THE MALEDICTION IN INDO-EUROPEAN TRADITION.

Ann Arbor:: UMI Dissertation Services., 1992;. First edition -. Fine in blue wrappers with title label on front cover.. First printing. A doctoral dissertation which focuses on the long history and linguistic richness of curses. " One way to create order out of the welter of ethnographic and literary sources on cursing is to survey the material thematically, the approach taken in [this dissertation] Drawing upon Indic, Hittite, Mesopotamian, Greco-Roman, Germanic, and Celtic literary sources, Falco offers examples of curses that reference such universal themes as the body and its parts (particularly the eye), food and hunger, sex, childlessness, homelessness, and pursuit and also more culturally specific themes such as allusions to swine and the sea and metaphors of atavistic dissolution into water, earth, and ashes. Particularly elaborate is the so-called Hittite Soldiers Oath, actually more of a threat of sanction than an oath, which charges that any soldiers breaking the military code will be changed "into women, and may they dress them in a womanly fashion É and let them place in their hands a distaff and a spindle . . . that they suffer defeat in battle and in lawsuits and in marketplace, and that they perish utterly" (Enclyopedia dot com) Bibliography. 206 pp.