The Sethian Curse Tablets of Rome

The tablets were recovered from a tomb on the Via Appia outside Rome and were published in 1898. Their subject is the circus. They name charioteers, they name the horses those charioteers drove, and they identify the factions, the organised racing companies whose colours divided Roman crowds into partisan blocs. Some of the tablets set out entire teams.

The scale of the surviving material is the point. Curse tablets against athletes and performers are known across the Roman world, but this group shows the practice attached to a professional entertainment industry with money behind it, and the precision of the naming indicates writers who knew the sport. Whoever commissioned these tablets knew which driver was dangerous in which race and which horse was worth disabling.

They also confirm the technique. Depositing in a tomb is not concealment for its own sake. The dead who had died young or violently were held to be restless and available, and a message placed with them could be carried down to the powers below. A tomb on a road out of the city was therefore both a hiding place and a postal address, and the fact that these tablets were deposited rather than dedicated at a temple marks them as belonging to the aggressive tradition rather than to the British prayers for justice.

Richard Wunsch called the group Sethian, and the name has been attached to it for well over a century, but it carries a claim that most scholars no longer accept. The tablets invoke a figure whom Greek and Roman writers of the period identified with the Egyptian god Seth, equated in turn with the Greek Typhon: a power of storm, violence and disorder, which is a coherent choice for a text meant to wreck a race. That much is in the tablets.

Wunsch went on to connect the group to the Sethians, a Gnostic movement known from the heresiological literature and later from the Nag Hammadi texts. That step required the two uses of the name to be the same thing, and there is little in the tablets to support it. The Gnostic Sethians are named for Seth the son of Adam, not for the Egyptian god, and their surviving literature has nothing to do with chariot racing.

The atlas records the attribution as debated rather than simply wrong, because the label persists in the scholarly literature as the standard designation for the corpus and because arguing that a name is only a convention is not the same as demonstrating that no connection existed. What can be said with confidence is that the name describes the god invoked, not the religious affiliation of whoever paid for the tablets, and that a reader meeting the term Sethian in this context should not take it as evidence of Gnosticism.