Magic for Love or Subjugation

Abstract

If magic could bring you untold material wealth, it could also bring you love — or so many believed. And if not love, at least obedience and compliance. Finding treasure by magical means was a formidable task, but did just about lie within the realm of the achievable. Attempting to subjugate another person’s will to one’s own, however, was nigh on impossible. Nevertheless, there is far more surviving evidence relating to what is known as erotic or love magic than to any other type of money-making magic. So widespread were practices designed to obtain love through enchantment that, as reflected in many literary works of the age,³ people began to think in terms of the duality of love. On the one hand, there was pure or idealized love, based on generosity and respect, in which spiritual communion between lovers was understood as a joining together, and not as possession; this was a love that would bring happiness, sometimes even a contemplative and ineffable state of constant renewal. On the other, there was the tormented, discordant, impatient love that held one in thrall to needs and impulses not met or reciprocated by the object of one’s affections. The anxiety and despair caused by this form of love led many to seek help by magical means.

At that time there came to Salamanca a woman well-versed in the ways of the world [… ] who, when Thomas spumed her and, so she thought, held her in revulsion [… ] gave him a Toledo quince laced with what folk call a love potion, believing that she could thus gain mastery over his will and make him love her.¹

That on many occasions, so that the women with whom he dealt would love him greatly, he said — in the very act of copulating with them — the words of the blessing Hoc est corpus meum, and that he taught it to other men that they might do likewise.²