Indo-European Poetry and Myth

Herdsmen found you,

culled you without hands,

cooked you without fire,

ate you without teeth.^50

The parallelism is astonishing; in both cases the herb is addressed with the
statement of its history, as if to tell it that it has been exactly identified and
cannot evade its duty.

Maledictions

In spells intended to harm or weaken another person two particular images of
aggression appear repeatedly: binding and stabbing.
Binding spells are attested in India, Greece, and the Germanic north. In
AV 4. 16, after some verses hymning the all-seeing and all-knowing god
Varuna, the guarantor of justice, he is urged to apply all of his hundred fetters
to the man who speaks untruth. This sounds like a general appeal for moral
regulation of the world, but the last verse (9) goes

With all those fetters I bind you,

O so-and-so, of so-and-so’s family, son of so-and-so [fem.];

and all of them in succession I assign to you.

Only the first and third verses are metrical; the second is a template to be filled
in with the details of the particular person targeted. Other poems, such as AV

6. 63, 121; 7. 83, are for release from the bonds of Varuna or another deity.
   Aeschylus’ Erinyes sing a song with a refrain, designed to ‘bind’ their victim
   (μνο δσμιο σθεν,Eum. 306, cf. 331 f. = 344 f.). This idea of binding
   is abundantly attested for Greek magic.^51 The one pronouncing the spell
   typically uses a performative first-person verb, as in the Vedic example, ‘I bind
   (so-and-so)’.
   Odin in the catalogue of his spells says ‘I know a third one for when I
   have a great need of a fetter (hapt) against my enemies’; his fourth one
   enables him to release himself from fetters that others put on him (Hávamál
   148 f.). The first of the two famous German incantations from the tenth-

(^50) Quoted by Marcell. De medicam. 21. 3, cf. 28. 16; Pelagon. Ars veterinaria 121. ‘Ate you
without teeth’ means ‘swallowed without chewing’, cf. Plin. HN 23. 110. I have assumed that the
lines should refer to the remedy, though in Marcellus and Pelagonius they are strangely made to
refer to the disease; so too in the Serbian, Russian, and Caucasian parallels adduced by Aarne
(1918–20), iii. 44f.
(^51) Cf. Plato, Rep. 364c, Laws 933a; Liddell–Scott–Jones, Greek–English Lexicon s.v. καταδω
(A) III; Gow on Theocr. 2. 3; Fritz Graf, Magic in the Ancient World (Cambridge, Mass. 1997),
118–25.
332 8. Hymns and Spells