Linguists and folklorists in many cultural contexts have collected private and personal curses, including modern Palestinian curses that follow biblical curse formulas. For example, a
daʾweh may call upon God (or sometimes Satan) to bring down affliction on an enemy's health, family, honor, or property: "may God make a disease, whose cure nobody knows, befall you," "may God destroy your tent and your pasture.… may God deprive you of all that throws a shadow" (Canaan, 1935, pp. 247, 259).
Among the richest sources of such private curses are the tabellae defixiones of the classical Greco-Roman world. Thousands of such tiny lead tablets, etched with inscriptions and sometimes diagrams and rolled and pierced by a nail, have been discovered at the bottoms of wells or buried at stadia, crossroads, marketplaces, and the thresholds of homes and shops. These tabellae use succinct and sometimes cryptic but often explicit subjunctive or optative language to call down mishap, misfortune, financial disaster, sexual dysfunction, bodily harm or death upon the object of the curse, whether a despised neighbor, a rival shop-owner, a courtroom adversary, a chariot-racing competitor (Gager items 66, 45, and 6, respectively), or the object of frustrated sexual desire: "I bind you, Theodotis, daughter of Eus, by the tail of the snake … and the penis of the god so that you may never be able to sleep with any other man, nor be screwed, nor be taken anally, nor fellate, nor find pleasure with any other man but me" (Gager item 54).
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