defixio

You could also go on the offensive by inscribing a curse on a statuette of someone you wished to harm, or on an “execration bowl”; either would then be ritually smashed, thereby releasing the power of your curse and, in effect, letting it loose.3 A similar, ancient form of cursing called in Greek “making a katadesmos” or, in Latin, a defixio has been widely evidenced in excavations all over the Greco-Roman world.

In the Valley of the Shadow James L. Kugel 2011

You could also go on the offensive by inscribing a curse on a statuette of someone you wished to harm, or on an “execration bowl”; either would then be ritually smashed, thereby releasing the power of your curse and, in effect, letting it loose.3 A similar, ancient form of cursing called in Greek “making a katadesmos” or, in Latin, a defixio has been widely evidenced in excavations all over the Greco-Roman world.

In the Valley of the Shadow James L. Kugel 2011

You could also go on the offensive by inscribing a curse on a statuette of someone you wished to harm, or on an “execration bowl”; either would then be ritually smashed, thereby releasing the power of your curse and, in effect, letting it loose.3 A similar, ancient form of cursing called in Greek “making a katadesmos” or, in Latin, a defixio has been widely evidenced in excavations all over the Greco-Roman world.

In the Valley of the Shadow James L. Kugel 2011

You could also go on the offensive by inscribing a curse on a statuette of someone you wished to harm, or on an “execration bowl”; either would then be ritually smashed, thereby releasing the power of your curse and, in effect, letting it loose.3 A similar, ancient form of cursing called in Greek “making a katadesmos” or, in Latin, a defixio has been widely evidenced in excavations all over the Greco-Roman world.

In the Valley of the Shadow James L. Kugel 2011

For the technical sense of _defigere_, _defixio_, see Jevons in _Anthropology and the Classics_, p. 108 foll.

The Religious Experience of the Roman People From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus W. Warde Fowler 1884