The connections between defixiones and the world of the dead are self-evident, almost banal. Yet, this is not to say that all gods and other supernatural powers invoked in early—Classical and Hellenistic—curse tablets belong to the underworld. Nor should we assume that being invoked in a curse forced gods like Hermes to undergo a complete inversion of their typical functions known from poetry, iconography, and cult. Unfortunately, the generic labels “chthonic” or “chthonian” regularly attributed to the gods of the tablets tend to hinder further investigation and impede our grip on a rather complex reality.
The evidence itself challenges the “chthonic/chthonian” label. Firstly, divine invocation in curses is likely to have met various needs: depending on the wording of individual tablets, the gods involved could be considered, at times, as simple witnesses or overseers offering their authority to the procedure, as mediators or even as executors of the curse, but, at other times, as th...