There is no evidence that any charm influences another person's feelings or choices, and this library does not present methods for attempting it. What the tradition can honestly offer is charms for your own confidence, your own commitment, and the remembrance of someone.

Why does this section not cover binding charms?

Because the platform does not publish material promising influence over another person's will. The historical binding literature is real and is discussed as history, including the unequal circumstances that produced most of it, but it is not presented as a method.

What is a traditional love amulet then?

Love tokens, engraved coins given at partings, posy rings with a verse inside the band, hair set into lockets and rings, true lover's knots, and Venusian talismans in copper. All of these are about the wearer's own feeling, promise or memory.

What is a Venus talisman for?

In the classical and medieval sources: attraction in the general sense, beauty, art, friendship, and specifically the settling of quarrels. It is made of copper and worked in an hour of Venus, traditionally on a Friday.

Someone is offering to cast a love spell for money. Should I?

No. There is no mechanism by which it could work, the sellers know that, and the trade targets people at their most desperate. If a charm feels like your last remaining leverage over someone, that is worth treating as information about the situation.

What is the difference between erōs magic and philia magic?

A distinction drawn by Christopher Faraone in Ancient Greek Love Magic in 1999, and the most useful tool for reading this material. Erōs magic tries to induce sudden uncontrollable desire in a target and was overwhelmingly commissioned by men against women. Philia magic tries to preserve affection and loyalty inside an existing relationship and was overwhelmingly used by women, usually wives with no legal or financial alternative. They are different operations with different users and different ethics, not two strengths of the same charm.

Love charms, honestly: what they can and cannot be

At a glance

This library covers: Confidence, fidelity, reconciliation, remembrance, friendship
This library does not offer: Binding, compulsion or influence over another person
The historical terms: Agōgē and philtrokatadesmos; defixio, katadesmos
Key scholarship: Faraone, Ancient Greek Love Magic (1999)
Best-attested objects: Love tokens, posy rings, hair jewellery
Planetary metal: Copper, for Venus

The line, stated first

The historical record for love magic is enormous and a great deal of it is coercive. The Greek Magical Papyri preserve agōgē spells, leading spells, whose stated purpose is to drive a named woman from her house to the man who commissioned them, unable to eat, sleep or think of anyone else until she comes. The same corpus gives the philtrokatadesmos, the love-binding spell, and the wider practice of the katadesmos or Latin defixio, the inscribed curse tablet folded, pierced and buried.

The best-known surviving object of this kind is in the Louvre: a small kneeling clay figure of a bound woman, pierced with needles through the head, eyes, ears, hands, feet and genitals, found in Egypt with a lead tablet naming the man who commissioned it and the woman he wanted. It dates to the third or fourth century CE, and the accompanying text follows a formula common enough that other copies of it survive.

This library reports that as history, because it is history, and because the context is the point.

What this library will not do is present any of it as a method. Nothing here describes how to make a charm to influence another person's will, and no page will imply that such a thing works or would be acceptable if it did. That is a standing editorial position, and it is the reason this page looks different from the others in the section.

What a love charm can honestly be

Four things, all of which are well attested and none of which involve anybody else's will.

Confidence. Charms carried before meeting someone, worn for a first date, kept for courage. This is the same mechanism as any luck charm, and the same research applies: an object that raises self-efficacy affects how you behave.

Remembrance. By far the largest surviving class. Love tokens, lockets with hair in them, posy rings engraved inside with a line of verse, coins smoothed and re-engraved by sailors and convicts, mourning jewellery. These are objects that hold a person, and they are the most emotionally serious things in this entire library.

Fidelity and commitment, of your own. Rings, knots, tied cords, handfasting bindings. A charm that commits you rather than someone else is a promise made into an object.

Reconciliation and friendship. The Venusian tradition in the grimoires is explicitly about settling quarrels and making peace as well as attraction, and that half of it is entirely usable.

The historical objects

Love tokens. Coins smoothed flat and engraved with initials, dates and messages, given at partings. The largest surviving group is British: convicts awaiting transportation to Australia filed down George III cartwheel pennies and cut farewell inscriptions into them for the families they would not see again, and the National Museum of Australia holds several hundred. They are among the most affecting objects in any museum collection.

Posy rings. Plain gold bands with a short verse engraved on the inside, from the French poésie, so that only the wearer can read it. Fifteenth to eighteenth century, English and continental, and the private inscription is the whole point.

Hair jewellery. Woven, plaited or coiled hair set into lockets, brooches and rings, in enormous quantity in the nineteenth century, for both love and mourning. Hair is the part of a person that does not decay, which makes it the one relic an ordinary household could keep.

Knots. True lover's knots in rope, ribbon, wire and drawn form, appearing across European decorative traditions. A knot that cannot be pulled apart is the most obvious possible metaphor and it has been used relentlessly.

Venusian talismans. In the formal tradition, copper, worked in an hour of Venus on a Friday, for attraction in the general sense, for art, for beauty and for peace between people.

Why the coercive strand persisted

It is worth understanding rather than just condemning, because the reason is not that people were wicked.

Christopher Faraone's Ancient Greek Love Magic, published in 1999, drew the distinction that makes the material legible. He separates erōs magic, which aims to induce sudden uncontrollable desire in a target and is overwhelmingly commissioned by men against women, from philia magic, which aims to preserve affection and loyalty inside an existing relationship and is overwhelmingly used by women, most often wives. They are not two intensities of the same thing. They are different operations with different users, different aims and different ethics.

That mapping matches the leverage available. Erōs magic is aggressive and belongs to people who can act. Philia magic is defensive and belongs to people whose survival depends on a relationship they cannot leave: where marriage is arranged, divorce unavailable, property held by the husband, and abandonment catastrophic. A great deal of surviving love magic was made by people with no legal or financial recourse whatsoever.

That context explains the practice without endorsing the method. The modern equivalent, sold online as a service with guaranteed results, has none of the excuse and all of the harm, and it preys on exactly the people the historical material came from.

So the position here is: read the papyri, note who was commissioning what and why, and do not buy the service.

How to think about a love charm

The usable form of this purpose, and the boundary around it.

Make it about you. A charm for your own confidence, commitment or memory is honest; one aimed at someone else's will is not.
Prefer a token with a real connection: a shared object, an engraved date, something one of you actually made.
Use copper if you want the traditional Venusian material, and Friday if you want the traditional hour.
Knots, rings and tied cords are the classic commitment forms, and they work as promises rather than as levers.
For remembrance, the historical objects are lockets, engraved coins and hair. All three are still makeable.
Do not buy a service that promises to make a specific person do a specific thing. It cannot, and the sellers know.

If you are in a situation where you feel a charm is your only remaining leverage over someone, that is worth taking seriously as information about the situation rather than as a shopping problem.

Charms and materials for this purpose

The honest half of the tradition.

Questions for reflection

A charm that commits you rather than someone else: is that less powerful or more?
The most affecting objects in this whole library are remembrance tokens. Why do you think that is?
Most coercive love magic was made by people with no other leverage. Does knowing that change how you read it?

Frequently asked questions

: There is no evidence that any charm influences another person's feelings or choices, and this library does not present methods for attempting it. What the tradition can honestly offer is charms for your own confidence, your own commitment, and the remembrance of someone.
: Because the platform does not publish material promising influence over another person's will. The historical binding literature is real and is discussed as history, including the unequal circumstances that produced most of it, but it is not presented as a method.
: Love tokens, engraved coins given at partings, posy rings with a verse inside the band, hair set into lockets and rings, true lover's knots, and Venusian talismans in copper. All of these are about the wearer's own feeling, promise or memory.
: In the classical and medieval sources: attraction in the general sense, beauty, art, friendship, and specifically the settling of quarrels. It is made of copper and worked in an hour of Venus, traditionally on a Friday.
: No. There is no mechanism by which it could work, the sellers know that, and the trade targets people at their most desperate. If a charm feels like your last remaining leverage over someone, that is worth treating as information about the situation.
: A distinction drawn by Christopher Faraone in Ancient Greek Love Magic in 1999, and the most useful tool for reading this material. Erōs magic tries to induce sudden uncontrollable desire in a target and was overwhelmingly commissioned by men against women. Philia magic tries to preserve affection and loyalty inside an existing relationship and was overwhelmingly used by women, usually wives with no legal or financial alternative. They are different operations with different users and different ethics, not two strengths of the same charm.