Among the oldest and most widespread ritual gestures is that of shaping a small figure representing someone and acting upon it. In the Greek world these images had a precise name: kolossoi. The term, which we now associate with gigantic statues, originally meant simply a substitute figure, a double. Archaeology and literary sources let us follow this practice from the Archaic age to late antiquity, and show us that it was not used only to harm.
The double: an ancient idea
To the ancient mind an image was not merely a representation: it could stand in for the person or thing depicted. This principle, which modern anthropologists have called sympathetic magic or magic «by similarity», runs through very different cultures. In the Greek world we find it applied in surprisingly varied contexts: public oaths, funerary rites, the protection of a community and, of course, curses as well.
The oath of the founders of Cyrene
One of the clearest testimonies comes from an inscription from Cyrene, the Greek colony in Libya. The text, engraved in the Hellenistic period but presented as a copy of a much older agreement, records the oath of the colonists who set out from the island of Thera. According to the inscription, the participants shaped wax figures and burned them, praying that whoever broke the oath would melt and waste away like those images, he and his descendants.
Here the figure does not strike a specific enemy: it is a collective guarantee. Those who swear accept in advance to be represented by that wax should they ever betray the community.
The lead figures of Athens
In Athens, in the Kerameikos district and at other sites in Attica, archaeologists have found small lead figures, often with their hands tied behind their backs or with twisted limbs, sometimes enclosed in tiny lead «coffins» with inscribed lids. In some cases names of people are written on the figures or containers, occasionally recognizable as citizens involved in lawsuits. They are closely linked to defixiones: the bound body of the figure makes visible the «binding» that the text expresses in words.
Plato and the wax figures
The practice was widespread enough to worry philosophers. In the Laws, Plato mentions wax figures placed at doors, at crossroads or on the tombs of parents, and observes that they arouse fear in people. His proposal is to punish those who perform these rites with the intention of harming, while distinguishing between the case of the physician and that of the seer or enchanter. The passage is important: it shows that as early as the fourth century BC the magical figure was also a legal and social problem.
The Louvre figurine
The most famous find is a small female clay figure kept in the Louvre museum, from Egypt and generally dated to the third or fourth century AD. It depicts a kneeling woman with her hands and feet bound behind her back, pierced by thirteen bronze needles: in the eyes, ears, mouth, chest, hands, feet and other parts of the body.
The figurine was found inside a terracotta jar together with an inscribed lead tablet. The text is a binding love formula addressed to underworld powers and to the spirit of a dead person, in which a man asks that a woman, identified by her mother's name, be bound to him. A decisive detail: the procedure corresponds almost word for word to a recipe preserved in the great Paris magical papyrus, which prescribes shaping two figures, piercing one with thirteen needles while speaking precise phrases, and laying the whole set by the tomb of someone who died before their time.
It is one of the rare cases in which we have both the recipe and the finished object, and it allows us to see how the handbooks were actually used.
Protective figures
Not all figures were meant to bind. Greek and Roman sources mention apotropaic images placed to guard houses and cities, and the papyri contain instructions for figurines of deities to be kept in a domestic shrine as protection. The same gesture of shaping a double could therefore serve to protect, to guarantee a pact, to remember the dead or, in its darkest form, to bind.
A key to interpretation
The figurines tell us a great deal about how the ancients thought of the relationship between image and reality. The world was crossed by correspondences, and what was done to the symbol was believed to resonate on the original. In the Hermetic Workshop of Studio Esoterico Cornelio this principle is studied as a key to the ancient mindset and to symbolic language, not as a practice to imitate.
In short
- Kolossoi were substitute figures, ritual doubles of persons or communities.
- At Cyrene burned wax figures guaranteed the oath of the founders.
- In Athens bound lead figures enclosed in small coffins accompanied defixiones.
- Plato in the Laws mentions wax figures and proposes punishing their harmful use.
- The Louvre figurine, pierced by thirteen needles, matches a recipe in the great Paris papyrus.
