“This is the charm for awakening the desire of a woman. Take a strip of cloth from her skirt, [write the charm], make it into the wick of a lamp and set it alight.”
Excerpt from manuscript Or. 5650 fol. 14v, Leiden University Library
Inserted almost casually between remedies for headaches and treatments for skin diseases, I was struck by how frequently love charms appeared in 18th- and 19th-century Malay medical manuscripts. These were largely focused on changing the behaviour of women for the benefit of the reader, presumably a straight male: how to make a woman obsessed with you, how not to lose an argument to your wife, how to perform better in bed, how to raze the marriage of a rival.
As a woman, my feelings fluctuated between amusement and indignation. I often felt like shouting relationship advice across time to the sad, insecure person who may have tried all these things—and more. “Just talk to her, dude,” I implored. “Find out what she likes or does not like, be caring and nice, listen to what her hopes, dreams, and aspirations are.” Yet, I also see in this imagined male reader of the past a vulnerability I recognise in my female self of the present: the inability to communicate one’s feelings, and the desperate hope for a miracle. For who among us does not wish to be loved?
A charm, known in the Malay-Jawi vernacular as azimat or jimat, can be defined as powerful words, letters, or figures that can effect a desired change by being read, ingested, buried, or worn in specific ways. Charms have always been ubiquitous, known worldwide by different names and associated with diverse religious traditions: biblical verses written on bread in medieval England, and consumed as medicine; an Arabic supplication from 17th-century South Africa for swift memorisation of the Quran traced onto a white bowl, filled with water, then drank from; magical letters to aid fertility in Ottoman Palestine, written on paper and tied around a sacred rock. The categories we now separate as “magic” and “religion” were once inextricable in common heterodoxy in the quest for desired events that transcended ordinary cause and effect.
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