The Babylonian World - Historia Antigua

— Tzvi Abusch —
the gods increasingly gained more control over the world. With the decrease in viewing
society primarily in corporate terms, a relationship was developed between the
citizen and his national god(s); the individual human might now be punished by the
god for his own sins. A further development in this human–divine relationship took
place with the subsequent emergence of the imperial state, in which powers were
further centralized and integrated. Centralization and integration caused various
changes in religious outlook, including the emergence of the witch as a major force
able to control personal gods, demons, and mortals.
In the later periods, man suffered not only because of sin, but also because of
outside forces such as witchcraft. As an explanation for misfortune, witchcraft had
the advantage of shifting much of the responsibility for one’s suffering away from
oneself and onto other human beings. This way of seeing oneself and others surely
fits the conditions of a new and more complex urban world in which heightened
social interdependence was experienced as a source of danger by an individual placed
in relationship with others with whom he did not have close or traditional ties, and
in which the extended family played less of a defining and supporting role and the
individual was confronted by more extended, impersonal, and hostile social forces
and felt weak, helpless, and anxious.
WITCHCRAFT AND THE WITCH:
HISTORICAL SPECULATION
Actually, the case of witchcraft may serve as a useful illustration of a form of evil
that seems to have changed over time. One possible reconstruction suggests the
existence originally of a popular village and/or domestic witch, and the subsequent
transformation of this personage or image into an evil form, first as an opponent of
the emerging exorcist, and, then, as an enemy and threat to society as a whole.
Thus, several stages can be identified in the development of Mesopotamian
witchcraft. The development begins with an early stage of “popular” witchcraft that
may have taken an archaic shamanistic form. In this early popular form, the witch
probably belonged to a rural, non-urban world. S/he was not, of necessity, an evil
being and took the form of both a “white” and “black” witch. Not infrequently, she
helped her fellows by means of magical abilities and medical knowledge; in this
popular form, she occasionally exhibited behavior otherwise associated with ecstatic
types of practitioners.
Originally, then, the witch was not primarily a doer of evil. Perhaps because the
witch was often a woman who possessed knowledge and power, the female witch
eventually became a focus of interest and even a threat to the prerogatives of the male
exorcist; for this and other reasons, she was made into the evil counterpart of the
exorcist. The village witch was, thus, turned into an anti-social, malicious, evil force
that was the polar opposite of the benevolent and helpful āsˇipu. The development
went even further, for the witch was even transformed into an alien and/or demonic
force that threatened society as a whole; she came to represent an enemy of the state,
even sometimes a foreign force that could threaten the late Assyrian empire. In the
first-millennium Maqlû ceremony, she was a representation not only of internal, but
also of external, danger; as such her image could be used as an instrument of state
propaganda.
374