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The Book of Bindings: Love Magic, Desire Spells, and the Complete Cross-Cultural Record of Erotic and Romantic Witchcraft From Ancient Egypt to the Present
For as long as human beings have desired one another, they have reached for something beyond ordinary means to shape that desire. This is the complete history of what they reached for.
From the love spells scratched onto papyrus in ancient Egypt to the binding tablets buried in the wells of classical Greece and Rome, from the incantation traditions of Mesopotamia to the erotic disciplines of the Indian Tantric path, from the red thread traditions of East Asia to the honey offerings of the African diaspora, from the charm manuscripts of medieval Europe to the spell culture of the modern internet age, this book traces the full documented record of love magic across every major civilization and every significant historical period.
It covers the goddesses, the grimoires, the roots and the rivers, the sacred fires and the planetary longings, the folk pharmacies of the heart and the learned mechanics of binding. It examines what practitioners actually did, what materials they used, what divine forces they invoked, and what they understood themselves to be doing when they performed these rites. It separates attraction work from coercion, sweetening from domination, protection from obsession, and treats each with the ethical seriousness the distinctions deserve.
Inside these pages you will find the love spells of the Egyptian magical papyri, the defixiones of Greece and Rome, the cuneiform tablets of Babylon, the Atharvavedic tradition of India, the red thread and talisman traditions of China, Korea and Japan, the Yoruba and diasporic traditions of Africa and the Americas, the folk magic of medieval Christian Europe, the grimoire tradition of learned magic, the botanical and sensory folk pharmacy of the heart, the modern witchcraft revival, and a complete cross-cultural ethical framework for understanding what this tradition ultimately demands of those who engage with it.
This is not a book of superstition. It is a book about one of the oldest and most persistent expressions of what it means to be human: the refusal to simply endure desire without acting on it, the ancient insistence that longing should count for something in the world, and the three-thousand-year record of everything people have done to make it so.