Strange Horizons
--Shakespeare,
The Tempest
Say the word "curse" and generally two sorts of images will leap to mind; the first will probably be the composite picture of a thousand B-movie and cartoon villains exclaiming "Curses! Foiled again," and the second may be one of several things, but it will very likely have something to do with Egypt, and will almost certainly involve a corpse, or a doll stuck with pins. This second set of images is not absolutely misleading, but it is limiting. Because these images are mostly foreign to us, it is easy to think that curses are safely confined within some exotic and ignorant past. But many people throughout the western world still believe in curses and perform them, and they do so for reasons that would not seem strange to those who lived in Europe and the subcontinent two, three, or six thousand years ago. The cursing methods of these places are the source of the great majority of curse stories and methods which are popular in the Western world now, and this overview will therefore concentrate on them.