Recently, more and more Americans have expressed interest and acceptance of rituals and practices that fall outside of institutional religion. Many often-dismissed traditions and practices, such as amulets, astrology, crystals, tarot, and spellcasting, have become more mainstream, and long-standing Jewish mystical and folk traditions are enjoying a revival among younger Jews, who are reimagining them through decidedly feminist and radical lenses.
As Gen Z and millennial Jews embark on personal spiritual journeys, many have gravitated toward constructing new identities and practices that blend traditional practices with folk rituals, kabbalah, and contemporary occult practices. Rebekah Erev, an artist and kohenet ordained by the Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Insitute, which “reclaims and innovates embodied, earth-based feminist Judaism,” offers a variety of online courses on aspects of their practices, including one titled “Introduction to Jewish Magic & Healing Arts.” Meanwhile, an increasing number of Jews are gravitating towards the term “Jewitch” and actively working to reclaim the term “witchcraft.”
Another way young Jews are embracing tradition outside of Jewish establishments is with incantation bowls, small earthenware bowls inscribed with incantations meant to offer protection from demons and other threats. To learn more about these bowls, New Voices spoke with Shira Eliassian, a doctoral student in religious studies at Yale University. She studies rabbinic literature in its cultural and religious context.
The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
New Voices: What is an incantation bowl?
Shira Eliassian: Aramaic incantation bowls are small earthenware bowls, usually about the width of a hand, sometimes a little bit larger, that were inscribed with an incantation. The incantation will usually start at the center of the bowl and spiral outwards. And in certain cases, they actually would have some sort of image at the center of the bowl. They were discovered buried face-down in front of households in Nippur, in modern-day Iraq. There are many different types of incantations that are protection for different types of things. Most frequently, it’s protection from demons.
NV: So what kind of demons were they trying to protect themselves from?
SE: Demons can pose a general threat or a specific threat. Incantations could also be for protection from illness or from the ill will of neighbors. For example, if a client felt like their neighbor was casting the evil eye on them, or something like that.
In antiquity, often the threat of illness was manifest in the form of a particular kind of demon, so demons could reflect particular types of illness. For example, there are certain bowls that talk a lot about certain eye diseases or demons that cause migraines or headaches. There are also demons that were seen to threaten a family’s ability to have children or the health of their children.
A lot of demons have a very specific history that goes generations back in antiquity. The example I talk about a lot is the Liliths. There are both male and female Liliths and those can be traced back to ancient Sumerian and Akkadian myths. The most famous one is Lamashtu. Lamashtu is a demoness who was considered to be the daughter of a god. She was kicked out of heaven because she wanted to eat the flesh of babies, which was seen as cannibalistic.
There’s also another version of the myth where the gods sent her out upon humanity to harm young children or kill young children in order to keep the human population in check. And Lamashtu is depicted in very particular ways: with the head of a donkey, sometimes the body of a lion, and she always has very exaggerated sexual characteristics. Very messy hair, visible genitalia. And she’s often depicted holding a hairbrush or a spindle.
That iconography goes all the way back to the second millennium, and we see traces of that continue into the bowls. The myth of Lamashtu existed for a millennia, and she just kept evolving in different ways in different generations. It’s the same basic threat of a child-eating demoness that comes back in different generations in different forms.
NV: That’s super interesting. I feel like Lamashtu isn’t really talked about as much as the Lilith who’s so popular in modern culture now and who’s been reclaimed among Jewish feminists. Does that Lilith have any relation to Lamashtu?
SE: Yes. The version of the Lilith in the Hebrew Bible is that she was Adam’s first wife, and that she was seen as too aggressive or too sexual or not submissive enough and therefore, God gets rid of her. And there are certain reasons why ancient readers read the story in this way.
In the version that we get in Jewish mythology, her child-eating characteristics are not as pronounced. But what you do see is that she’s depicted as a dangerously sexual female entity, and that’s part of the mythology of Lamashtu, that she’s a dangerously sexual woman.
So that’s where the threat comes from again. It’s the idea that women who are too sexual pose the threat of sexual immorality, right, so that gets folded into the myths of Lamashtu in certain ways – and that’s the threat of Lamashtu that makes its way into the Hebrew Bible. The reason why you say our own generation has tried to reclaim figures like that is because we’re trying to reclaim female sexuality and reclaim women who are not submissive, women who are independently minded, and women who are powerful and who control their own destinies.
NV: So what drew you to research incantation bowls?
SE: In the spring of 2021 during my second year of my Ph.D. at Yale,, Alexander Marcus offered a class on the Aramaic incantation bowls. I decided to take the class. What was fascinating to me is that there’s a particular type of incantation called the divorce incantation. It’s a type of incantation where a divorce is issued to a Lilith. Many scholars were interested in this incantation because the language of the divorce is very similar to the language of the divorce formula that’s found in rabbinic literature.
But as I was reading it, all of these bowls seem to be targeting some sort of female demoness and the clients of these bowls, the people actually commissioning them, all seem to be women. My question became, “what’s this about? What’s the threat that’s actually being posed?” I began to recognize that we’re talking about child mortality, and we’re talking about pregnancy loss, which women and families dealt with constantly in antiquity. It was so obviously a feminist issue that it felt like something that just needed to be expressed and identified. So that’s what my research became about, and it’s explicitly informed by feminist values and a feminist framework of wanting to lift up women’s voices from the archive.
Incantation bowls offer a very unique pathway or a unique opportunity for allowing women to speak in their own terms. All the narratives we have of women from antiquity are usually mediated by men, right? It’s a male scholarly elite that tells us stories about women, we almost never get to hear women speak in their own voices. While yes, there is a scribe, the person who’s actually writing the incantations, the archive of incantation bowls is an incredible resource for seeing how women practiced their own ritual and spiritual and religious agency in antiquity and that there were opportunities that this ritual offered to them that were not available to them in normative religious settings or normative legal settings.
Going back to how we see women talking about problems that affect women, as opposed to men, what does it mean that women are divorcing female demons?
SE: Yeah, I love this. I think it’s incredible. I’ll also just throw this out there as take it or leave it: there’s also a question of, why are they issuing a divorce? Why is the divorce the particular method that’s being used to try and dispel this demoness?
What’s fascinating is that this dates back to the second millennium and rituals that were used to get rid of Lamashtu from a household. One of the rituals involved little figurines, and they would marry this Lamashtu figurine to a dog. And the idea was that, by performing this sort of marriage ceremony, you were limiting Lamashtu to only being able to have sex with a dog. She’s now limited to that relationship. In some ways, the divorce is also a domestic legal document that is again meant to limit the threat of Lamashtu the Lilith.
In antiquity women are not usually the ones who are able to issue a divorce, right? Women are usually on the receiving end of a divorce. That is 100% the case in Jewish law. That’s also true in other legal systems as well. If a man thought that his wife had been possessed by a demon since they got married, he was allowed to divorce his wife. So we sort of have traces all over the place of this idea that women who wouldn’t have been able to provide their husbands with children, or women who were perceived as being possessed by demons or cursed in some way, were vulnerable.
The poetic justice of divorce incantations is that a woman who’s facing the threat of divorce for being unable to bear children is able to address the very thing that is threatening her. She’s able to take the very legal means that threaten her and direct it against the Lilith, the one that’s actually posing the threat. So she’s taking charge in this situation. Instead of being the victim, she’s the one who’s issuing the divorce, and instead of an innocent woman in this situation being the person who’s banished from the household, it’s this child-eating demoness that’s being banished from the household.
NV: When did incantation bowls fall into disuse? Did they ever?
SE: We have hundreds and hundreds of incantation bowls that are dated to the fourth through sixth or seventh century. By the seventh century it really starts to peter out and that’s when we stopped finding them in southern Iraq.
The rise of Islam in the seventh century is really what put a stop to the bowls. I think that part of the reason for this is that Islam is extremely opposed to iconography, anything that has depictions of humans or gods or living beings. Once they became the ruling empire, they managed to stamp out this practice for the most part.
But I would say that the tradition of Jewish magic continues to exist––it has always existed in various forms throughout the generations from antiquity all the way up to today.
From a personal place, I am Persian. My parents are both from Iran. One of the things that I find delightful about studying the bowls, and one of the reasons why I feel very represented when I study these bowls, is because it reminds me so much of certain practices I grew up with in my family. Even little things; my grandmother and my great aunts would drink Turkish coffee, and then turn the coffee cups over and read the coffee grounds. Anytime my grandmother would have a really bad dream, she had some guy she would go to who had chickens in his garage, and he would ritually slaughter the chickens. And my mother tells me that my grandmother would actually bring the blood of that chicken home and give it out to members of the family to put on their doorposts.
And there are other memories I have too of things like this that my grandparents would do growing up, and I think that normative American Jewish settings have a way of dismissing practices like that as being superstitious or silly or ridiculous or not real. And part of the project of studying the incantation bowls is to show that there has always been a very live strand of Judaism that engages in these types of ritual practices, or what we might call non-normative ritual practices. They’re really meaningful for people. It’s not our job as scholars to decide what’s authentic and what’s inauthentic Judaism, like all of these things are part of our tradition. And we should take them seriously.
NV: That’s really beautiful. So how can incantation bowls fit into the larger history of Jewish witchcraft?
SE: I actually hesitate to use the term magic or even witchcraft because those terms carry such negative valence. A lot of times, when we hear the term magic or witchcraft, we think it’s not something that’s real, it’s just superstition. People feel like they can just dismiss it once they hear those terms.
We have lots of other pieces from antiquity that played similar roles. For example, we have many Jewish amulets from Roman Palestine. In a lot of the amulets, there are tiny pieces of metal that have either certain incantations or protective verses or sometimes even verses from the Bible, and they will be rolled up really small. People would wear them and often be buried with them.
There’s a whole genre of instruction manuals for magic that are understudied. This fits into mystical practices when we talk about Jewish mysticism. Medieval texts talk about the cosmos and about God’s figure and God’s presence in mystical terms, but also graphic terms. A good example is that many Jewish congregations have the tradition of reciting the Anim Zemirot, the song sung at the end of services on Shabbat that talks about God’s body in different ways. Which is super anti-rational.
Jews today often identify with the extremely rational approach that’s associated primarily with Maimonides. It’s an approach that doesn’t believe in a corporeal God, doesn’t like talking about God in any corporeal terms, it doesn’t believe in any of these mystical or superstitious practices. But for all of Jewish history, there has been a parallel strand of a mystical impulse. We can classify the bowls along with that mystical impulse that continues to exist today.
NV: Do you have any better terms to use when describing witchcraft or mysticism or magic that don’t carry these negative connotations?
SE: It just depends on the content we’re looking at. For example, I always refer to the bowls as incantation bowls, because I think incantation is a more descriptive term to me than magic. So I think it really just comes down to using more descriptive terms than the term “magic” or “witchcraft”. Witchcraft can be a really anti-feminist term, considering witch is a feminine term. The word associates women with deviance and a way of delegitimizing women’s ritual authority and ritual power. So naming it as witchcraft or magic is a way in which we debilitate or delegitimize the practice.
In many contexts, I think it’s totally appropriate to call it a ritual practice. I don’t think we have to reserve the term ritual for something that has been codified under Jewish law exclusively by an elite class of men.
NV: It’s super interesting that the incantation bowls would be buried underneath the entryway to the home. Is there any connection to mezuzahs being hung in entryways?
SE: Oh, that’s a great thought. We don’t know but I think it’s very reasonable to say that it’s coming from the same thought. Just as the mezuzah functions as a way of protecting the household, so does the bowl.
The types of rituals that we find in normative Jewish law and some of these other rituals function in very similar ways. Studying the incantation bowls and some of these so-called magical practices often causes us to rethink the role that some of these other types of ritual objects played. It’s a similar thing to what makes you think about how a mezuzah and an incantation bowl serve the same function. And what makes you question how they are actually more similar to each other than different.
It’s the same idea with, let’s say, an amulet and tefillin. The types of tefillin that we find in antiquity share certain similarities to amulets. They’re both very, very small, and they were worn. They’re both tiny objects that have verses from the Hebrew Bible inscribed within them. And they’re both meant to serve as protection. So what’s the difference between tefillin and an amulet?
NV: What’s the last thing that should readers know about incantation bowls and your area of study?
SE: You know, when I first came to this subject, it was presented to me as this really small and obscure area of Jewish studies that most people don’t know about. It’s exciting to me to see New Voices’s interest in the subject and to see that this is something that other young Jewish people are interested in learning about. This is a field that’s transforming from something that’s not well understood, and not well studied, to something that can help young Jews today reclaim their own Jewish identity––that’s really, really powerful.
Featured photo courtesy of the Gershom Scholem Collection at the National Library.
