Using magic to manufacture consent

I’ve been thinking about magic a great deal lately. I’m preparing talks on both banshees and witches, so my head has been full of the female and the otherworldly for weeks, and then along came Obsession, Curry Barker’s new horror film about a man who uses a wish on a supernatural trinket to make the woman he loves love him back. It ends about as badly as these things can end.

People have been nursing unrequited love since forever, and reaching for remedies almost as long. What might surprise you is that early Irish law took those remedies seriously enough to legislate for them.

In the vast body of that law sits a sentence about a man who brings a woman to bed, or to marriage, by means she cannot see and never agreed to. It comes from what are called the Heptads, na Sechtae, the medieval Irish lawyers’ great lists of sevens, sixty-five of them gathered into Senchus Már, the largest collection of early Irish law. Heptad 52 names the seven kinds of woman entitled to walk out of her marriage whenever she wishes, taking her brideprice with her, because of something her husband has done. One of the seven grounds is this:1

A woman to whom her companion gives or utters a charm when soliciting her, so that he brings her to lust.

The offence is not the seduction. Courtship, honestly, has always mostly been one person trying to change another person’s mind, and the law had no quarrel with that. The offence is the charm, the epaid: the thing pressed into her hand or the words spoken over her, meant to manufacture a feeling she would not otherwise have had.

So, what interests me here is not that medieval Irish people believed in love charms. Half of medieval Europe believed in love charms. What interests me is that Irish lawyers took the belief seriously enough to build a remedy around it, and that the remedy they built tells you something precise about how they thought of consent. A yes obtained by a charm was, in their eyes, a defective yes. Not an outright no, exactly. Something more slippery than that, and the law had to decide what to do about it.

That courtship charm doesn’t stand alone in the legal record either. Elsewhere in the same collection it has relatives: a short, strange list of supernatural offences, and the items on that list, a carried charm, a cursed marriage bed, a poisoned dog, are what give the Heptad we are looking at its meaning.