This Spellbinding Exhibition Explores How Ancient Cultures Used Magic to Navigate Life’s Challenges

The Toledo Museum of Art is showcasing a treasure trove of masks, amulets, spellbooks and gems dating to between 2000 B.C.E. and 300 C.E.

Ryley Graham | Correspondent

March 26, 2026

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When visitors arrive to see “Cursed! The Power of Magic in the Ancient World” at the Toledo Museum of Art, they will find the once airy and bright Glass Pavilion gallery transformed into a dim, eerie cavern. Written curses are projected onto the wall, while artifacts once believed to hold magic are on view throughout the space.

“You almost feel like you’re within the curse itself,” Amy Passiak, a loans and exhibitions associate registrar at the museum, tells the Toledo Blade’s Lillian King.

“Cursed!” invites viewers to consider the role magic played in the daily lives of people in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome between 2000 B.C.E. and 300 C.E. Artifacts on view include an Old Babylonian Mask of Humbaba (from the British Museum) and a mummy portrait of a young boy wearing an amulet (from the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles).

“I think visitors will be surprised by most of the objects, which are rarely seen and probably quite unfamiliar,” Jeffrey Spier, the exhibition’s guest curator, tells My Modern Met’s Eva Baron.

Spier hopes that visitors will understand that magic in antiquity wasn’t about illusion or trickery. Instead, it was a “serious, deeply held belief system” used to harness control in a chaotic and frightening world. For example, during the seventh century B.C.E., the Neo-Assyrian amulet of Pazuzu was worn to protect against the demon Lamashtu, who was blamed for the deaths of infants and pregnant women at the time. “This is practical magic,” Spier tells the Guardian’s Veronica Esposito, referring to magical objects in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt. “These are things that people are actually using.”

The exhibition also demonstrates how magic interacted with a rich variety of cultural practices and norms. In ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, magic and religion were inextricably intertwined. Spells and practices were passed down through generations and eventually formalized in written texts. Greece and Rome, on the other hand, tended to value philosophy and bureaucratic order. Magic wasn’t state-sponsored and was typically viewed with suspicion.

“Cursed!” is focused on how everyday people incorporated magic into their lives. The gallery displays a small figurine from Athens which depicts a coffin and a bound figure. Artifacts like this one would have been used to bring misfortune on one’s adversaries, perhaps in a legal dispute.

The exhibition also shows how magical traditions evolved as ancient societies collided. “Maybe the most fascinating transformation occurred after Alexander’s conquests, when Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, Jewish and Greek traditions merged in cosmopolitan cities like Alexandria,” Spier tells My Modern Met. The resulting practices are evident in items like the London Magical Papyrus, a third-century C.E. spell guide written in both Demotic Egyptian and Greek. Spier calls it “a working professional’s handbook.”

“What’s incredible, and what we keep saying, is the fact that all of this stuff survives in such good condition,” Passiak tells the Toledo Blade. “With curses, you think of temporal things, something that you’d send out, and it’s just for that moment. And yet we still have these items, which is pretty cool.”

Museumgoers will also see how magic served as a remedy for various kinds of suffering, from loneliness to illness to fear. Humans have been using magic to cope with challenging circumstances for thousands of years—a strategy that, for some, persists through the present day.

“People turned to magic as a way to act—to have agency when facing forces beyond their control,” Spier tells My Modern Met. “That impulse hasn’t disappeared, and people today can sympathize quite easily.”

“Cursed! The Power of Magic in the Ancient World” is on view at the Toledo Museum of Art through July 5, 2026.

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Ryley Graham is a freelance journalist based in New York City. Her work has appeared in outlets such as National Geographic, Earth Island Journal and USA Today.