A gallery on East 84th Street, a block from Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is spending this fall on curses, spells and protective charms. The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW), part of New York University, is showing Cursed! The Power of Magic in the Ancient World, and admission is free. On Halloween morning, the galleries add a hands-on twist: a workshop where adults carve amulets from soft stone and children make their own on metal plaques.

What the exhibition covers

Cursed! looks at how people pictured and practiced magic across roughly 2,300 years, from 2000 BCE to 300 CE. It moves through four ancient worlds: Mesopotamia and Egypt, where magic was built into religious practice, and Greece and Rome, where it sat closer to the margins and was often treated as illicit.

The objects on view span many materials. ISAW lists sculpture in stone and bronze, decorated ceramics, amulets cut from semiprecious stones and worked in gold and silver, and papyrus scrolls. The thread running through them, as the institute describes it, is a very old human wish to reach and steer the unseen forces believed to shape life and death.

The show was organized by the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio. Its New York presentation at ISAW is supported by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation and the Leon Levy Foundation.

Halloween amulet making, Saturday, Oct. 31

The Galleries at ISAW hold their Halloween event at 11 a.m. on Saturday, Oct. 31, inside the galleries at 15 East 84th Street. It runs as two separate activities, one for grown-ups and one for kids.

Adults work in steatite, a soft stone that ancient carvers also used, under the guidance of Carl Walsh, an assistant exhibition curator at ISAW who carves steatite as a hobby. Walsh has curated ISAW exhibitions on ancient Iraq, Etruria, Islamic Spain and Egypt.

Children of any age make an amulet on a metal plaque decorated with a fantastical monster, led by Leopoldo Fox-Zampiccoli, an ISAW doctoral candidate and the institute's 2026 museum practicum student. The workshop description points to two classic choices: the eye of Horus for protection, or the face of Pazuzu, the Mesopotamian demon whose fierce image was used to drive off other evils.

Materials are provided. ISAW notes that the activity calls for some hand dexterity, and registration is required through the event page. After the workshop, participants can look at the amulets on display in the exhibition.

Talks on magic, demons and the paranormal

The exhibition comes with a run of evening lectures in the ISAW lecture hall. Each starts at 5:30 p.m. and requires registration.

  • Thursday, Oct. 29: Jeb Card, an archaeologist at Miami University in Ohio, gives an ISAW Library talk on how the archaeology and myths of ancient Southwest Asia get borrowed and bent by modern paranormal and conspiracy theories, from claims about ancient astronauts to Babylonian stargates. Card's argument is that Near Eastern material is the biggest single ingredient in how these ideas are built and shared.
  • Wednesday, Nov. 4: Foy Scalf, an Egyptologist who directs the Data Research Center and Research Archives at the University of Chicago's Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, speaks on magic in ancient Egypt. His talk draws on texts and objects in the exhibition to show how Egyptians used spells, written words, images, amulets and rituals to heal the sick, protect children, defeat enemies and reach the dead. For Egyptians, the force usually translated as magic, called heka, was part of creation itself.
  • Wednesday, Dec. 2: Karen Stern of Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center looks at Jewish prayer through the objects people wore on their bodies, including inscribed amulets and phylacteries, using pieces from the exhibition and from other collections.

Earlier programs in the series included a gallery talk with curator Jeffrey Spier, formerly senior curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum, and an October lecture on demons and witchcraft in Mesopotamia.

Free tours every week

No reservation is needed to see the show. ISAW runs free guided tours on Fridays at 6 p.m. and Saturdays at 11 a.m. The galleries are on the ground floor and reachable by elevator from the street-level lobby, with stools and a wheelchair available. Large-print object labels and assistive listening devices are offered for tours and gallery talks.

Plan your visit

ISAW is at 15 East 84th Street, between Madison and Fifth avenues. The galleries are open Wednesday to Sunday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., with Friday hours until 8 p.m. They are closed Mondays and Tuesdays. Admission is free.

The nearest subway stop is 86 St on Lexington Avenue, served by the 4, 5 and 6 trains, a short walk west. The Halloween amulet workshop is Saturday, Oct. 31, at 11 a.m.; sign up through ISAW's events page before you go, since registration is required for the workshop and all of the lectures.

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