Summoning the Sacred
Jan 31, 2009 20:27:52 GMT -5
Post by us4-he2-gal2 on Jan 31, 2009 20:27:52 GMT -5
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Reviewing
Summoning the Sacred
By: Graham Cunningham
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Reviewing
Summoning the Sacred
By: Graham Cunningham
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Today I'm looking over Cunningham's interesting article published in SEL2 which deals with magical processes which summon divine attention to the mundane realm - or as Cunningham puts it, that establish an 'elision between the Sacred and the profane'. This paper is a direct follow up to some of the information he put forth in his 1997 Deliver Me from Evil: Mesopotamian Incantations 2500 - 1500 which has been central to the study at enenuru. If anyone has not been able to access this work but would like to go about studying it, please contact me directly for assistance.
The process of successfully summoning the sacred can be viewed as consisting of two complementary parts which together produce an elision between opposites, the profane and the sacred.
Cunningham begins by stating that the textual evidence from Mesopotamia and the material evidence of temples and iconography "amply demonstrate the richness of Mesopotamian ritual techniques for achieving such elision." His paper under review today concentrates on the Incantation part of that evidence. In understanding how incantations summon the sacred, the author takes note of Falkenstein's identification of four principal types of incantations and these we have looked at briefly on This Thread (reply 1 and 3). Just to recap, the four types are as follows:
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Type I. Legitimationstyp (Legitimation type)
Cunningham: "priestly legitimation"
-Incantations in which a priest legitimates himself as a representative of a deity.
Type II. Prophylaktischer
Cunningham: "Prophylactic-type incantation" (Prophylactic = 1. defending or protecting from disease or infection)
- Incantations instructing an evil demon not to approach the person on whose behalf the exorcist works.
Type III. Marduk-Ea typ
Cunningham: "divine dialogues"
- Incantations which contain the transfer of ritual instruction from a senior to a junior god, this transfer in effect re-enforces the corresponding actual ritual of the incantation-specialist.
Type IV. Weihungtyp/Kultmittelbeschworung (roughly Cultic practices of the Incantation specialist)
Cunningham: "consecration/praise of divine purifiers"
- These incantations praise certain cultic items for example the tamarisk or for example the reed, which were seen as pure, and were capable of bestowing purity. As magical items they were seen as mediating between the divine and temporal worlds. This type of incantation might correctly be seen as pre-empting a ritual procedure.
Cunningham: "priestly legitimation"
-Incantations in which a priest legitimates himself as a representative of a deity.
Type II. Prophylaktischer
Cunningham: "Prophylactic-type incantation" (Prophylactic = 1. defending or protecting from disease or infection)
- Incantations instructing an evil demon not to approach the person on whose behalf the exorcist works.
Type III. Marduk-Ea typ
Cunningham: "divine dialogues"
- Incantations which contain the transfer of ritual instruction from a senior to a junior god, this transfer in effect re-enforces the corresponding actual ritual of the incantation-specialist.
Type IV. Weihungtyp/Kultmittelbeschworung (roughly Cultic practices of the Incantation specialist)
Cunningham: "consecration/praise of divine purifiers"
- These incantations praise certain cultic items for example the tamarisk or for example the reed, which were seen as pure, and were capable of bestowing purity. As magical items they were seen as mediating between the divine and temporal worlds. This type of incantation might correctly be seen as pre-empting a ritual procedure.
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These incantations were "often performed in conjunction with each other" and in this paper the author undertakes to discuss two of these types, Weihungtyp , and the Marduk-Ea typ which we know also from an enenuru examination (see here). These two types "are the ones most concerned with providing an elision between the sacred and the profane, each operating on different axes, Weihungstyp incantations on a vertical axis and Marduk-Ea-typ incantations on a horizontal axis."
About Weihungstyp/
Soap-plant, pure plant growing from the abzu, your branches (reach) to heaven, your roots to the underworld
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This type of incantation, as mentioned above, is primarily concerned with consecrating objects to be used in purifying the invalid, and, as the above line demonstrates, does so by providing elisions between the temporal domain and the divine domains by means of purification. Because the praise of these plants and purifiers uses terms relating to above or below, Cunningham terms this purification on a "vertical" axis.
Cunningham then sets about to define purification, the symbolic nature of which is made difficult to define by imperfect understandings of relevant Mesopotamian terminology, unfortunately. It is generally understood that purification relating to the change from sickness to health, can be interpreted in the terms of a rite of passage consisting of 3 stages: separation, transition and incorporation. Cunningham further explains this interpretation and states that the magic is in the separation from ordinary time and space, which allows for transition (from illness to health) resulting in immersion in the sacred (incorporation).
In addition, something was removed in process, some impurity and "what may underlie this sense of defilement is a perception that it constitutes disorder, similar in some ways to the modern perception of dirt as offending against order.. from this perspective it has been argued that the fear of impurity and the consequent emphasis on purification are in the background of a ritual behavior relating to transgression."
About Marduk-Ea-typ/
While we have examined the Marduk/Ea type incantation elsewhere, the author has great potential to enrich those understandings. He understands this type of incantation as a horizontal type of narrative the basic structure of which all reading are now familiar with, if you have seen the above enenuru.net link. As a backing for analysis he chooses here (somewhat unexpectedly) Propp's analysis of Russian fairy tales, which have been broadly applied to myths. Propp recognized three essential stages: first complication, in which an explanation of a lack of a misfortune caused by villainy is described; secondly a beginning counteraction in which a hero surfaces to assist; in the third stage the donor provides the hero with an agent of help.
Cunningham believes this model can be applied to the Marduk-Ea incantation typ as well. Turning more specifically to the ritual instructions that Enki provides Asalluhi in these texts, they "contain references to what Frazer termed sympathetic magic, based on principals of similarity and contact. Durkheim, however, regard such ritual as being as characteristic of religion as of magic and therefore referred to imitative rites and contagiousness of the sacred." Whether viewed as more religious or magical however, the
sympathetic rituals in any case "can be viewed as actively exploiting the figurative properties of language..." as when it is requested that "the evil be broken like a pot" or "the illness be stripped off like these dates."
Harmful divine intervention in the Marduk-Ea-typ incantations and divine punishment/
The author notes here that this type of incantation also features information about harmful divine intervention - such as the actions of an angry god. Very interesting are his remarks about this aspect of Marduk-Ea incantations in the Early Dynastic incantations which "contain indications that the illness they aim to cure was thought to be caused by demons and their agents, as is the case in later incantations." It is somewhat unclear, the authors explains, as to whether this punishment in this context was in answer to human transgression or some motiveless force independent of divine will - however "broadly contemporary royal inscriptions operate within a divine punishment model, the primary Mesopotamian model and one which is again attested in later incantations."
Other Genres Sharing the Worldview of the Incantation text/
As a sidenote, Cunningham has made brief comments on two genres of text which operate in tandem with the incantations:
Omen Literature
Divinatory texts also summon the sacred though in order to obtain information about past or future events, such as for example the outcome of an illness should no incantation be performed. The author mentions an Akkadian text which exists and is referred to as the Exorcists Handbook (1st mill.) and which indicates that all who study it must learn both incantation and divinatory texts. Cunningham refers the reader to E. Reiner, JNES 19, 1960 for some edited texts from the Handbook showing how divination and incantation work in tandem.
The Personnel Laments
This second group complements the incantations, and are fundamentally complaints about suffering as illness, "these texts raise theological questions about the relationship between deities and humans and about the nature of the formers influence on the latter, examining in particular the correlation between human behavior, divine intervention to reward or punish that behavior, and human success or suffering. In addition to the fact that several of these laments contain narratives of exorcism, their close relation to the incantations is indicated by the fact that one lament, referred to as the Theodicy, is specified as having been composed by a mashmashhu."