The Book of Spells

That reputation is not a modern invention pasted on from outside. It comes straight from the text itself. The greatest Western scholar of the Atharvaveda, Maurice Bloomfield, wrote flatly that the Veda's most salient teaching is sorcery. Whitney, who made the definitive scholarly translation, said the same: this is a book that contains, mainly, mantras used in witchcraft. The Atharvaveda is the place where the most sacred language of an entire civilization was turned, deliberately and in detail, toward making things happen in the world — healing, yes, but also harming. Compelling. Binding. Cursing. Killing.

This is the Veda of the will. And to understand it you have to understand the single belief that powers the whole thing — a belief so total that it built a four-thousand-year-old technology of the spoken word.

This is why the priest of this tradition wasn't quite a priest in the way we mean it. He was closer to an engineer of the invisible — a man who knew the operating codes of the cosmos and could type the right command. And once you believe that — once you believe words are levers on reality — then every human desire becomes a target you can hit with the right spell. Want someone to love you? There's a code for that. Want your enemy to fail? There's a code. Want the fever to leave the child, the rival to lose the lawsuit, the rain to come, the curse someone sent you to bounce back on them? Codes, all of it.

The Atharvaveda is the great codebook. And like any powerful technology, it has a bright use and a terrible one — and the text knows it, and contains both.

The Atharvaveda confesses its double nature in its oldest title. It originally called itself the Atharvāṅgirasaḥ — and that's two names welded together, two lineages of ancient sorcerer-priests pulling in opposite moral directions.

• the Atharvans · the bright handMasters of auspicious magic — śānta, the “white” work: healing the sick, blessing the household, protecting the king, drawing rain, ensuring safe birth. The hand that mends.
• the Angirasas · the dark handMasters of the other thing — abhicāra, hostile sorcery, the “black” work aimed at enemies and rivals: the curse, the binding, the spell that withers a man's strength or turns his own weapons against him. The hand that harms.

So the Atharvaveda is, by its own self-naming, a book of both hands — blessing and curse bound into one scripture. Over the centuries, the respectable tradition got nervous about this and leaned hard on the bright side, quietly promoting the auspicious “Atharva” name and letting the sinister “Angiras” half fade from the title. But the dark hand never left the pages. It's right there.

And the word the dark hand operates under — abhicāra — is the single most important word in the whole black-magic story, because it is the technical Sanskrit term for malevolent sorcery, and it runs in an unbroken line from these hymns all the way down to the vashikaran specialist taking your money today. Hold that word. We're going to follow it through three thousand years.

Let's stop circling and actually read the dark hand at work, because the specifics are stranger and more vivid than any summary. The Atharvaveda is full of what scholars classify as ābhicārika hymns — sorcery proper — and kṛtyā-pratiharaṇa hymns — counter-sorcery, spells to throw a curse back. And the texture of them is chillingly practical. They don't speak in vague ill-wishes. They name what they want done and they do it through ritual objects: an amulet carved from a particular tree, a buried charm, a figure made of clay or wax.

There are charms to strip an enemy of his vigor and his luck. Charms to make a rival's mind cloud over, his speech fail, his courage drain out through his feet. Charms recited while tying on an amulet “to destroy the enemy who hates me.” And then there are the spells of transference — the grimmest genre — where the sorcerer takes his own misfortune, his own disease, even his own bad dream, and ships it onto someone else.

Atharvaveda 6.46 · against evil dreams

yáthā ṛṇám … evā́ duṣvápnyaṃ … pratimúñcāmasi

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As one pays off a debt, thus do we transfer every evil dream upon our enemy.

Your nightmare becomes a parcel you address to a man you hate. Sit with how casually domestic the image is — as one pays off a debt — and how cold. The misfortune is real, the text assumes; it is a quantity that has to go somewhere; so the rite simply re-addresses it. This is the logic of the whole dark hand: suffering is not endured, it is routed.

And then there is the most genuinely eerie thing in the entire Veda — an idea so striking it has haunted Indian magic ever since. The Kṛtyā. A kṛtyā is a curse made physical — witchcraft given a body. The reasoning, preserved in the old commentaries, is coldly logical: a curse is a powerful thing, but a curse is also motionless — it can't walk to your enemy's house on its own. So the sorcerer must give it legs.

He fashions an effigy — Sāyaṇa, the great medieval commentator, describes it as an idol made of wood or clay or soil, shaped to represent the victim — and through the rite he animates it, breathes hostile life into it, turns it into a malignant entity, a kind of artificial demon. And then he sends it. The kṛtyā walks to the target's home and unleashes the harm: sickness, ruin, death.

That defense is the kṛtyā-pratiharaṇa — the counter-rite to detect a sent kṛtyā, neutralize it, and turn it around so that it stalks back to the sorcerer who made it and devours him instead. Return, O kṛtyā, to your maker, the counter-charms say in effect; the one who made you, let him eat you. An entire arms race of the invisible — offensive sorcery and defensive sorcery escalating against each other — is written into a book three thousand years old.

The people who composed this did not think magic was a metaphor. They thought there were curse-demons walking the roads at night, and they wrote the antivirus software for them.

Now follow the dark thread forward, because this is the part people most want to know and most misunderstand. Vashikaran — the famous, infamous Indian art of bending another person's will, most often to compel love or desire — has its taproot right here. The word breaks down as vaśī-karaṇa: vaśa means “control, submission, power-over,” and karaṇa means “the making-of.” Vashikaran is literally the making-of-someone-subject-to-your-will. And the Atharvaveda's love-charms are its seed. Read one and the compulsion in it is unmistakable — this is not a prayer for love, it is a command for it:

Atharvaveda 6.131 · a love-compulsion charm

Let him consume with love of me…

· ◉ ·

Down upon thee, from head to foot, I draw the pangs of longing love. If thou shouldst run three leagues away, five leagues, a horse's daily stage — thence thou shalt come to me again.

Let him consume. Even if he flees to the world's edge, he will turn and come back. There are others — one (6.130) that “heats” a love-philter brewed by the gods to set the beloved on fire with want; one (6.139) invoking a plant to make the speaker irresistible; charms that ask to grip the beloved's mind the way a creeper strangles a tree, the way the wind bends the grass: as the wind shakes this grass on the ground, so do I shake thy mind, that thou mayst love me and not be parted from me. These are not gentle. They are spells of binding — the direct ancestor of every vashikaran mantra promising to bring your lover under control.

And here's the genuinely fascinating part — the way the thread runs unbroken through history. That Atharvavedic abhicāra developed, over the following two thousand years, into one of the most systematic magical technologies any civilization produced: the ṣaṭkarma, the “six acts” of Tantra. By the medieval period the tantric manuals laid the dark arts out almost like a menu — six classic operations, each with its own deity, color, direction, and ritual:

• śānti · pacificationEnding disease, calming hostile forces. The bright one — the survival of the old Atharvan hand inside the dark catalogue.
• vaśīkaraṇa · subjugationBringing a person, and famously a desired lover, under your control. Vashikaran itself — the seed-charm, now systematized.
• stambhana · paralysisFreezing an enemy, stopping their action, “shutting their mouth” — even, the manuals claim, stopping fire or water.
• vidveṣaṇa · estrangementDriving a wedge between friends, allies, lovers, kin. Breaking the bonds that hold people together.
• uccāṭana · eradicationDriving someone away, ruining their peace, making them flee in disgrace, destroying their home.
• māraṇa · killingThe deadliest act. The one the manuals warn carries the heaviest karmic cost — and recoils on a careless practitioner.

Look at that list and you are looking at the full dark catalogue of human malice, formalized into ritual: control, paralyze, estrange, banish, kill — and, at the bright end, heal. The later tradition openly traces this whole apparatus back to the Atharvaveda, calling it the first and most complete book of tantra-vidyā. And it carries a built-in moral warning, repeated across the texts: the abhicāra acts are meant only for emergencies, the destructive ones recoil on a careless practitioner, and a tradition that began as protection slid, “out of personal selfishness,” into doing harm — which is exactly why the orthodox came to treat this side of things with such suspicion.

It would be a lie to leave you thinking this Veda is only darkness, because the same codebook that curses also holds the oldest medicine in India — and the two were the same craft, performed by the same people, in the same breath. In the Atharvaveda, disease is a demon, and the healer is an exorcist who is also a herbalist. The fever, Takman — almost certainly including malaria, the sickness that “comes every autumn” — is addressed to its face like a hostile spirit to be intimidated and deported:

Atharvaveda 5.22 · against Takman, the fever

Go now away, down, into the depths!

· ◉ ·

Thou that makest all men sallow, inflaming them like a searing fire — even now, O Takman, thou shalt become void of strength. Having made obeisance to the Takman, I cast him down below.

The healer bows to the fever-demon — makes obeisance, the way you'd respectfully address a dangerous power — and then orders it out, down, and away, even trying to banish it into the territory of rival tribes. But woven right through this demon-talk is real, accumulated plant medicine: hundreds of references to healing herbs and roots, a charm with one plant to knit a broken bone, the pepper-corn for wounds, specific herbs to stanch bleeding, a whole Hymn to all the Herbs that addresses the medicinal plants as a great assembly of mothers, each with her power.

This is why the Atharvaveda is honored as the oldest literary monument of Indian medicine and a fountainhead of Ayurveda. The exact same mind that could build a kṛtyā to harm an enemy could also identify the root that brings down a fever. Magic and medicine had not yet divorced. The Atharvaveda is the record of the marriage.

Here is the final twist that should detonate any simple picture of this as “just the spell-book.” The very same Veda of curses and love-binding and fever-demons also climbs to some of the most exalted spiritual peaks in all of Indian literature. The hands that ground herbs for a vashikaran charm also composed the Pṛthivī Sūkta, the great Hymn to the Earth — sixty-three verses of pure reverence for the planet as the universal Mother, now beloved by the global ecological movement. Its most famous line lands harder every year:

Atharvaveda 12.1.12 · the Hymn to the Earth

mātā bhū́miḥ putró ahám pṛthivyā́ḥ

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The Earth is my mother, and I am her son.

It sings of the Earth who bears the seas and the mountains and “people of manifold speech and differing customs,” and begs her never to forsake us. And there's more in this high register: profound cosmological hymns on the mysterious Skambha, the cosmic Pillar that props up the universe; meditations on Prāṇa, the breath, as the very principle of life; speculation on Time itself as a god. And the Atharvaveda's youngest layer produced three of the most important Upaniṣads of all — the Muṇḍaka, which gave India its national motto satyam eva jayate (“truth alone triumphs”); the Praśna; and the tiny, towering Māṇḍūkya, the supreme meditation on the syllable Oṃ and the four states of consciousness.

This is the staggering truth of the Atharvaveda, all under one roof: a curse to destroy a rival, a spell to bind a lover's will, a demon you build from clay and send into the night — and the Earth is my mother, and I am her son, and truth alone triumphs, and the deathless meditation on Oṃ. From the blackest sorcery to the highest reverence, in a single book. No other scripture on earth holds that whole range of what a human being is.

The Rigveda is grander, the Samaveda more beautiful, the Yajurveda the engine of the great rite. But the Atharvaveda is the one people lower their voices about — and the one that grabs you hardest — precisely because it refuses to pretend people are nicer than they are. It knows you want someone who doesn't want you back, and it hands you a binding-spell. It knows you lie awake hating a rival, and it hands you a curse — and then, knowing your enemy is doing the same to you, it hands you the counter-curse. It knows you are terrified watching a fever climb in someone you love, and it hands you both a chant and a healing root. And then, when you least expect it, it lifts your face from all that fear and wanting and lays your forehead against the ground in front of the Earth, your mother.

The deepest spell the Atharvaveda casts isn't any single charm. It's the recognition that floods you when you read it: that the people on the far side of three thousand years wanted exactly what you want, feared exactly what you fear, loved and hated and ached exactly as you do — and reached, as you reach, for whatever power they could find to bend the world a little closer to their hearts.

— the book of spells

That recognition is the real magic. And unlike the love-charms, it actually works — every single time someone opens the book.