The Aramaic Incantation Bowls: Traps for Demons

Between 1888 and 1900, excavators from the University of Pennsylvania at Nippur in southern Iraq kept turning up ordinary clay bowls, the kind used for food, buried upside down under the floors of houses. Inside, written in ink, were spells that spiralled from the rim to the centre. Many had a drawing in the middle: a figure with wild hair, its hands and feet bound in chains. The spells were written for named clients, to protect their homes, wives, children and cattle from demons, the evil eye and curses. In 1913 James Montgomery published forty of them as Aramaic Incantation Texts from Nippur. Today some 2,000 or more are known.

The bowls

• Made in Mesopotamia under the Sasanian Persian empire, mostly in the 5th to 7th centuries CE, and continuing a little after the Islamic conquest.
• Written in several scripts and dialects: Jewish Babylonian Aramaic (the largest group), Syriac, Mandaic, and a few in Middle Persian. Some are written in pseudo-script, imitation writing by scribes who could not write, or for clients who could not read.
• Clients included Jews, Christians, Mandaeans, Zoroastrians and pagans, and a single scribe might write for clients of different faiths.
• Many bowls have come from Nippur and other excavations; many more came onto the market after the 1990s from unrecorded sources in Iraq, raising questions about looting and ownership.

What the spells say

• Many begin with a formula such as "Healing from heaven for..." followed by the client's name. Clients are named by their mothers' names ("N son of N"), as in many Jewish prayers for the sick.
• They bind, seal and adjure demons, often in the name of God, angels and holy names.
• Some are divorce writs (get) against the demoness Lilith, modelled on Jewish law: the demon is formally divorced from the household and must leave. Several invoke the sage Joshua bar Perahia, who appears in the Babylonian Talmud, as having sent such a writ.
• Some quote biblical verses and use formulae also known from Jewish mystical texts.

Symbology and sacred encoding

The spiral. The text coils around the bowl, sometimes from the rim inward, sometimes from the centre outward. The spiral may have been meant to confuse or trap demons, but this is an interpretation.

Turned over. Buried face down at a threshold or in the corners of a room, the bowl became a trap or a dome over the demon. Some bowls were found in pairs, rim to rim, sealed together.

The bound figure. The drawing in the centre often shows a demon or Lilith in chains, making the spell's binding visible.

Holy names. The spells use divine names, including forms of the Tetragrammaton, and strings of letters and names whose meaning is uncertain, a form of sacred encoding shared with Jewish amulets and later Kabbalistic magic.

The interactive bowl above shows the opening formula as a spiral. Turn it over to see how it was buried.

Connections

Rabbinic Judaism (ch19), since the bowls come from the same time and place as the Babylonian Talmud; Mandaeans, Yazidis and Druze (ch56). Compare the Ketef Hinnom Silver Scrolls (V12), much earlier Jewish amulets.

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/incantation-bowls.html