Among the most fascinating magical objects of antiquity are some simple earthenware bowls, much like those used for eating. Inside, however, a skilled hand has traced in ink a text that starts at the centre and winds in a spiral out to the rim. These are the incantation bowls, produced in late antique Mesopotamia and now kept by the thousand in museums and collections all over the world.
Place and period
These bowls come mainly from central and southern Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq, and partly from western Iran. They are generally dated to the Sasanian period and the early Islamic era, roughly between the fifth and eighth centuries CE. It was a time when the region was home to very different communities: Jews, Syriac-speaking Christians, Mandaeans, Zoroastrians, pagans.
The first scientifically documented bowls were found in the American excavations at Nippur at the end of the nineteenth century, and a famous edition of those texts was published in 1913 by the scholar James Montgomery.
Languages and scripts
One of the most interesting aspects of the bowls is their linguistic variety. The texts are written mainly in three forms of Aramaic:
| Language | Associated community | Script |
|---|---|---|
| Jewish Babylonian Aramaic | Jewish communities | square Hebrew script |
| Syriac | Christian communities | Syriac script |
| Mandaic | Mandaean communities | Mandaic script |
There are also bowls in Middle Persian and some with imitation or illegible scripts, perhaps produced by craftsmen who did not know the language well. Interestingly, clients did not always belong to the same community as the scribe: whoever sought protection turned to the specialist considered most effective.
Upside down beneath the floor
Archaeologists have found many bowls buried upside down beneath the floors of houses, sometimes at the corners of rooms or near thresholds. At times they came in pairs, one on top of the other, rim to rim, forming a kind of closed box.
The most widespread interpretation is that the bowl worked as a trap: demons were drawn in by the text and remained imprisoned beneath the earthenware dome. The very spiral of the text, turning around the centre, reinforced the idea of a circle that encloses and binds.
What the texts say
The formulas vary greatly, but some elements recur regularly:
- The client's name, often given with the mother's name («X son of Y»), a usage typical of late antique magic.
- The list of dangers: demons, evil spirits, the evil eye, curses, nightmares, liliths and other night figures.
- The invocation of higher powers: divine names, angels, formulas drawn from sacred texts.
- Formulas of binding and sealing: the demon is «bound», «sealed», «driven out».
- The protection of house and family: wife, children, property, animals.
At the centre of many bowls there is a drawing: often a bound demonic figure with chained hands and feet, or geometric figures and concentric circles.
«Divorcing» the demons
One of the most curious formulas in the Jewish Aramaic bowls is the so-called get, the bill of divorce. The scribe used the legal language of Jewish divorce to «divorce» the client from a female demon tormenting him, as though it were a marriage to be dissolved. Some texts attribute the authority of this formula to an ancient master, Rabbi Joshua bar Peraḥia.
It is a remarkable example of how magic used the forms of law to give strength to its words.
A bridge between worlds
The incantation bowls are a bridge between ancient Mesopotamian magic and later traditions. They contain elements reaching back to Babylonian demonology, such as the fear of night demons and the use of binding formulas, alongside angelic names and biblical quotations. They also bear witness to the coexistence of different religious communities, which shared fears, techniques and sometimes even the same scribes.
A symbolic reading
The spiral winding out to the rim is one of the most eloquent images of ancient magic. It starts from a centre, the name and the house to be protected, and spreads in ever-wider circles until it closes the space. From the perspective of the Hermetic Workshop it is a figure of the protective circle: the written word that, turning upon itself, draws a boundary.
In short
- Incantation bowls were produced in Mesopotamia roughly between the fifth and eighth centuries CE.
- The texts, written in spirals, are in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, Syriac and Mandaic.
- They were buried upside down beneath floors, perhaps as traps for demons.
- They contain the client's name with the mother's, lists of dangers and binding formulas.
- Some use the divorce formula to separate the client from a demon.
