Spells of Venice

How the Women of Renaissance Italy Got and Kept Their Men
by Bestia Mortale


As fashions have changed in recent years, a few bold souls in the academic world have begun to explore the underground histories of sex and magick in Western culture. Many of the resulting works, though interesting, are marred by the intellectual distance their authors fastidiously maintain towards these dirty subjects, but such is not the case with Guido Ruggiero, a professor of history at the University of Connecticut, who seems to be able to take his curiosity into the archives while leaving many conventional restrictions at the door. Among his books, The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (1985) and Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage, and Power at the End of the Renaissance (1993) paint a fascinating picture of the widespread use of magick, especially love magick, in Renaissance Italy. I’ll try to pique your interest in his work, which I’d highly recommend, by highlighting a few of the things he describes.

Magick in Renaissance Venice was primarily the domain of women. Mothers passed knowledge on to their daughters, both about medicinal and magickal healing and about coercive spells, most often used to attract and bind the affections of men. The other main spell-casting group was renegade clerics, who horned in on healing and other magickal work thanks to its lucrative nature, but Ruggiero writes:

Clerics learned their magic from women. In turn, a surprising number of the women accused could read and write and were involved in passing on to other women a written as well as an oral culture.... There was a highly articulated discourse concerned with magical power over love that was widely understood and practiced in late-sixteenth-century Venice, ... dominated by women and women’s networks.
Healing, then as now, was big business, and was the more open, accepted side of magickal work, but healers were assumed to know other magick as well. Accusations of malicious witchcraft seem to have originated within the community of women healers, as an explanation of failed healings. When a sick child did not get well, for example, it seems to have been common practice to divert the parents’ anger and grief by accusing a competitor of having cast an evil spell. Despite the obvious short-term advantages of this practice, in the long run it created a strong public belief in the existence of nasty witches responsible for all manner of misfortunes. Since the witches themselves made the accusations, who was to doubt them?

One of the most common magickal practices was the divinatory casting of beans. Apparently, the beans were marked to represent various people and then thrown, sometimes together with other symbolic objects. The caster then interpreted the resulting placement of beans and objects to reveal the relationships of the people in question; as Ruggiero writes,

"the beans revealed their closeness/love or their distance/hate."
The beans could answer other questions, too, and were occasionally used for coercive purposes. Some of the other things that could be thrown in divination were coal, bread, small coins, rock salt and chains used to suspend pots over the fire.

Spells tended to rely heavily on the symbolic power of things. Ruggiero reports, for example, that when a wife concerned about her husband’s fidelity inventoried the contents of the mattress they slept on, she found there:

millet, sorghum, spelt, laurel, wheat, apple seeds, seeds of flowers from every month, peas, husks of sorghum and small bones that seemed to be from babies, coal, stockings, rocks of several types, pieces of wood of various kinds, and two nails plus two large needles one with the head the other without as was the case with the nails, needles with hard heads one of which was for sewing, whistling bones, and other things.
These were presumably the residue of many love spells, accumulated over years of mattress use. Seeds and objects of penetration stand out, with obvious links to sex. For more serious spells, menstrual blood and semen had strong symbolic power, as did anatomically correct wax votive statues that could be pierced with needles as appropriate. Live eels were also considered good phallic symbols.

The written word was regarded as one of the most powerful magickal symbols. Eating a sage leaf, for example, on which the "secret of the mass" had been written, was thought to bind a man effectively to the woman who fed it to him.

Christian symbolism in general was regarded as a particularly powerful source of magick. Although appeals to the Devil were not uncommon, the Venetians thought Christ a more powerful and equally accessible ally. Holy water and holy oil were thought to be among the most effective media for healing or binding in love.

A coercive spell was generally referred to as a "martello" or hammer, because it pounded the will of its target. It was commonly aimed at making loved ones miserable outside of the company (or bed) of the one on whose behalf the spell was cast. Men described themselves as sexually broken ("guasto") by such spells directed against them. Measuring was a common way of gaining power over a thing; healers would measure the swaddling of a sick baby, for example, so as to work a healing. One spell involved a woman measuring her lover’s penis with a candle, then burning the candle in church to bind him.

One thing above all that emerges from Ruggiero’s research is how widespread was the interest and belief in magick during this period. He quotes Cesare Lanza, prominent professor of theology at the University of Padua and devoted scholar of magick, testifying to the Inquisition in 1579:

If you knew those who are interested in magic and those who are greedy and if you had the eyes of Argos you would not be able to see all the evil that there is in this land. Today a lowly little woman does more than all the necromancers accomplished in the ancient world. Moreover, there is not a person who is not wearing some kind of charm with characters.
Magick, and love magick in particular, was both pervasive and still very much the domain of women, to the disgust of intellectual and religious men.

Copied from Mark Sumpter