![]() They work as messengers and guards for higher ranked males they set bones they help with large-scale butchery. In addition to curing and making leather goods, they are the jack-of-all-trades guys. In Pukhtun culture, leatherworkers are regarded as being the second lowest ranking among the occupational groups. Let the ethnographers and folklorists, and in some cases the police, look into them more closely. Don’t actually make or apply them to anybody. (This is a good place to note that you should take these examples of love potions from around the world only as examples of the concoctions designed to enslave the object of affection. He apparently was attempting to dry it out.” He showed police where the skull was hanging on a string inside a two-burner kerosene stove in his quarters. The murderer “told police he had been studying black magic and needed a human skull to make into dust for a love potion to cast spells on women. ![]() The body had been decapitated and found buried on the farm where the man worked. In a ghastly 1957 case from Vineland, New Jersey, a man was arrested for the murder of a 13-year old boy. Of course, freelance potion-making has its hazards. The murderer “told police he had been studying black magic and needed a human skull to make into dust for a love potion to cast spells on women.” “A girl can infallibly win the love of any sweetheart she may desire by secretly throwing over his clothing some of the powder made by rubbing together a few heart leaves.” And if one sweetheart isn’t enough, a “score of lovers” will result from “simply carrying the leaves in her bosom.” This plant-charm is believed to be so powerful that it is “equally efficacious if used by one of the opposite sex.” All you need to do is collect them and dry them before a fire. Liverworts with heart-shaped leaves are supposed to do the trick. In the Carolina mountains, the ethnographer James Mooney reports, it’s DIY. Of course, you can always eschew the witch or other middle-person. “As, however, it was evident that she had really had no other intention than to gain the man’s love, and had the poison administered in ignorance, she was merely sentenced to simple imprisonment for a short period,” the BMJ author writes. Chemical analysis of the pill found it was made of Indian hemp, which could have been one of two plants, and datura, a poisonous genus. Neither man died, but the woman was arrested and charged with causing harm. A “young widow,” having procured a pill from an “old witch,” proceeded to poison her “hard-hearted swain” and his father, who also ate the food the pill had been secreted into. Here’s one from India that was written up in the British Medical Journal. Perhaps unsurprisingly, some of these magical mixtures turn out to be simply poisonous. In sum, writes Lindholm, “The target loses all sexual autonomy and the ambiguity of human love relationships is, in theory, negated.” So, Lindholm continues, “magic, the passionate desire to conquer ‘the domain of the unaccountable’ is often called into play in an effort to control the force of sexuality.” The point of such love magic is to enslave the targeted objection of affection, to overcome the individual’s will, to drive them crazy with desire for the potion administerer. Wayward and powerful, it unites couples but can also divide them it is a precondition for the reproduction of society, yet it is simultaneously a threat to custom and order.” ![]() ![]() The anthropologist Charles Lindholm goes right to the aorta: “Sexual desire both binds and disrupts the human community. Love potions-or “philters” if you’re old school-can do that to people. In other words, the potion resulted in a rash of sexual harassment before being quashed by the law. He broke my little bottle of Love Potion Number Nine. 9’s constituent elements remain unknown, but the effects were all too public:īut when I kissed a cop down on Thirty-fourth and Vine It is, after all, supposed to be a magic potion, and the key to magic is secret knowledge, the possession of the witch, available for a price- maybe a soul. But the ingredients of the titular potion were left a little vague in Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller’s lyrics. 9” was a hit for The Clovers in 1959 and then again for The Searchers in 1965. It smelled like turpentine and looked like India ink. She said “I’m gonna make it up right here in the sink” The icon indicates free access to the linked research on JSTOR.
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