Everyday religion and magic

“Rites of passage” were associated with unique occurrences, as we just saw. But other religious acts were part of the daily routine. Thus, every meal started with a libation or a

Small burned sacrifice in one’s own hearth, the focal spot of the house and the oikos, and personified as a goddess, Hestia. The polis also had its hestia. The border between this kind of everyday religion and magic, a kind of DIY religion, was constantly shifting: warding off the “evil eye,” for example, could be done by appealing to the gods, but also with amulets and incantations. The evil eye was the envious look with which others looked at you, at your relatives, dependents, animals, or other possessions, and which could thereby be destroyed or damaged.

Protecting oneself against the evil eye by magic is an example of apotropaic magic, that is, magic intended to ward off evil. There was also another kind of magic: acts by which the forces of evil were not dispelled, but were called up, in order to intentionally inflict damage on some enemy. From the ancient world, we have many examples of so-called curse tablets or defixiones, small sheets of lead that carried the name of the cursed person, with or without some explanatory text. These curses provide us with a very interesting view of the mental life of ancient humans, often common people who otherwise left but few traces in the sources. Often, such curse tablets were rolled, pierced with a nail, and deposited in a grave or some such spot supposed to be near to the forces of the underworld. Again, borders can be seen to be shifting: cursing could be the clandestine procedure just described, but curse tablets have also been found dedicated in temples. Whether something is magic or religion is very much a question of point of view. Most people will have been concerned about things like the evil eye or curses. The philosopher Plato may have rejected the belief in ghosts and black magic, but it seems more than likely that most of his fellow Athenians were quite “superstitious.” And Plato too did not doubt the existence of a wide range of divine beings and daimones, “spirits.”