Note 36.2 — PSYCHE’S TASK

Thieves cursed in ancient Greece. The ancient Greeks seem to have made a very liberal use of curses as a cheap and effective mode of protecting property, which dispenses the injured party from resorting to the tedious, expensive, and too often fruitless formalities of the law. These curses they inscribed on tablets of lead and other materials and deposited either in the place which was to be protected from depredation or in the temple of the god to whose tender mercies the criminal was committed. For example, in a sacred precinct dedicated to Demeter, Persephone, Pluto and other deities of a stern and inflexible temper at Cnidus, a number of leaden tablets were found inscribed with curses which consigned the malefactors of various sorts to the vengeance of the two Infernal Goddesses, Demeter and her daughter. “May he or she never find Persephone propitious!” is the constantly repeated burden of these prayers; and in some of them the sinner is not only excommunicated in this world but condemned to eternal torments in the world hereafter. Often the persons who launched these curses were ladies. One irate dame consigns to perdition the thief who had stolen her bracelet or the defaulter who had failed to send back her underclothes.36.2 Another curse, engraved on a marble slab found at Smyrna, purports that if any man should steal one of the sacred vessels of a certain goddess or injure her sacred fish, he may die a painful death, devoured by the fishes.36.3 Sometimes, apparently, these Greek imprecations were as effective in reclaiming sinners as Dyak curses are to this day. Thus we read of a curious dedication to a lunar deity of Asia Minor, by name Men Aziottenos, which declares how one Artemidorus, having been reviled by a couple of rude fellows, cursed them in a votive tablet, and how one of the culprits, having been punished by the god, made a propitiatory offering and mended his wicked ways.37.1 Landmarks protected by gods and curses. To prevent people from encroaching on their neighbours’ land by removing the boundary stones, the Greeks committed landmarks to the special protection of the great god Zeus;37.2 and Plato dwells with unction on the double punishment, divine and human, to which the sinner exposed himself who dared to tamper with these sacred stones.37.3 The Romans went even further, for they created a god for the sole purpose of looking after landmarks, and he must have had his hands very full if he executed all the curses which were levelled not only at every man who shifted his neighbour’s boundary stone, but even at the oxen which he employed to plough up his neighbour’s land.37.4 The Hebrew code of Deuteronomy pronounced a solemn curse on such as removed their neighbour’s landmarks;37.5 and Babylonian kings exhausted their imagination in pouring out a flood of imprecations against the abandoned wretch who thus set at naught the rights of property in land.37.6 King Nebuchadnezzar in particular, before he was turned out to grass, appears to have distinguished himself by the richness and variety of his execrations, if we may judge by a specimen of them which has survived. A brief extract from this masterpiece may serve to illustrate the king’s style of minatory eloquence. Referring to the bold bad man, “be it shepherd or governor, or agent or regent, levy master or magistrate,” whosoever he might be, who “for all days to come, for the future of human habitations,” should dare to tamper with the land which his Majesty had just marked out, “Ninib, lord of boundaries and boundary-stones, tear out his boundary stone. Gula, great lady, put lingering illness into his body, that dark and light red blood he may pour out like water. Ishtar, lady of countries, whose fury is a flood, reveal difficulties to him, that he escape not from misfortune. Nusku, mighty lord, powerful burner, the god, my creator, be his evil demon and may he burn his root. Whoever removes this stone, in the dust hides it, burns it with fire, casts it into water, shuts it up in an enclosure, causes a fool, a deaf man, an idiot to take it, places it in an invisible place, may the great gods, who upon this stone are mentioned by their names, curse him with an evil curse, tear out his foundation and destroy his seed.”38.1