types of love magic

(Agape and Philia vs. Eros)

We native speakers of English distinguish between lust and love, but tend to get confused when we look at the Greek distinction between eros and agape (or philia). While it is easy to understand agape as the love one feels towards friends, family, and animals, we think of the mutual affection we feel towards our mates as different. The agape or philia of the Greeks included affection, and also the sexual passion felt towards our mates, according to the University of Chicago's Christopher A. Faraone. Eros, however, was new, disorienting passion, conceived of as an attack of unwelcome lust, aptly represented as inflicted by the arrow-wielding god of love.

(Black and White Love Magic)

When we talk about black magic, we mean spells or voodoo practices designed to hurt someone else; by white, we mean spells or charms whose aim is to heal or help, often connected with medicinal herbs and other "holistic" or non-traditional healing practices. From our perspective, the ancient Greeks used black and white magic to arm themselves in the arena of love. On the side of black magic, there were magical effigies much like those used today by practitioners of voodoo. The practitioner of this aggressive magic would cast an incantation and poke or burn the effigy in an effort to affect the person represented. The intention was to make the woman represented suffer the pangs of lust to the point that she would leave her family. The practitioner might invoke Eros, Pan, Hekate, or Aphrodite. Practitioners of the "white" variety of love magic applied herbs to make an errant lover return or to restore harmony to a dysfunctional relationship. She might invoke Selene, Helios, or Aphrodite. Both types of love magic usually involved spells or incantations, but the former is more closely related to curse tablets than the other, more benign, love magic. The difference between these two types of magic is based on the difference between the two types of love, eros and philia.

(Gender-Based Love Magics)

Faraone distinguishes these two types of love and their related magics as overwhelmingly gender-based. Men used the eros-based agoge spells [ago=lead] designed to lead women to them; women, the philia spells. Men used the spells to make women burn with passion. Women used the spells as aphrodisiacs. Men tied up their effigies and tortured them. They used incantations, tortured animals, burning, and apples. Women spread ointments on the clothing of their mates or sprinkled herbs in food. They also used incantations, knotted cords, and love potions.
Theocritus' Iunx
The gender division isn't absolute. The iunx is said to have been a small, sexually rapacious bird which Greek men would tie on a wheel and then torture, in the hopes of filling the objects of their lust with burning, irresistible passion. In Theocritus second Idyll, a woman uses a iunx as a magical object for an agoge spell. She repeatedly chants:
Iunx, bring my man home.

(Mythology and Modern Love Magic in Pill Form)

While the agoge spells, the ones men usually used on women, resemble voodoo, and seem like what we call black magic, the philia spells could also be deadly. As is the nature of many herbs, you only need a little. When Deianeira used the centaur's ointment on Hercules' garment, it was as a philia spell, to keep Heracles from abandoning her for his new love, Iole (cf Women of Trachis). Although we do not know, perhaps a drop would not have killed him; however, the amount Deianeira used proved fatal. The ancient Greeks did not distinguish magic from medicine, as we claim to do. The need for erotic (whether agoge or philia) magic has long extended into domestic life where the wife of an impotent man (or the man himself) might invoke a bit of philia magic. Viagra's popularity attests to the fact that we still practice magic "miracle" cures.

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