Astral Magic in Babylonia Author(s): Erica Reiner Source: Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, Vol. 85, No. 4 (1995), pp. i-150 Published by: American Philosophical Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1006642 Accessed: 17/01/2010 18:16 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=amps. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. American Philosophical Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. http://www.jstor.org Astral Magic in Babylonia TRANSAC'I'IONS of the American Philosophical Society Held at Philadelphiafor Promoting Useful Knowledge VOLUME 85, Part 4, 1995 Astral Magic in Babylonia ERICA REINER THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY Independence Square, Philadelphia 1995 Copyright ? 1995 by The American Philosophical Society. All rights reserved. Reproduction of this monograph in whole or in part in any media is restricted. Cover: Neo-Babylonian tablet with relief of a sundisk suspended before the sun god. Courtesy of the British Museum, no. 91000; published by L.W. King, BabylonianBoundary- Stones (London, 1912) pl. xcviii. Reiner, Erica Astral Magic in Babylonia Includes references and index. 1. Babylonia 2. Magic 3. Religion 4. History, Ancient 95-76539~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ISBN:0-87169-854-4 ISBN: 0-87169-854-4 95-76539 TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Illustrations ......................... vi Foreword ................................................... vii A bbreviations ......................................... x Introduction ...... ........................ 1 Chapter I: The Role of Stars ................................. 15 Chapter II: The Art of the Herbalist .......................... 25 Chapter III: Medicine ....................................... 43 Chapter IV: Divination ...................................... 61 Chapter V: Apotropaia ...................................... 81 Chapter VI: Sorcerers and Sorceresses ........................ 97 Chapter VII: The Nature of Stones ........................... 119 Chapter VIII: Nocturnal Rituals .............................. 133 Index ................................................. 145 ILLUSTRATIONS 1. Relief from Assurnasirpal's palace with the king wearing a necklace hung with emblems of the planets .............. 4 2. Cylinder seal showing bearded Istar .................... 5 3, 4, 5. Representations of constellations incised on a Late Babylonian tablet .................................. 10, 11 6. Middle register of a bronze plaque, showing a patient being cured ......................................... 45 7. Seal representing Gula with her dog ................... 54 8. Gula and her dog represented on a boundary stone ...... 54 9. Clay models of sheep livers inscribed with liver omens ... 60 10. Bronze bell decorated with scenes of exorcisms of demons.. 80 vi Foreword I, Muhammad ibn Ishaq, have lastly only to add that the books on this subject are too numerous and extensive to be recorded in full, and besides the authors keep on repeating the statements of their predecessors. al-Nadim, Fihrist, vol. 1, p. 360 Magic, astrology, and witchcraft have become fashionable of late. The appeal of the mysterious and the occult to the contem- porary public has spawned a considerable literature on magic, ancient and exotic alike. Classicists have mined Greek and Latin sources for elements of magic and sorcery, and have made forays into the neighboring territories of the ancient Near East for parallels, real or assumed. Knowledgeable as he may be in his own field, the Classical scholar cannot be expected to be equally well versed in the lit- erature of peoples whose records have survived in the cunei- form script only and are couched in dead languages that have been deciphered only in the last century. One, Sumerian, is not related to any known language; the other, Akkadian, even though it belongs to the Semitic family of languages, diverges from its relatives sufficiently to be difficult to master. Not sur- prisingly, the most apposite and interesting comparisons often suffer from a misunderstanding of the Near Eastern material. Connections between the oriental cultures and their echoes in the west become tenuous if one term of the equation is incor- rectly expressed. To provide a foundation for comparisons the Near Eastern material needs to be presented in a reliable form. This is the purpose of my study. My sources are culled from such scientific texts as medicine, divination, and rituals, which are not usually included in anthologies of Mesopotamian texts and are rarely available in translation. While I do not claim familiarity with the Classical data, it has seemed necessary that I refer to Greek and Latin sources as I attempt to point up parallels. Many suggestions for the paths to pursue and references to the literature came from David Pin- viiVll ASTRAL MAGIC IN BABYLONIA gree, whose wisdom and interest have sustained this work. My quotes from and my translations of Classical sources are neither independent nor original; I adduce them simply because they provide a context that the cuneiform sources lack, and therefore they situate in a broader background the Near Eastern texts' terse allusions. The point becomes evident from the examples of "drawing down the moon," and "seizing the mouth," discussed in Chapters V and VI. In spite of some striking similarities which may simply attest to the universal and ubiquitous nature of magic practices, one must note that well-attested procedures in Hellenistic and later magic are not matched in their more specific details by the Mesopotamian material, as the comparison of rituals for the confection of amulets and prescriptions for molding figurines and their paraphernalia shows. Of course, the few Mesopo- tamian rituals with detailed descriptions of the materia and the dromena have been many times invoked by comparatists and historians of religion, from Mircea Eliade's Cosmologieet alchimie babyloniennes(Bucarest: Vremea, 1937 [in Rumanian]; French translation Paris: Gallimard, 1991) to WalterBurkert's Die orien- talisierendeEpoche of 1982 (Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Klasse, 1984/1 = The OrientalizingRevolution, Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1992), not to mention more romantic and popular books of the past. There are other important differences between the Near East and Greece. In Mesopotamia, preserved are those rituals that exorcists set down in handbooks and handed on to their disci- ples and successors through generations; these can be regarded as the official scientific manuals of the experts. Magic was not a marginal and clandestine manipulation; it was an activity pre- scribed and overtly practiced for the benefit of king and court, or of important individuals-only noxious witchcraft was for- bidden and prosecuted. The magic of the common folk prob- ably was never written down, and we have not much to go on when seeking to compare it with the material from the West. Neither can we document from Mesopotamia, as we can from the Hellenistic world and Rome, the changes in the social and legal status of magic and its practitioners. Moreover, in the Clas- sical world we are privileged to have a vivid documentation of viii FOREWORD the use of magic in the literary sources, whether they deal with mythological events or events deemed historical. Classical lit- erature provides the background against which the spells on lamellae, amulets, or gems can be delimited. The accounts of the preparation of a magic ritual, its aims, and its effects found in Homer, Greek drama and novels, in epics such as Lucan's Pharsalia,or the stories of Lucian, are the envy of the Assyriol- ogist who has to be content with the allusions, or tantalizing glimpses into the practice of magic, which Mesopotamian sources allow. The Near Eastern material for this book was collected over many years of association with the ChicagoAssyrian Dictionary; for the stimulation provided by discussions at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (in the second term of 1990-91 and the summer of 1992), and for the opportunity to explore a variety of avenues there I am indebted especially to the fac- ulty of the Institute's School of Historical Studies. The original impetus to study astral influences in Babylonia, as well as many suggestions, came from Otto Neugebauer; I could no longer seek his advice for the final manuscript in Princeton, but to his memory I would like