The ‘curse that binds,’ the κατάδεσμος, throws light on another element that went to the making of the ancient notion of sacrifice. The formula[361] in cursing was sometimes καταδῶ ‘I bind down,’ but it was also sometimes παραδίδωμι ‘I give over.’ The person cursed or bound down was in some sense a gift or sacrifice to the gods of cursing, the underworld gods: the man stained by blood is ‘consecrate’ (καθιερωμένος) to the Erinyes. In the little sanctuary of Demeter at Cnidos[362] the curse takes even more religious form. He or she dedicates (ἀνιεροῖ), or offers as a votive offering (ἀνατίθημι, for ἀνατίθησι), and finally we have the familiar ἀνάθεμα of St Paul. Here the services of cursing, the rites of magic and the underworld are half way to the service of ‘tendance,’ the service of the Olympians, and we begin to understand why, in later writers, the pharmakos and other ‘purifications’ are spoken of as θυσίαι. It is one of those shifts so unhappily common to the religious mind. Man wants to gain his own ends, to gratify his own malign passion, but he would like to kill two birds with one stone, and as the gods are made in his own image, the feat presents no great difficulty. Later as he grows gentler himself, he learns to pray only ‘good prayers,’ _bonas preces_[363]. The curse (ἀρά) on its religious side developed into the vow[364] and the prayer (εὐχή), on its social side into the ordinance (θεσμός) and ultimately into the regular law (νόμος); hence the language of early legal formularies still maintains as necessary and integral the sanction of the curse. The formula is not ‘do this’ or ‘do not do that,’ but ‘cursed be he who does this, or does not do that.’ One instance may be selected, the inscription characteristically known as ‘the Dirae of Teos[365].’ The whole is too long to be transcribed, a few lines must suffice. ‘Whosoever maketh baneful drugs against the Teans, whether against individuals or the whole people: ‘_May he perish, both he and his offspring._ ‘Whosoever hinders corn from being brought into the land of the Teans, either by art or machination, whether by land or sea, and whosoever drives out what has been brought in: ‘_May he perish, both he and his offspring._’ So clause after clause comes the refrain of cursing, like the tolling of a bell, and at last as though they could not have their fill, comes the curse on the magistrate who fails to curse: ‘Whosoever of them that hold office doth not make this cursing, what time he presides over the contest at the Anthesteria and the Herakleia and the Dia, let him be bound by an overcurse (ἐν τῇ ἐπάρῃ ἔχεσθαι), and whoever either breaks the stelae on which the cursing is written, or cuts out the letters or makes them illegible: ‘_May he perish, both he and his offspring._’