Marginalia to mesopotamian malevolent magic.

• Author: Scurlock, Joann
• Position: Corpus of Mesopotamian Anti-Witchcraft Rituals, vol. 1 - Book review

The book under review is one volume in a projected series, a long-awaited publication of new editions of all known ancient Mesopotamian (anti-)witchcraft texts. The current volume consists of an introduction to the subject (pp. 1-25), text editions (pp. 27-443), bibliography, concordance and index (pp. 444-82), and numerous copies and collations (pls. 1-133).

The introduction is a good, sensible, down-to-earth summary of current knowledge, and it is such a pleasure to see so many edited texts. Apart from the usual quibbles, about which more presently, there is only one major problem with this book and that is its organization. By this I mean less that I would have organized the texts differently, although that is the case, than that the presentation of the texts is incoherent. Thus in volume one we have all the texts of Groups 1-2, then nothing until Group 7, of which we have ten items, while sixteen texts have been omitted. Group 8 weighs in with fourteen included, as opposed to thirty-three omitted, texts. Group 9 has three of six texts included. Group 10 five of eleven, and Group 11 two of seven.

Presumably more of each of the omitted texts will be published in succeeding volumes. But how is the reader to appreciate the categorization system of which the authors are obviously quite proud when one has before one only rags and tatters of this system? And what are we to do when the series is complete? I sincerely hope that we are not expected to tear out the pages of these beautiful (and expensive) volumes and to reassemble them ourselves! Also to be noted is that a subject index really should have been included. Witchcraft is not exactly a boring subject that nobody outside the field would ever wish to know about, so allowing the casual reader to zero in on things that interest him would be most appropriate and contribute significantly to the readership.

Also. I am hardly the one to criticize people for taking tablets apart in order to reorganize the contents. However, what does need to be done when in this situation is to provide charts which show the organization of the contents on the original tablets. Most of this information is given somewhere in the volume, but it would have been preferable to have a series of charts at the end and in the order of the texts. Perhaps in the last volume, when the project is completed, these charts and a subject index can be provided.

Quibbles:

p. 3 and passim: Generally speaking, witchcraft is that subset of magical activity that is for very good reason socially proscribed. The witch or sorcerer was supremely self-centered and would literally attempt to move heaven and earth to get what he/she wanted, preferably at somebody else's expense. In our culture, people like this exist but they are admired rather than disproved of, and they have no need of magic to get what they want. Ancient Mesopotamians felt otherwise except under certain circumstances, as when in love with an unresponsive object, when not having any success in business, or when facing a very scary day in court with potentially ruinous consequences.

For those with an impending court date, or those who had to deal with authority figures on a daily basis, protecting themselves from slander and/or slandering their rivals while avoiding being defamed themselves, there was a category of dubious magic teetering on the knife's edge of respectability and occasionally falling off into witchcraft. This was what ancient Mesopotamians referred to under the general rubric of Egalkura. Somehow this type of semi-legitimate magic seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle here, which is a shame since there are some spectacular examples included in this volume.

The Egalkura presented here give a nice range of practice from simple protective spells to outright down and dirty, nasty, and vicious attacks on personal enemies cleverly disguised as protection for the practitioner from attacks on the part of the person who was the actual victim of the spell. This sort of Up is Down and Right is Left rhetoric is almost shockingly modern.

If this publication were a more ordinary churning through the texts, having similar...