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FILE 002 · VOL I · They Knew First
He Used an Ancient Love Spell. It Worked.
The only love worth having is the kind that could have left.
Based on: Ancient Love Spells
Intake record
| Recovered from | Auction lot 2209, antiquities (unsorted), with one lead tablet and the contents of a laptop notes file |
|---|---|
| Contents | Lead tablet, rolled and nailed; 47 dated notes written by the cataloguer |
| Finder | W. Adair, auction house cataloguer |
| Status | Tablet consistent with period lead. Inscription unattested in any known collection. |
Recovered file
The tablet was smaller than a playing card, rolled tight and pierced straight through with a bronze nail gone green with age. Wes found it in a crate of unsorted antiquities, bedded in straw beside a cracked oil lamp and a bag of worn Roman coins.
He knew what it was before he unrolled it, flattening it slowly under a weighted cloth so the old lead would not split. Archaeologists have found more than fifteen hundred of them: curses and binding spells scratched into soft metal, folded, nailed, and dropped down wells or into graves so the dead would carry the request below. Archaeologists still pull them out of the mud. [2] Most are petty. Make the chariot driver crash. Make the thief's hand wither. But some are about love, and those are the hardest to read, because they are so honest about what love wants when it is frightened.
In the Louvre, in a glass case, there is a small clay woman no taller than a finger. She kneels with her arms bound behind her back and her ankles tied, and she is pierced through with thirteen pins. She was found in Egypt, sealed in a clay jar with a lead tablet. [1] The tablet is about seventeen hundred years old. It calls on a spirit of the dead to bring a woman named Ptolemais to a man named Sarapammon, and the spell it follows, which survives on papyrus, asks the dead to keep her from eating, drinking, or sleeping until she comes to him. [3] You can go and look at her. Thousands of tourists walk past her every day on their way to the Mona Lisa.
He translated it at his desk under a raking lamp, letter by scratched letter. The phrasing was familiar from the real binding spells he had read in translation, the ones that ask the gods to keep a woman from rest in any house but the speaker's. Then, along the bottom edge, in a different and later hand, was a line he had never seen anywhere.
The rest of this file is sealed. The ending, the sources and the archivist's note unseal with the file.
Unseal File 002 ($2.99) · its volume · everything ($49.99)
Built on real, cited records. The stories are dramatized. Disclaimer · If you are in crisis in the U.S., call or text 988.