Cockerel Testicles and Vervain: Love Magic

He said that I was the only one found capable of defiling her widowhood, as if it were virginity, by my incantations and love-philtres. -- Apuleius

Disclaimer

This is NOT a page about Wiccans or neo-pagans, and I do not advocate the belief that Wiccans are Satan-worshippers and/or baby-killers. I am well aware that they are not. This is a starting point for historical research into the great witch craze of 1100-1700 AD. And please, don't ask me for spells.

• Love Magic
• Philtres and Love Potions

Love Magic

Love magic could be very simple or extraordinarily complex. A fifteenth-century manuscript known as the Munich handbook contains various spells, all demonic in nature. The spell to obtain the love of a woman is very elaborate.

While reciting incantations, the magician takes the blood of a dove and uses it to draw a naked woman on the skin of a female dog. He writes the names of demons on various parts of this image, and as he does so he commands the demons to afflict those parts of the actual woman's body, so that she will be inflamed with love of him. He fumigates the image with the smoke of myrrh and saffron, all the time conjuring the demons to afflict her so that day and night she will think of nothing but him. He hangs the image around his neck, goes out to a secret place either alone or with three trustworthy companions, and with his sword traces a circle on the ground, with the names of demons all around its edge. Then he stands inside the circle and conjures the demons. They come (the handbook promises) in the form of six servants, ready to do his will. He tells them to go and fetch the woman for him without doing her any harm, and they do so. On arriving she is a bit perplexed but willing to do as the magician wishes. As long as she is there, one of the demons takes on her form and carries on for her back at home so that her strange departure will not be noticed.
(Kieckhefer 7)

Dogs also played a part in other love spells:

1. Obtain a hand mirror with a copper backing (a metal associated with Aphrodite).
2. Write the subject of the spell and corresponding mystical characters on the back of the mirror.
3. Take the mirror to a spot where a dog and a bitch are copulating.
4. Reflect the copulation in the mirror.

When the victim looked into this mirror, they were stricken with lust for the owner of the mirror (King 52, 53).

The grimoire Salomonis Clavicula offered a love pentacle as a means for achieving love. This pentacle is a magic design covered with mystic symbols and Latin words, underscored by a French legend. The Latin translates to, "For this is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh and they shall be one flesh. Genesis II. 23, 24." The French translates to, "It has great virtue since it compels the Spirits of Venus to obey and to force any woman whatever to come instantly" (Wedeck 58).

Another fifteenth-century document contained equally-convoluted means by which a woman could be seduced. Under a heading which reads "Experiments which King Solomon devised for the love and courting a a certain noble queen, and they are experiments of nature" are listed a collection of magic tricks, presumably useful for entertaining Solomon's beloved:

He tells how to make a hollow ring leap and run through the house, how to carry fire in your shirt of hands, how to cause a person to strip, how to make a great flame explode in the face of a companion, and so forth. All these tricks are presumably meant as ways to a woman's heart. At the very end, however, the "experiments" abruptly change their tone and character; if up to this point they have been "experiments of nature," the last of them hardly qualifies for this description. It tells how to make a lead ring on the day and at the hour when Venus is dominant. Ater making the ring one should fast through the day, then go out at night and offer sacrifice with the blood of a dove. Writing with this blood on the skin of a hare, one should inscribe the name and sign of the "angel" Abamixtra. After this ceremony has been carried out, one should approach the desired woman with ring in hand, and she will obey one's every wish. Certain key words in the instruction are given in cipher, but not enough to obscure the sense.
(Kieckhefer 171)

Many spells were much simpler. In 1485 Innsbruck, a baptized Jewish woman was accused of reciting a blasphemous spell which went as follows: "May N. love me as much as Mary loved her Son when she gave him birth" (Kieckhefer 82). Another woman kissed a man she desired while holding the consecrated host in her mouth (Kieckhefer 83).

Some so-called aphrodisiacs seem quite ridiculous.

To arouse a woman's lust, one manuscript advises soaking wool in the blood of a bat and putting it under her head while she is sleeping. The testicles of a stag or bull, or the tail of a fox, will arouse a woman to sexual desire. Putting ants' eggs in her bath will arouse her so violently that willy-nilly she will seek intercourse. More questionable still is the advice of one compiler that if you write "pax + pix + abyra + syth + samasic" on a hazel stick and hit a woman on the head with it three times, then immediately kiss her, you will be assured of her love. A woman, on the other hand, can arouse her husband to love by mixing a herb with earthworms and giving it to him in his food.
(Kieckhefer 83)

In some instances, infanticide was thought to have been used in an attempt to magically force love:

In 1686, Appolonia Mayr, a jilted servantwoman, confessed that she had murdered her newborn baby. The Devil had promised that if she killed her child, her lover would marry her. She had strangled the infant at a little hill beyond the Lech bridge, just before the small town of Friedberg. She still knew the place and could find it. There was a tree not far away and she had walked into the fields, and it was midday that it happened. Describing the birth and murder, she said "The Evil Spirit left her no peace. It was only a moment, the Devil touched it [the child] as if her were a midwife, it happened quite quickly that the child came out. She strangled it immediately with the hand, and she felt no pain in the delivery. The Appolonia walked on: "she left it lying quite naked, uncovered, and unburied.... The Devil did not go with her, but remained staying by the child, and she did not look back.
(Roper 1995 1)

The Black Masses of Madame de Montespan, Guibourg, and La Voisin also relied on child sacrifice. By 1673, love philtres and amatory masses were inadequate for the seduction of Louis XIV. Stronger and darker magic was called for:

A mass was celebrated on the body of a masked but otherwise naked woman, conceivably Madame de Montespan herself, and at the moment of the consecration of the bread and wine a child's throat was cut and its blood drained into the chalice. Simultaneously, a prayer was recited to the demons Ashtaroth and Asmodeus: 'Prince of Love, I beseech you to accept the sacrifice of this child...that the love of the King may be continued...'
(King 111).

Philtres and Love Potions

Philtres were of many and very different sorts. Some were intended to excite and trouble the senses, like the aphrodisiacs. Others were dangerous drugs administered to cloud the wits and deprive the victim of all power of self-control.

Thousands of recipes exist for these potions. Since philtres are meant to be taken orally, they generally ought to be palatable, hence the typical composition of wine, water, tea, and herbs. Typical ingrediants are mandrake [also known as love apples], vervain, ambergris, orange, tobacco, briony, fern seed, dragon blood [a red gum], catharides [Spanish Fly], rose, and betel nuts. Thousands of recipes exist for these potions. Nevertheless, some look not at all tasty, such as the following gem from Girolamo Folengo's 1519 Maccoronea: "Black dust of tomb, venom of toad, flesh of brigand, lung of ass, blood of blind infant, corpses from graves, bile of ox" (Wedeck 78). Other ingredients included the reproductive and internal organs of various animals and birds.

Philtres could also be baked into a cake. One spell of folk witchery calls for a woman to get sweaty and then clean the sweat off with flour. This flour was then to be mixed with oil, egg, and ashes of burnt hair from every part of her body. This concoction was then to be baked into a cake and fed to the object of the witch's lust (King 52).

One medieval recipe for a love potion calls for ground heart of dove, liver of sparrow, womb of swallow, and kidney of hare. An equal part of the caster's own blood, dried and powdered was added, and mixed into a liquid. "Marvellous success" was promised (Guiley 268).

According to folklore, these love potions work best when concocted by professional witches. "When drunk, the philtre supposedly makes the recipient fall in love with the giver, which means great care must be taken that it is administered properly" (Guiley 267). In the story of Tristan and Iseult, Iseult's mother gets a love potion to make her uncooperative daughter fall in love with her fiancé, King Mark of Cornwall. Iseult believes the philtre is poison and shares it with Tristan, her knight escort to Cornwall. The two fall in love, which proves fatal to both of them.

Love spells had to be completed perfectly or disaster could occur. According to the rather suspect Newes From Scotland [1591], John Fian, schoolmaster of the Scottish village of Saltpans, attempted to conduct some of his own love magic.

One day [he] asked a pupil to bring him some of the pubic hair of his older sister. On the following night the boy, clearly very stupid or very obedient, attempted to comply. He crept to the bed of the sleeping girl, pulled back the coverlet, and tried to carry out his task. The girl awoke and called her mother. The boy, cross-questioned, explained his conduct and was given some hair to take to the schoolmaster, but these were taken from the udder of one of the family's cows, not from the girl.

The mother, it is apparent, suspected Fian of planning to work love magic and a day or two later her beliefs were justified. For the unlucky schoolmaster was pursued throughout the village by the now lust-maddened cow which came 'leaping and dancing upon him...to the great admiration of all the townsmen of Saltpans.'
(King 52)

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Cockerel Testicles and Vervain: Love Magic copyright 1998 to Shantell Powell.