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.

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Charmed I'm Sure

The Ethics of Love Spells
by Mike Nichols

To gain the love of someone: On a night of the full moon, walk to a spot beneath your beloved’s bedroom window, and whisper his/her name three times to the nightwind.
-- Ozark love spell


It seems to be an immutable law of nature. You are interviewed by a local radio or TV station, or in some local newspaper. The topic of the interview is Witchcraft or Paganism, and you spend the better part of an hour brilliantly articulating your beliefs, your devotion to Goddess and nature, the difference between Witchcraft and Satanism, and generally enlightening the public at large. The next day, you are flooded with calls. Is it people complimenting you on such a splendid interview? No. People wanting to find out more about the religion of Wicca? Huh-uh. People who are even vaguely interested in what you had to say??? Nope. Who is it? It’s people asking you to do a love spell for them! This used to drive me nuts. I’d take a deep breath and patiently explain (for the thousandth time) why I won’t even do love spells for myself, let alone anyone else. This generally resulted in my caller becoming either angry or defensive, but seldom more enlightened. ’But don’t you DO magic?’, they ask. ’Only occasionally,’ I answer. ’And aren’t most magic spells love spells?’, they persist. That was the line I really hated, because I knew they were right! At least, if you look at the table of contents of most books on magic, you’ll find more love spells than any other kind. This seems as true for the medieval grimoire as for the modern drugstore paperback.

Why? Why so many books containing so many love spells? Why such an emphasis on a kind of magic that I, personally, have always considered very negative? And to make matters even more confusing, the books that do take the trouble of dividing spells between ’positive’ and ’negative’ magic invariably list love spells under the first heading. After all, they would argue, love is a good thing. There can never be too much of it. Therefore, any spell that brings about love must be a GOOD spell. Never mind that the spell puts a straightjacket on another’s free will, and then drops it in cement for good measure.

And that is why I had always assumed love magic to be negative magic. Years ago, one of the first things I learned as a novice Witch was something called the Witch’s Rede, a kind of ’golden rule’ in traditional Witchcraft. It states, ’An it harm none, do what thou will.’ One uses this rede as a kind of ethical litmus test for a spell. If the spell brings harm to someone -- anyone (including yourself!) -- then don’t do it! Unfortunately, this rule contains a loophole big enough to fly a broom through. It’s commonly expressed, ’Oh, this won’t HARM them; it’s really for their own good.’ When you hear someone say that, take cover, because something especially nasty is about to happen.

That’s why I had to develop my own version of the Witch’s Rede. Mine says that if a spell harms anyone, OR LIMITS THEIR FREEDOM OF THOUGHT OR ACTION IN ANY WAY, then consider it negative, and don’t do it. Pretty strict, you say? Perhaps. But there’s another law in Witchcraft called the Law of Threefold Return. This says that whatever power you send out, eventually comes back to you three times more powerful. So I take no chances. And love spells, of the typical make-Bobby-love-me type, definitely have an impact on another’s free will.

So why are they so common? It’s taken me years to make peace with this, but I think I finally understand. The plain truth is that most of us NEED love. Without it, our lives are empty and miserable. After our basic survival needs have been met, we must have affection and companionship for a full life. And if it will not come of its own accord, some of us may be tempted to FORCE it to come. And nothing can be as painful as loving someone who doesn’t love you back. Consequently, the most common, garden-variety spell in the world is the love spell.

Is there ever a way to do a love spell and yet stay within the parameters of the Witch’s Rede? Possibly. Some teachers have argued that if a spell doesn’t attempt to attract a SPECIFIC person into your life, but rather attempts to attract the RIGHT person, whomever that may be, then it is not negative magic. Even so, one should make sure that the spell finds people who are ’right’ for each other -- so that neither is harmed, and both are made happy.

Is there ever an excuse for the make-Bobby-love-me type of spell? Without endorsing this viewpoint, I must admit that the most cogent argument in its favor is the following: Whenever you fall in love with someone, you do everything in your power to impress them. You dress nicer, are more attentive, witty, and charming. And at the same time, you unconsciously set in motion some very powerful psychic forces. If you’ve ever walked into a room where someone has a crush on you, you know what I mean. You can FEEL it. Proponents of this school say that a love spell only takes the forces that are ALREADY there -- MUST be there if you’re in love -- and channels them more efficiently. But the energy would be there just the same, whether or not you use a spell to focus it.

I won’t attempt to decide this one for you. People must arrive at their own set of ethics through their own considerations. However, I would call to your attention all the cautionary tales in folk magic about love spells gone awry. Also, if a love spell has been employed to join two people who are not naturally compatible, then one must keep pumping energy into the spell. And when one finally tires of this (and one will, because it is hard work!) then the spell will unravel amidst an emotional and psychic hurricane that will make the stormiest divorces seem calm by comparison. Not a pretty picture.

It should be noted that many spells that pass themselves off as love spells are, in reality, sex spells. Not that there’s anything surprising in that, since our most basic needs usually include sex. But I think we should be clear from the outset what kind of spell it is. And the same ethical standards used for love spells can often be applied to sex spells. Last year, the very quotable Isaac Bonewits, author of ’Real Magic’, taught a sex magic class here at the Magick Lantern, and he tossed out the following rule of thumb: Decide what the mundane equivalent of your spell would be, and ask yourself if you could be arrested for it. For example, some spells are like sending a letter to your beloved in the mail, whereas other spells are tantamount to abduction. The former is perfectly legal and normal, whereas the latter is felonious.

One mitigating factor in your decisions may be the particular tradition of magic you follow. For example, I’ve often noticed that practitioners of Voudoun (Voodoo) and Santeria seem much more focused on the wants and needs of day-to-day living than on the abstruse ethical considerations we’ve been examining here. That’s not a value judgement -- just an observation. For example, most followers of Wicca STILL don’t know how to react when a Santerian priest spills the blood of a chicken during a ritual -- other than to feel pretty queasy. The ethics of one culture is not always the same as another.

And speaking of cultural traditions, another consideration is how a culture views love and sex. It has often been pointed out that in our predominant culture, love and sex are seen in very possessive terms, where the beloved is regarded as one’s personal property. If the spell uses this approach, treating a person as an object, jealously attempting to cut off all other relationships, then the ethics are seriously in doubt. However, if the spell takes a more open approach to love and sex, not attempting to limit a person’s other relationships in any way, then perhaps it is more defensible. Perhaps. Still, it might be wise to ask, Is this the kind of spell I’d want someone to cast on me?

Love spells. Whether to do them or not. If you are a practitioner of magic, I dare say you will one day be faced with the choice. If you haven’t yet, it is only a matter of time. And if the answer is yes, then which spells are ethical and which aren’t? Then you, and only you, will have to decide whether ’All’s fair in love and war’, or whether there are other, higher, metaphysical considerations.

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