter, the main character in the “Harry Potter” series, used various spells throughout the books and films. One of his most famous spells is “Expecto Patronum,” which is used to defend against dark creatures known as Dementors. The spell causes a Patronus, a guardian that takes the form of an animal, to appear and protect the caster.
how to get rid of black magic spells?
Black magic spells, also known as dark magic, can be difficult to remove and may require the help of a professional. Some methods to remove black magic include performing a ritual to break the spell, using protective spells or talismans, and seeking the help of a spiritual healer or exorcist.
Hello, and welcome to my blog! My name is Idammah, and I am the founder of this site dedicated to exploring the world's mysteries, uncovering fascinating facts, and delving into science's weird and beautiful aspects. I have always been fascinated by the unknown and the unexplained, and I love nothing more than digging deep to find the answers to some of life's greatest mysteries. Whether it's exploring the depths of the ocean, investigating ancient civilizations, or unraveling the mysteries of the universe, I am always on the hunt for new knowledge and insights. As a self-proclaimed weirdo and science enthusiast, I believe that there is always more to learn and discover, and I am constantly seeking out new and exciting ways to expand my understanding of the world around me. Through FoxPeek blog, I hope to share my love of all things strange and wonderful with like-minded readers and inspire others to embrace their inner curiosity and seek out the world's mysteries for themselves.
