This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
An incantation entry records one documented spell, curse, charm or ritual formula preserved from a specific culture and period: the Greek and Roman curse tablets recovered from sites across the Mediterranean world, the Anglo-Saxon medical charms preserved in manuscripts such as the Nine Herbs Charm, the Mesopotamian incantation series Maqlu and Shurpu, the Jewish Aramaic incantation bowls of late antique Mesopotamia, and living or recently living traditions including Pennsylvania Dutch Braucherei and African American hoodoo conjure, among others the atlas records.
An entry keeps each incantation's own documented text, language, findspot or manuscript source and ritual context distinct from any other tradition's comparable practice, since a curse tablet buried at a Roman bath and a Babylonian anti-witchcraft incantation series address genuinely different circumstances through genuinely different formal structures, even where a comparative scholar can point to family resemblances in how a spoken or written formula is thought to work.
Where an incantation belongs to a living, closed or restricted practice rather than to a text recovered wholly from archaeology or philology, an entry describes it as a documented historical and cultural fact rather than presenting it as instruction, and names the practice as closed where the tradition itself holds it so.