Ancient Christians and the Power of Curses is not really a study of ancient Roman defixiones, nor does it really say much about early Christians beyond their occasional penchant for cursing (and general interest in efficacious speech). What this book really represents is the next wave of ‘magic studies’ — following forty years of critical publications and synthetic works on magic. Laura Nasrallah is asking where appreciating the elements of ancient magic can take us, both as scholars and as ethical humans. Ancient curse practices, she argues, exemplify a range of creative impulses: mysterious utterances, bricolages, juxtapositions of sounds and materials and distillations of myths, all of which came with immense performative and visual power in the worlds of ritual craftsmen and their clients.

The book follows a simple structure. The first two chapters concern the materiality of magical texts (nailing, inscribing on lead, ritualised action, assemblages); the last two chapters concern features of their incantation (nonsense-speech, the magic of song); and between them, as a bridge from materiality to orality, is a discussion of the mysterious vowel-invocations inscribed on the theatre at the ancient city of Miletus, a perfect interweaving of materiality and (implicit) orality.

N.’s attention in Power of Curses is on creativity more than philology, history or archaeology, and this attention inspires her most original intervention: a series of comparisons with the work of contemporary Black American artists. Most of these artists likewise (but for very different reasons) draw on the juxtaposition of materials and on the materiality of the written word, often self-consciously referencing magically imbued media of early American folk art or African sculpture. These contemporary works illuminate an aesthetics based in bricolage and meant to convey both potency and justice. Unfortunately, N. risks casting all these works as curses themselves (and cursing in African-American folk-culture is a rich topic of its own in folklore studies). Moreover, the selection of solely Black American artists both limits the range of artistic comparanda (what of Joseph Cornell? Luana Vitra?) and, more critically, implies that ancient defixio-clients actually sought liberation from an unjust world.

Indeed, for those scholars who have worked in the language and micro-social contexts of ancient curse-spells, it can be difficult to elevate their clients’ ethical impulses. Consuming hatred, jealousy and resentment motivate most of these objects, or power-hungry efforts to ‘bind’ others, or fantasies of erotic enslavement (often of others’ wives). N. plays with the idea of defixiones as ‘counter-imperial’ justice (81, 88) but comes down more provocatively on the idea that ‘we need to have a more capacious understanding of religious practices as means of effecting justice’ (126). That is, as selfish as curses could be, they articulate a justice through ritualised assemblage and professional consultation. N. wants to broaden the defixio from curse to any private ritual effort to stabilise one’s social environment in the face of rivalry, gossip, scandal and — inevitably — injustice.

Ancient Christians remain largely in the background in Power of Curses. N. neatly unpacks the ways that Clement of Alexandria and Julius Africanus as individual writers participate in an elite world of compulsive epoidai, incantations, but they do not direct those epoidai in ways we would necessarily call ‘Christian’. What N. demonstrates is these authors’ distinctive grasp of sonic powers: ‘These sounds and songs are aesthetic works and simultanously intervention[s] of power — power of one human over another, power to invite the daimones and gods to be involved, power to connect the human and the non-human’ (215). Likewise the Corinthian assembly to whom Paul writes (a little too early to call properly ‘Christian’) may — N. imagines (following P. Cox Miller) — be breaking the human/divine barrier with glossolalic speech in a way that approximates the mysterious voces magicae of many defixiones and ritual formularies; but this approximation does not make glossolalia curse-language any more than Clement’s epoidai.

What, then, does ‘curse’ mean for N.? We learn in the Conclusion that katadesmoi and defixiones are not the topic here so much as ‘an international, ecumenical set of practices that resound around the Mediterranean basin and beyond for centuries’ (265). N. is, in a way, articulating a feature, not so much of curses and binding-spells per se, but of ‘magic’ in general — in its abstract sense, subordinate to ‘religion’. And for anyone interested in the aesthetic and ethical implications of ancient magic, N.’s broad framework breaks new ground and assembles intriguing connections.

Power of Curses is extraordinarily rich and provocative, especially in its gestures to contemporary art. At heart, it is an experiment in teasing out the implications of magic studies. N.’s book would certainly augment an undergraduate or graduate course in ancient religion and culture if paired with a selection of primary texts, like John Gager’s 1992 Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World. For anyone familiar with ancient magical texts, the book offers fresh directions both humanistic and ethical — as long as the reader is prepared to forsake most traditional associations with cursing.