Strange Horizons - "May You Die in Horrible Agony": A Brief Overview of Curses in the Western World By Marian Kensler
Strange Horizons --Shakespeare, The Tempest Say the word "curse" and generally two sorts of images will leap to mind; the first will probably be the composite picture of a thousand B-movie and cartoon villains exclaiming "Curses! Foiled again," and the second may be one of several things, but it will very likely have something to do with Egypt, and will almost certainly involve a corpse, or a doll stuck with pins. This second set of images is not absolutely misleading, but it is limiting. Because these images are mostly foreign to us, it is easy to think that curses are safely confined with...
Source: strangehorizons.com