The Witch
Page 9
Mesopotamia
The civilizations of Sumer, Babylonia and Assyria had much in common with that of Egypt. They were also based in a great valley, in their case that of the two rivers Tigris and Euphrates which formed the plain that the Greeks called Mesopotamia and which is now in Iraq. They were likewise based on cities, with large temples staffed by a powerful priestly class, and centralized kingdoms, led by monarchs who were assumed to have a special relationship with the regional deities. They also showed a remarkable continuity over three millennia, despite cycles of stability and disorder in which particular dynasties rose and fell, sometimes precipitated or accompanied by foreign invaders. They had, too, a literate elite, who used texts composed in a standard script as a crucial component of government and religion. As part of this package of similarities, they also displayed a considerable interest in magic, partly as an aspect of official religion. This interest took forms that remained much the same throughout the whole historical period of ancient Mesopotamian culture, though evidence for it is most abundant in the first half of the final millennium BC. Attitudes to magic in Mesopotamia, however, also displayed striking differences from those in Egypt, so giving them their own strongly marked regional character.13
One of these differences was that Mesopotamians were more afraid of, and respectful to, their deities than Egyptians, and do not seem to have thought it possible to coerce or deceive them. Humans were not even believed to be capable of commanding spirits directly, being reliant on the help of deities to control lesser supernatural beings.14 Another difference was that they displayed a much keener interest in the influence of heavenly bodies on human affairs, thus becoming the originators of the Western tradition of astrology. By the third millennium BC they already believed that the stars and planets were associated with major deities and should decide the best time for important actions. By the first millennium astrological omens were used to predict the fates of kings and court astrologers reported regularly to rulers.15
A third major difference was that the peoples of Mesopotamia attached great importance to demons, in the sense of spirits inherent in the cosmos that were hostile to humans and a permanent menace to them, and so essentially evil. These were thought constantly to attack people, especially in their homes, and to be immune to physical barriers. Virtually all human misfortune, and especially disease, was credited to them and ritual action, both regular and ad hoc, was regarded as necessary to repel and expel them. Dealing with demons was the job of a priestly functionary called the āshipu, who mostly worked for private clients, with a mixture of incantations and actions addressed to deities, natural forces and the demons themselves. The rites included, as in Egypt, the use of figurines of wood and clay, often buried below buildings to protect them and their inhabitants, or destroyed to represent the beings that were the causes of affliction, or used as repositories for evil spirits exorcized from patients. Another similarity between the two was a willingness to import foreign ideas, in the Mesopotamian case by using spells in foreign languages. Like the Egyptians also, the inhabitants of Mesopotamia believed that to know the name of a supernatural entity was to acquire power over it; but unlike the Egyptians, they took pleasure in making long lists of demons with their characteristics. Virtually all the evidence that we possess for the practice of Mesopotamian magic consists of the records amassed by and for the āshipu: occasionally in those records mention is made of lower-grade kinds of magician, who operated among the common people – the ‘owl-man’, the ‘snake-charmer’ and ‘the woman who works magic in the street’ – but of these nothing else is known.16
The peoples of Sumeria, Babylonia and Assyria also believed in witches, in the classic sense of human beings, concealed inside their own society, who worked magic to harm others because they were inherently evil and associated with the demons which were the object of so much fear. The repertoire of the āshipu included many rites for undoing the harm that such people had wrought, while law codes prescribed death for those convicted of working such harm. The concern of the rites to avert witchcraft, however, was always to remove the affliction and not to detect the witch: indeed, the rituals themselves were supposed to bring about the death of the witch at whom they were aimed. In any case, most misfortune was blamed on angry deities, ghosts or (of course) demons. Mesopotamians also believed in the evil eye (and the evil mouth, tongue and sperm), and thought it to be destructive of both people and their livestock; it is not clear from the texts if this was thought to be voluntarily or involuntarily activated, but it was carefully distinguished from witchcraft. Actual witch trials seem to have been very rare, there are no recorded mass hunts, and the charge of witchcraft does not seem to have been a factor in political struggles. Witches were supposed to harm individual people, and not whole communities. The famous law code of the Babylonian king Hammurabi, from the early second millennium, allowed somebody accused of witchcraft to undergo the ordeal of jumping into a sacred river. If that person drowned, the charge was regarded as proven and the accuser inherited her or his estate; but if she or he survived then the accuser’s estate was handed over instead.17 It is possible, overall, that ancient Mesopotamian societies were among those in the world in which counter-magic used against presumed witchcraft was thought usually to be effective enough to remove the need to proceed against witches themselves.
The stereotypical witch mentioned in the sources is assumed to be female, which seems to match the generally low status of women in Mesopotamian society and make witchcraft an assumed weapon of the weak and marginalized. This suggestion is borne out by the other kinds of people associated with the practice of it: foreigners, actors, pedlars and low-grade magicians. In the few cases of actual prosecutions for witchcraft, which span the whole period of the various Babylonian and Assyrian monarchies, the accused were all women.18 Witchcraft was thought to be worked by the bewitchment of food or drink consumed by the victims, or of personal possessions or bodily waste taken from them (as across the world), or of images of them, or by the ritual making of real or symbolic knots. As in Egypt, destructive magic was regarded as a legitimate weapon if the cause were just, and kings formally cursed the enemies of the state. The secretive and malicious use of such magic was, none the less, clearly feared and hated in a way that was not apparent in Egypt. The texts used by the āshipu made the witch into a public enemy, capable of introducing chaos into the social order and even doing harm to deities. She was one of the menacing forces of the universe, along with foreign foes, wild animals, deities of other lands and wild lands, and (of course) demons. Fear of her seems to have increased gradually throughout ancient Mesopotamian history, so that by the mid-first millennium, she was ceasing at times to be regarded as a human being and becoming elided with a malevolent spirit of the night.19 Like the Egyptians, the peoples of Mesopotamia seemed to make no distinction between religion and magic (as defined earlier in this book), though with the difference that the rituals they performed to obtain their wishes were allowed and empowered directly by the deities whose aid they solicited. They did, however, make a major distinction between good and bad rites, good and bad practitioners of rites and good and bad superhuman beings.
Mesopotamian attitudes to magic seem to have been typical of an area far larger than Mesopotamia itself, extending from Asia Minor and Palestine in the west to the Indus Valley in the east. Three peoples found on the borders of this region, while reproducing most of those attitudes, also developed variations that were to be significant in the history of European witchcraft. The first of these were the Persians or Iranians, who occupied the region between Mesopotamia and India, and between the sixth century BC and the seventh century AD often controlled huge empires, which included Mesopotamia itself, and sometimes the whole remainder of Asia westward to the Mediterranean. By the late first millennium BC they had adopted the religion of Zoroaster, which depended on the concept of a cosmos divided between two mighty warring entities representing, respectively, essential good and essential evil.
Lesser deities had become servants of these great beings, according to their dispositions, turning into the equivalents of angels and demons. Virtuous humans were likewise expected to choose the good supreme being and wicked humans the evil one. Among those who were regarded as automatic followers of evil were people who were believed to worship the demons who obeyed the Evil One and be rewarded by them with the ability to work destructive magic on others. Their rites were thought to be carried out at night, while naked. Putting a chronology on the development, or even the expression, of these ideas is very difficult, because the earliest records of them are in manuscripts dating from the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries AD, but containing texts written in the sixth and seventh centuries and based on originals which, from their language, were composed at various points dating back to the thirteenth century BC. Moreover, they were the work of the priesthood of the official religion, and give little indication of how ordinary people regarded the same issues, and of the manner in which suspected witches were treated in reality. It can be safely concluded, however, that the belief system expressed in them was fully formed by the late antique period, equivalent to that of the Roman Empire. By then, if not long before, witches were regarded by the Persians as the most evil of humans, who had to be fought (by protective and retaliatory priestly rites of the Mesopotamian sort) and punished in order to keep the land healthy.20
At the opposite end of the Mesopotamian basin were the Hittites, who during the later second millennium BC developed a powerful and aggressive monarchy of their own, based on Asia Minor. Their culture also seems to have reproduced the attitudes to witches found in Mesopotamia, but with one significant difference: that the charge of being a witch was an important element in central politics at recurrent moments throughout Hittite history. This was one reflection of the Hittite tendency to try to concentrate magical power in the hands of the government, so that not only was witchcraft illegal but anybody thought to have knowledge of magic was to be brought to the royal palace for interrogation. The physical remains of purification rites carried out by priests or priestesses had to be burned at official places. Before 1500 BC, King Khattushili I banned his queen from keeping the company of certain priestesses who specialized in exorcism, and a couple of centuries later, a monarch accused Princess Ziplantawi of bewitching him and his family. In the late fourteenth century Khattushili III tried a governor for employing witches against him, and in the late thirteenth, Murshili II made the same charge against the current dowager queen.21
The final variation on the norm was found on the south-eastern fringe of the Mesopotamian world, among the Hebrews, who developed in the course of the first millennium BC an exceptional emphasis on one of their own gods, Yahweh, as the single deity whom they were henceforth permitted to honour. Spiritual power was therefore concentrated in the hands of priests and other holy men associated with Yahweh’s cult, and this had an impact on attitudes to magic. The Hebrew Bible applauds wonder-working prophets who serve Yahweh, above all Elijah and Elisha, even when they deploy their powers as expressions of personal vindictiveness. It invests the objects of Yahweh’s cult, especially his altar and the Ark of the Covenant, with intrinsic power, sometimes lethal. Joshua’s army stages an elaborate rite to draw on Yahweh’s power to bring down the walls of Jericho, and the god himself tells Moses to make a bronze serpent to protect his people from snakebite. The Mosaic Law includes a ceremony to determine the guilt of a woman accused of adultery by making her drink water mixed with sacred texts and dust from the Tabernacle floor (Numbers 5:11–31). All these could be termed ceremonies of a kind usually associated with magic, co-opted into the service of the official cult.
Unsurprisingly, in view of this, the Hebrew Bible also forbids recourse to magic and magicians outside that cult. It lists practitioners of magical services among the pagan Canaanites, calls them abominable and bids Hebrews turn to a prophet of Yahweh instead (Deuteronomy 18:9–22; cf. Leviticus 19:31, 20:6). Moses puts a Hebrew to death for cursing in Yahweh’s name (Leviticus 24:10–15), but the same curse is regarded as wholly acceptable when employed by a special instrument of the god such as Elisha (2 Kings 2:24). Saul is shown as behaving correctly when offering to pay a recognized Hebrew holy man to tell him the whereabouts of some lost donkeys (a classic service provided by magicians through the ages); and trying to learn Yahweh’s will through dreams and the god’s prophets (1 Samuel 9:1–10, and 28:15). However, when he hires a ba’a lot’ov, a female magician from outside the official cult (known in early modern English translation as the Witch of Endor), he does evil (1 Samuel 28:4–25). At one point the Mosaic Law ordered that a mekhashepa should not be permitted to survive, a passage officially translated in Jacobean England as ‘thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’ (Exodus 22:18). A proper understanding of this text would be possible if we knew exactly what a mekhashepa was, and was supposed to do: all we do know is that she was a specifically female practitioner of some kind of magic (and it is equally unclear from the language if she is expected to be killed or simply to cease living in the community, in other words, to be exiled). All in all, the Hebrew Bible does not spend much time on magic, as opposed to execrating the worship of other deities, and seems to make a classic incorporation of some forms of it into religion, by declaring that the same kinds of action were sanctioned for Hebrews if performed by accredited, and so divinely empowered, representatives of the one true god and execrated if offered by others.22
A similar relative lack of interest in magic seems to obtain in the Second Temple period, between the late sixth century BC and the late first century AD, when Hebrews returned from exile in Babylonia, eventually to establish a new monarchical state in their Palestinian homeland with a single cult of Yahweh. Different strands of their literature continued to express a general animosity towards magic, as used by people not recognized as sanctified servants of the true god, but it was hardly debated. In the third and second centuries BC, the First Book of Enoch had fallen (and so corrupted) angels teach human women magic, especially by using plants (Book of the Watchers 1–36), but the Book of Jubilees (10:10–14) asserted that Yahweh sent angels to bind demons, which plagued humanity, and teach people the arts of healing, also especially by using plants. The Dead Sea Scrolls class apostasy from the true faith with magic, and order both to be punished. Exorcism, of demons from persons and places, by rites of the ancient Mesopotamian sort, remains the most commonly attested activity that may be categorized as magical.23
More material survives from the succeeding period, following the Roman destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem and the dispersal of the Hebrew people, to complete their evolution into the Jews even as the cult of Yahweh completed its development into the religion of Judaism. The crucial collection of source material is the rabbinical literature composed between the second and seventh centuries, above all the Talmud, the collection of pronouncements and anecdotes to expound the faith, originally compiled in two separate documents in Babylonia and Palestine. The attitudes to magic expressed in it are not altogether coherent, but tend as before to credit outstanding holy men of the religion, now members of the official priesthood called rabbis, with the ability to work apparent miracles. These acts are always applauded, presumably as permitted and empowered by the true God, though this sanction for them is only sometimes made explicit. By contrast, anonymous women or heretics are treated as the natural practitioners of witchcraft, keshaphim, and are usually portrayed as being defeated by rabbis. Witches are not portrayed as having special looks or belonging to a special breed: they are just ordinary Jews, usually female, who have chosen to work harmful magic. At times they seem to operate in groups, with leaders. The Mishnah law code of c. AD 200 prescribed the death penalty for anybody who was judged to have bewitched somebody else with apparent genuine effect. How far it was actually enforced is hard to tell, as there are no references to witch trials in the same literature, or to rabbis having suspects put to death, save for the story of how rabbi Simeon ben Shetah an
d his followers killed eighty witches at Askelon in Palestine. That, however, has strong folkloric elements, which tell against it as a historical event: for example, it is described as having been necessary to lift all the women off the ground simultaneously to deprive them of their magical powers. The episode was supposed to have happened seven hundred years before the story is recorded. There are no accounts in the whole body of literature of financial compensation for witchcraft or references to it in divorce cases, so it is hard to see whether Talmudic stories describing the defeat of female magicians reflect social reality. One possible insight into that reality is provided by the metal bowls found buried in houses and cemeteries in Mesopotamia and western Iran, apparently dating from the fifth to the eighth centuries AD and made mostly, but not exclusively, for Jews. They are inscribed with spells to protect the owner against witchcraft and demons, and women rather than men, especially working in groups, are identified as the witches. However, women are also found as commissioning or making the bowls, and 90 per cent of the spells are directed against evil spirits alone, and not evil humans. In general, the Jewish literature of late antiquity rarely used magic as a polemical label for the religious practices of opponents, and attributed misfortune far more to the anger of the deity or the malice of demons than to witchcraft. None the less, it retained the traditional Mesopotamian belief in the existence of witches, who were generally presumed to be women.24