materialsHairοὐσία
said ousia — the essence of a person, in the Greek of the binding spells
also: nail clippings · ousia · conjure hair
materialGreece and the AegeanRome and ItalyBritain and IrelandWestern EuropeNorth AmericaGreeceItalyUnited KingdomBelgiumUnited States of Americaconfidence mediumneeds checking
Hair cut from a named person and put inside something else. It is almost never the charm on its own. It is the component that makes a general formula point at one particular body, and every tradition here says so out loud.
citedWhen
early 5th century BCE to now still carried cited
| Period | Classical Greece to the present |
|---|---|
| How the date is known | excavated — dug up in a dated context |
| Note | Dated from the curse-tablet corpus, whose earliest group — twenty-two tablets from Selinus in Sicily — is mostly early fifth century BCE; the tablets that carry hair are not separately dated in the source. The witch bottle tradition is dated to at least the sixteenth century, and conjure bags are made now. |
Years are stored astronomically — 1 CE is 1, 1 BCE is 0, 500 BCE is −499 — and printed the way a reader says them. How these dates are made.
What its carriers say it stops
Reported, attributed, not tested here. Each row below is somebody's claim, with their name on it.
- Attracting custom, luck or love — the charm that pulls rather than blocks citedsaid by the writers of Greek erotic binding spells, which call for hair from the head of the love target
hair from the head of the love target
- Another person's sorcery citedsaid by English householders, whose bottles held their own hair and urine as countermagic against a spell already cast
- A curse already laid citedsaid by conjure workers in the American South, who put hair into bags meant to protect against conjure or to work it
- Bad luck, unspecified citedsaid by the makers of goofer bags, built from goofer-root, cloth, strands of hair, needles and graveyard dirt
The story
The Greek binding spells give the theory. Curse tablets included hair or pieces of clothing, and the cited account explains why: this was seen as a way to give them strength through the inclusion of the central essence — ousia — of the person. Love spells are the strongest case, calling for "hair from the head of the love target", and some have been found "folded around some hair", probably to bind the spell itself.
England put it in a bottle. A witch bottle historically contained the victim's urine, hair or nail clippings, or red thread from sprite traps; older accounts list rusty nails, urine, thorns, hair, menstrual blood, and pieces of glass, wood and bone. The bottle was buried at the farthest corner of a property, under the hearth, or hidden in a wall, and was held to work as long as it stayed hidden and unbroken.
One of those bottles has been opened in a laboratory, which is the only time in this record that hair gets analysed rather than described. A glass bottle found buried in the threshold of a house at Trelissick in Cornwall appeared on Antiques Roadshow in 2016; a 2019 episode reported that Loughborough University had analysed the contents and identified "urine, a tiny bit of alcohol, and one human hair", alongside brass pins dating from the late 1840s and an ostracod.
In the American South the same component travels under a different name. A former slave from Texas described how a conjure bag was assembled: they "would take hair and brass nails and thimbles and needles and mix them up in a conjure bag." A goofer bag is made with goofer-root, cloth, strands of hair, needles and graveyard dirt, and camel hair is added to increase a bundle's potency.
Inference — one hair, from one Cornish bottle, is the entire physical record this atlas can point to. Hair survives in the right conditions — dry, sealed, frozen — and rots everywhere else, and the bottles that preserved it did so by accident of being corked. Set that single strand against the thousands of surviving lead tablets that once had hair folded into them, and the shape of the gap is visible: the metal is in the museum and the person is gone.
How it is made and carried
Cut, or collected after cutting, and then enclosed — folded inside a lead sheet, corked into a bottle, sewn into a flannel bag. The enclosing is the point. Hair on its own is not treated as a charm in any account read here.
Notes
This record describes a component taken from a named living person, sometimes without that person's knowledge. It names no living person and reproduces no procedure for obtaining it.
What this is near
What names this one
Each in its own words, from its own page.
Where this came from
- Curse tablet — Wikipedia read 2026-09-16
- Witch bottle — Wikipedia read 2026-09-16
- Mojo bag — Wikipedia read 2026-09-16
Elsewhere
Record updated 2026-09-17. This record as JSON. Every field carries its own provenance; the tier chips above say which.