Walter Farber on Magic | e n e n u r u

Walter Farber on Magic May 28, 2008 17:56:23 GMT -5

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Post by us4-he2-gal2 on May 28, 2008 17:56:23 GMT -5

reviewing: Witchcraft, Magic, and Divination in Ancient Mesopotamia

(Walter Farber 1995, CANES vol. III, pg. 1895)

When speaking in terms of Mesopotamian Witchcraft we may think be reflex "Tzvi Abusch" .. or in terms of Magic we might remember an article by Wiggermann, Geller or Scurlock etc. - therefore it's interesting to see some commentary by Farber who I don't generally place in the small circle concerned with magic. Reading through his article perhaps there will be something noteworthy to add below...

Farber starts off with a nice observation about the Mesopotamian world view on religion/magic. Noting that in the modern western "enlightened" world view, we clearly distinguish between distinct ideologies (i.e priest - layperson, science - quackery, etc) , he comment about the Mesopotamian worldview:

"It is hard for us to cope with a system that in general fails to make such clear distinctions. In texts from ancient Mesopotamia, we might, for instance, encounter a "priest" engaged in very diverse functions. In one text, he might be performing the daily ritual of a specific temple or god, while in another, he may be working as a scholar or physician, poring over pharmaceutical handbooks and trying to find the right prescription for a sick person in his neighborhood. A third text could well should him engaged in an apotropaic ritual to avert the evil portended by a lizard seen in his own bedroom, reciting an incantation to soothe a crying baby, or copying and editing the text of a recently composed hymn to the sun-god. Although for him all these activities clearly belonged to the realm of "religion," they might well end up being described in four or five different chapters of a twentieth-century cultural history of Mesopotamia, under headings as diverse as "Magic," "Science," "Medicine," "Literature," and "Religion." "

Since the ancients made no distinction between Magic and their religion world view as a whole, the author stresses we must bear in mind that such label is a modern convention to discuss the subject in a more comprehensive manner. Farber believes that to comprehend Mesopotamian "magico-religious" thought, one must go beyond even the incantation and ritual texts the ancients left that detail those aspects, which are "just one aspect of a multifaceted philosophy of life based not on rational but on mythological experience."

On Demons (p. 1896):

Farber: "Although we know the names of many Mesopotamian demons, only a few are individually described in out texts. The others remain rather shapeless sources of evil. Those demons taken over into Akkadian beliefs from earlier Sumerian mythology remain especially colorless. For all those utukkus, asakkus, smf rabisus, and such, we have no more than rather general descriptions of their role in all sorts of evil and sickness. The accompanying ritual are also very stereotypical and give few clues to the individual traits of these figures. They mostly show up in groups, often in sevens, and the same general type of incantation can be used to dispel any of them."

On "Black Magic" and Sorcery (p. 1898):

Farber: "It has to be stressed, [that] black magic as a category never existed in Mesopotamia; sorcerers used exactly the same techniques and spells for their illegitimate purposes that the victims might use to defend themselves legitimately. The only difference is that evil sorcery was done by secretly invoking the gods or manipulating other supernatural powers, while the defense relied on the openness of its acts. It is not easy to understand how the gods themselves could be fooled by this simply distinction, but they obviously were believed to act on behalf of the illegitimate rites as long as the victim failed to point to them, in his on non secretive ritual, how things really stood. Only after the victim did so could the gods be expected to reverse their allegiance."

(The often cited Maqlu text is given as an example of the ritual reversal of black magic.)

On Witchcraft (pg. 1898):

Farber: " The [Maqlu] text takes great pains to secure the identity of the effigy [used to counteract the black magic] with the perpetrator, who, is in all surviving [anti] witchcraft texts, remains anonymous and, presumably, unknown to the victim. This anonymity, seemingly an important part of the Babylonian belief in witchcraft, is also reflected in the fact that we have no evidence for witches being actually criminally prosecuted, aloud several "law codes" mention such procedures. The machinations of a person recognized as the witch were probably no longer magically dangerous and were therefore not mentioned or counteracted in extent rituals. In any case, an accusation of sorcery after the fact was extremely hard to prove, could easily lead to the death of the accuser himself, and was thus probably avoided whenever possible: the standard procedure in such a case was not trial by human judges, but rather an ordeal by immersion into the "Divine River" who could pronounce the accuser guilty by drowning him, or innocent by letting him survive."

Walter Farber on Magic Jun 5, 2008 16:44:29 GMT -5

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Post by us4-he2-gal2 on Jun 5, 2008 16:44:29 GMT -5

Naomi: Yes I find the rare comments on the practice of Black Magic in Mesopotamian very interesting! To avoid general confusion, Farber should probably have said "no special black magic technique". For more on Black magic I noted a bit here if you haven't seen it.

Further notes from W. Farber on Magic

(ibid. see above)

Is Love Magic, Black Magic? (pg.1900)

While G. Leick in her publication on Mesopotamian Erotic literature characterizes love incantation's as coercive, therefore against the will of the human target (thus, "black magic"), Farber is less decisive about this. He alludes to a genre of late Babylonian love incantations which are known as the Šarziga rituals.
The Šarziga rituals were apparently used to induce or rekindle love in an unresponsive individual "and specifically to enable the male to sustain an erection" - apparently the increased virility of the male was supposed to have an effect on the intentions of the unresponsive female in other words. One text reads:

Let the wind blow, let the palm grove sway,
let the clouds mass together, and a rainstorm
pour down!
Let my potency flow like rive water!
Let my penis be (as taut as) a harp string,
so that it will not slip out of her!

(Šaziga incantation, Neo-Assyrian period)

Farber's interesting comment is that while this may be manipulative, it may not ultimately be anti-social.. most marriages were arranged in Babylonian times, and "were not generally based on love." These incantations may have fulfilled the greater interest of the household, and in the context of the times "Šarziga might not have been seen as illicit trespassing on another individual's rights, but might even have served a fully legitimate social purpose." Thus, if endorsed by society in some way, these set of love incantations at least would not be black magic.

Expert and layman Magic practitioners (pg.1902)

Farber: "..in a largely illiterate society all written material tends to be concerned only with the needs of the uppermost social stratum. In Babylonia, many of the extent magical texts were probably restricted in their practical use to the royal household and its immediate dependents."

This observation is very much in keeping with general reading on incantation lore in Mesopotamia - the cuneiform incantation tablets are directly related to activities of the professional exorcist, and scribal work was th prerogative of the Temple and Palace to which the professional was attached. Hence folk magic is all but invisible in Mesopotamia.. Walter's next comment is interesting then:

" In spite of this, we may confidently assume that some rituals, though possibly less learned, less elaborate, and less expansive, were also performed for, and maybe by, the average illiterate citizen. Such an assumption is especially plausible in those genres where we can detect traces of oral folklore in the written versions preserved in the libraries of the learned. Nevertheless, with the exception of very simple procedures and spells, we have to assume that any magical rite needed staging and recitation by a professional expert, the aforementioned āšipu."

Earlier he had mentioned some of these in which oral folklore may be detectable, on pg. 1901:

"[Some] spells were known to dispel the dangers of fire, to ease childbirth, to prevent the development of sty in the eye, to quiet a baby whose crying was disturbing the household, or to keep wild dogs from biting....A number of these are neither apotropaic nor manipulative in a narrow sense and can be traced back to forms of folk poetry. The baby incantations, for instance, reflect the motifs and style of earlier lullabies. The fact that such "secular" little poems could be integrated into the corpus of magical texts, could be secondarily provided with ritual instructions, and then became a fixed part of the tradition of exorcism sheds an interesting light on the complex system of magico-religious thought. Examples like these show that magical protection or support was not restricted to exorcism in the Western sense of the term or to the defense against evil powers: magic was equally appropriate in most cases where, from our point of view, a religious prayer or even a completely secular nursery rhyme would be the remedy of choice."