Showing the Gods the Way: Curse-tablets as Deictic Persuasion

Lead-tablets intended to convey an imperative message to the Other World in a situation of personal crisis or need constitute an interesting class of religious objects, inasmuch as they are expressions of a weakly-developed institution that provided some general guidance regarding performance or execution but otherwise required individual initiative. They thus perfectly illustrate one aspect of Lived Ancient Religion. An issue of RRE devoted to the rôles of objects in religious contexts offers an opportunity to consider a number of different ways in which the material base of the Textträger, lead-sheet, could serve as a device for increasing the effectiveness of the aims expressed in the written text. Since the devices employed in the Imperial period were all inherited from Greek models in the Classical and Hellenistic period, some attention is necessarily paid to the earlier period(s). The three modes discussed are: piercing the lead-sheet with a nail; the use of lead as a source of guiding metaphor; and 'pseudo-paragraphia', the deliberate distortion of script.