A History of Incantation Bowls

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“The ancient users of the incantations had the same concerns as people in any age, but as they lacked insurance policies, psychiatric services, or hard science, they turned to magic. Today scholars tend to emphasize the vast gap of knowledge that separates medical specialists from ordinary people, hypothesizing that in antiquity clients took home incantation bowls much like people today might take home a pharmaceutical drug, ignorant of its ingredients or its inner workings.”​

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(Placing Ancient Texts The Ritual and Rhetorical Use of Space edited by Mika Ahuvia and Alexander Kocar) 

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During the talmudic period, in roughly 300-600 C.E., incantation bowls were in common use in Babylonia by Christians, Mazdeans, Mandeans, and Jews. While bowls in use in Jewish homes often were prepared by Jews who were not involved with or representative of the rabbinical academies such as myself, certain rabbinical figures also were deemed potent agents, the citation of whose names could drive away particular demons.

The majority of surviving magic bowls were found during excavations in Nippur in 1888-1889.They were found upside down in the ruins of houses, with one or more bowls found in almost every house as well as in cemeteries, where they apparently served to lay ghosts at rest.

 

The chief element of the bowls is an incantation composed of repeating phrases, words, or syllables believed to have the power to bind favorable powers, they were basically spell casting vessels. 

 

In the academic paper, “The Daughters of Israel”: An Analysis of the Term in Late Ancient Jewish Sources by UW professor MIKA AHUVIA (AND SARIT KATTAN GRIBETZ), I learned that the primary threat the bowls warded off was from demons, with harm from the human realm (in the form of witchcraft, sorcery, and curses). Others were written to maintain the health of individuals in the household, specifying their physical, emotional, and/or financial well-being. Apparently, the practitioners believed that demons could not be killed and so they only sought to expel them, contain them, or seal a house against them.

 

Archaeological data is sparse, unfortunately, but scholars hypothesize that these bowls were buried under the floors of the homes of the clients or were visible in the corners of their rooms. However, due to lack of provenance of the other examples, the geographic spread of this formula cannot be determined.  

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In the article, “Exe(o)rcising Power: Women as Sorceresses, Exorcists, and Demonesses in Babylonian Jewish Society of Late Antiquity” by Rebecca Lesses she writes, “The incantation bowls were found in or near houses (in the courtyard or on the threshold) or in graveyards, usually buried upside down…” and that, “...there are often four bowls with identical inscriptions placed in the four corners of a room. The bowls name both women and men as beneficiaries of the incantations or as malevolent forces to be protected against, and it appears that both women and men were involved in the production of the texts.”

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It was in this atmosphere that the archaeologists came across dozens of incantation bowls, mostly in Jewish Aramaic, but also in Syriac and Mandaic. These incantation bowls, once relegated to the periphery of scholarship on ancient religion, are now recognized as important sources for the understanding of ancient ritual practices. Made of plain ceramic material about the size of cereal bowls, the incantation bowls would hardly make beautiful museum displays. Hence, their notes on these it appears that incantation bowls were in use from the fifth to eighth century CE in Mesopotamia. ​