Mesopotamian Witchcraft: Toward a History and Understanding of Babylonian Witchcraft Beliefs and Literature.

• Author: Scurlock, Jo Ann
• Position: Book Review

Mesopotamian Witchcraft: Toward a History and Understanding of Babylonian Witchcraft Beliefs and Literature. By TZVI ABUSCH. Ancient Magic and Divination 5. Leiden: BRILL/STYX, 2002. Pp. xiv + 314. $87.

The work under review is a volume made up of a series of articles written over the course of some thirty-odd years in which a single author applies a single methodology (a form of text criticism) to a single ancient text (Maqlu). The methodology in question was designed to deconstruct what comes to us as a single document (the Bible) into its constituent parts, separating older from newer materials and discerning differing points of view which have been conflated or only partially reconciled in the text before us. The technique should also in theory allow, in more secular contexts, for the discovery in a work of literature of hidden meanings of which the author of the work may not himself have been aware.

This is a methodology of which the reviewer has had occasion to apply a form in her own work, and this allows her to appreciate its strengths and weaknesses. No technique is so productive of apparently spectacular results extracted from the meanest scraps of evidence; a phrase, even a word might be sufficient to suggest all manner of interesting possibilities. This is precisely its danger, since it is often difficult and sometimes literally impossible for the practitioner to explain in any convincing way just where the interpretation is coming from. This means that, without some serious form of check applied, it is possible to be either brilliant or "off the wall" and to have no clue as to which of the two you are.

In my opinion, the best way to avoid this danger is to apply text criticism in exactly the opposite direction than that of the author. Abusch searches the ancient text looking for apparent contradictions or disjunctions, separating the narrative into pairs of original and corrected texts and assigning to each pair a place in chronological time (older or younger). The reviewer looks for consonances or conjunctions and would insist that the apparent disjunctions which assail the modern reader of an ancient text are for the most part either redactional errors or, worse yet, reflect the failure of the modern researcher to understand his text. This is particularly true when a theory or model is being applied consciously or unconsciously--any disjunction between what the text should say, according to the theory or model, and what the text does say is not proof of historical development but of the failure of the theory or model.

In the book under review, the model applied is the witch burnings of early modern Europe. Events of this sort are unique and produced by a very particular set of circumstances, none of which may plausibly be argued as having existed in ancient Mesopotamia or anywhere else other than Europe in the early modern period. Take, for example, the role played by the early modern inquisitorial system of retributive justice in producing the witch panics, (1) a role that makes any parallel with ancient Mesopotamia extremely unlikely. The ancient Mesopotamian system of restorative justice is at the opposite pole from this early modern system of retributive justice.

Restorative justice is essentially democratic; it assumes that a crime represents an imbalance in society. The aim of the societies' representatives, the government, is to restore social harmony by forcing the miscreant to compensate his victim. Retributive justice is an inherently autocratic imposition by rulers on the ruled. It was originally a feature of the criminal branch of Roman law as imposed in conquered provinces whose population, not having been granted Roman citizenship, were not entitled to civil-rights protections including the right of appeal against the arbitrary authority of a Roman magistrate. The latter was allowed to enforce whatever law he saw fit (in practice often a standard code issued by some illustrious predecessor) and to use torture and harsh punishments as an instrument of terror to discourage revolt. No Roman of the republican period would have referred to this as "Roman Law." However, under the emperor Septimius Severus, the system was extended to cover Roman citizens, with privileged classes (the honestiores) retaining former citizenship rights such as the right of appeal, exemption from torture, and substitution of lesser punishments in lien of being sent to the arena, burned, or crucified. It was this "Roman" imperial law which, like the doctrine of sovereign immunity that accompanied it, held such a fatal attraction for intellectuals of the early modern period. (2) A large part of this attraction lay in the intellectual certainty of the Roman Law proof procedures which, with the help of torture, held out the promise of no person proven to have been falsely accused. It also meant that, once prosecutions began, there was no stopping them until the last potential witch had been executed or until the prosecutors lost confidence in their proof procedure.

By contrast, in ancient Mesopotamia, it was up to the victim not merely to bring the alleged witch to the attention of the authorities but also to prove his or her guilt without benefit of torture and with the prospect of facing the death penalty for false accusation. It followed that--cases of a sorcerer caught red-handed attempting to leave a ritually slaughtered animal at his neighbor's door aside--the victim of sorcery did not typically take his case to court. Instead, he had recourse to magic. An interesting feature of the ancient Mesopotamian understanding of witchcraft is that the type of magic allegedly practiced by sorcerers was actually of a different sort than that employed to combat them. The former was what the Azande called "stupid" magic, that is, it did specified damage to a specific victim or, in other words, no more or less than what the practitioner told it to do. (3) Anti-witchcraft magic like Maqlu was what the Azande called "vengeance" magic, (4) perhaps better "justice" magic or "smart" magic; that is, it acted as a sort of trial by...