Magical Spells for Love

These magical love recipes, preserved in the Cairo Geniza, provide mechanisms to induce love between two individuals. The anonymized nature of these texts, lacking specific names, indicates that they may have been part of larger collections of magical potions and underscores the broad interest in these materials. The space to add the individual’s name is denoted as “N b. N.” Several of these examples rely on a symbolic representation of the love between the individuals. These texts are written in a mixture of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Judeo-Arabic.