also claimed authority.74 If Christian soteriology was constructed around a particular ordering of human sexuality, much late antique magic was geared toward coping with the more immediate disorders and destructive possibilities of sex, as well as with other dangers that routinely beset ancient households—charming an indifferent beloved and attracting their desire, preventing against the dangers of childbirth, and warding off diseases that might befall loved ones are all common aims of late antique magical texts. Indeed, the fact that male religious professionals frequently conceptualized magic in negatively gendered terms—as arcane, unholy feminine knowledge—underscores its close connection to private, domestic spaces that bishops (as well as rabbis) could not always regulate so simply.75
The hundreds of Aramaic incantation bowls excavated from southern Iraq make for an evocative example of late antique domestic magic that involved religious-ritual practices and gender categories different from those of Christian orthodoxies. Dating to the sixth and seventh centuries (and perhaps to the fifth and eighth), the bowls are inscribed with incantations that seek healing or protection for the households of the clients who commissioned them: for themselves, their children, and their livestock and other property.76 The bowls are written in several scripts and dialects, including Jewish Aramaic, Mandaic, and Syriac. Client names indicate that individuals from across the religious spectrum—Zoroastrians, Jews, Christians, Mandaeans, Manicheans—made use of the bowls, and the incantations invoke a host of Hellenistic, Iranian, Jewish, and Christian deities, demons, and religious symbols.77 The incantations are also gendered in idiosyncratic ways. Clients are usually identified by their matronymics—that is, descent in the maternal line—which is incongruous with the largely patrilineal social organization of the Sasanian Empire, and may speak to the incantations’ connection to distinctly domestic realms understood in feminized terms.78 We can take as an example a bowl inscribed for one Bar-Sahde, a Christian name meaning “son of martyrs,” whom the inscription identifies further as the son of Ahata, a feminine Aramaic name. The magical practitioner who composed the incantation was presumably Jewish, to judge by its Hebrew script. The bowl’s target is a lilith, a female demon who has taken up residence “upon the threshold of the house of Bar-Sahde” and “strikes [and smites and k]ills boys and girls.” The lilith has effectively become a malevolent, unwanted member of Bar-Sahde’s household: the incantation expels her from it by writing her a deed of divorce so that she can no longer harm her human fellow householders, Bar-Sahde, his wife Aywi, and especially their children. In order to accomplish the divorce, the incantation invokes “the name of Joshua bar Peraḥia,” a rabbi whose demon-fighting powers appear often in bowl texts, as well as an Iranian entity, “Elisur Bagdana, the king of demons and dēvs, the great ruler of liliths.”79 After having the bowl inscribed, Bar-Sahde would have placed or buried it facedown in a corner of his house, the position in which excavations usually discovered the bowls, to trap or otherwise serve notice to the offending lilith.80
Bar-Sahde’s bowl vividly evokes a sphere of late antique household religiosity, intimately connected to sexual and familial order but largely outside the purview of Christian orthodoxies and formal hierarchies. To protect his family and household, Bar-Sahde took recourse to a Jewish magician and received an incantation invoking Jewish and Iranian powers. Besides the religious boundary crossing involved, the conspicuous feminine gendering of certain elements of Bar-Sahde’s incantation—its concern for matrilineal descent, the malevolent demon wife who must be divorced—evinces the domestic orientation of magical forms of ritual power and their difference from the more public, institutionalized ritual practices of the church (although the figure of the lilith is suggestive of a concern for the destructive potential of uncontrolled female sexuality common to many high-normative traditions as well).81 Late antique householders thus understood ritual practices like those surrounding Bar-Sahde’s bowl as specially attuned to the uncertainties and problems of desire, domesticity, and family life. Christian powers could certainly be harnessed to similar ends; psalm-chanting priests ward off demons in the story of Rabban Bar ʿEdta, for example, and East Syrian synodal canons mention learned and even ordained Christians who compose incantations, amulets, and auguries—indeed, we have plenty of incantation bowls written in Syriac, a number of which invoke the power of Christ and the Trinity.82 The telling point, however, is that high ecclesiastics condemned incantation writing, but not psalm chanting, as unlawful “demonic servitude” (pulḥānā d-shēdē): the former was part of a diverse tradition of ritual practice that bled out across the communal boundaries imagined by religious elites, operated outside the purview of more official hierarchies, and undermined Christian doctrine’s claim to exclusive authority over sexuality and domestic life. To high ecclesiastics, salvation came only through their prescribed forms of Christian piety and the singular mysteries of the Eucharist and baptism. But many laypeople decided they could not afford to bank on such an exclusivist model, and domestic religiosity, sexuality, and familial order in the late antique world were thus much more heterogeneous affairs than the normative ecclesiastical vision.
Figure 1. Syriac incantation bowl with an illustration of a magician. The incantation seeks protection against various demons for one Nuri and her house, husband, sons, and daughters. It invokes the Trinity, among other protective powers (see Moriggi, Corpus of Syriac Incantation Bowls, 27–31). The Catholic University of America, Semitics/ICOR Collections H156, with thanks to Dr. Monica Blanchard. Photo by author.
Marriage was foundational to the social organization of the late ancient world, as it had been to human societies for millennia. It was the chief institution around which the practices of social reproduction were organized, rendering sex between a man and a woman legitimate and defining the familial and kinship relations that transmitted property, status, and social identity. In the late antique eastern Roman and Sasanian empires, marriage bore considerable cultural weight and sat at the intersection of multiple normative orders: the imperial legal traditions that regulated the public meaning of cohabitation, sex, and associated property relations; religious traditions that ascribed cosmological significance to human sexuality and sought to direct its practice accordingly; and any number of local customs (regional, tribal, magical, etc.) by which subjects throughout the two empires conducted their domestic affairs.
While there was much interpenetration among these moral-legal-practical orders, a foundational story of late antique societies was the major challenge posed by Christian theologies of sex to other, long-established systems. In societies that by the sixth century were majority Christian as far east as the foothills of the Iranian Plateau, Christian traditions valorized virginity, downgraded the moral and theological significance of marriage and childbearing, and condemned a host of ancient and legally recognized practices: divorce, sex outside marriage for men, and, in the Sasanian Empire, close-kin unions and polygamy. But the Christian vision was not hegemonic. Even as Christian principles made their way piecemeal into Roman legislation and Christian clerics became influential community leaders, ecclesiastical law never had the authority to determine the public validity of marriage and the kinship and property relations that it established. Clerics preached, prescribed penitential punishments, and catechized, and all this undoubtedly prodded the sexual lives of laypeople toward the orthodox ideal, especially in cities and other territories with thick ecclesiastical presences. But it is clear that many of those ostensibly un-Christian practices associated with ancient marriage persisted in late antique societies, not least because they remained generally lawful in the eyes of the empires. The same held true for the rituals of domestic life, love, and religiosity decried as sorcery by ecclesiastics. Marriage remained an institution that inducted late antique subjects into multiple loyalties: to spouse, kin, and imperium as well as to the religious community.
The imperial orders of late antiquity, however, were soon to change. In the first half of the seventh century, armies from the Arabian Peninsula conquered the entire eastern Mediterranean world south and east of the Taurus Mountains. They brought with them a new religious dispensation, particular attitudes toward sex and marriage, and quickly developing ideas about how their Christian, Jewish, Zoroastrian, and other subjects were supposed to relate to their rule.
