How Rituals Shape Authority: The Mesopotamian Exorcist’s Self-Presentation in Ritual Texts and Practice

Date of Award

Spring 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

First Advisor

Frahm, Eckart

Abstract

The exorcist (āšipu/mašmaššu) was a prominent ritual expert, healer, and scholar in ancient Mesopotamia. He was responsible for the performance of a wide range of rituals that cared for the physical, mental, social, and religious well-being of individual clients. His ability to expel and protect from evil powers of any kind, including evil demons, ghosts, diseases, and witchcraft, required the authority to gain his clients’ trust in the effectiveness of his rituals and superiority among his competitors.This thesis analyzes the exorcist’s self-presentation in a substantial corpus of ritual texts from the first millennium BCE and shows how ritual practice shaped this expert’s authority. Through repeated ritual performance, as well as the related study of ritual texts, the exorcist’s idealized professional identity could materialize as a social reality. I analyze the exorcist’s authority on its own terms and evaluate various etic labels’ analytic usefulness for describing this prominent ancient expert. Following Introduction, Chapter 2 surveys the terminology used for this professional in antiquity as well as in modern scholarship. Ancient terms applied to the exorcist coalesce around themes, some of which feature prominently in his self-presentation in ritual texts, explored in later chapters. Chapter 3 situates the exorcist in social context, exploring his various roles as a priest, a scholar, and a healer and ritual practitioner. Against this background, chapters 4, 5, and 6 proceed to analyze the exorcist’s self-presentation in ritual texts through three key themes: the expert’s purity, his need for divine protection, and the power of his speech. First, the exorcist claims to be perfectly pure, which makes him an ideal vehicle for divine agency and suitable for purifying others. His frequent proclamations of purity stand in contrast to the lack of evidence for an elaborate self-purification routine, which shows that the exorcist’s purity was largely constructed through performative statements. On another hand, the exorcist’s appeals for divine protection reveal his awareness of his vulnerability and dependence on the gods. His need for divine support further manifests in his use of various ritual tools and attributes that mediated the powers of individual deities through a multisensory experience. In this way, the exorcist physically surrounded himself with divine powers, as echoed in his verbal pleas for being surrounded by the gods. Finally, previous discussions of the exorcist’s ritual speech have mostly focused on their verbal legitimation strategies, pointing out that the expert drew on divine authorization to perform his craft, even to the extent of identifying his words with divine words and himself with the god Marduk/Asalluḫi. However, an examination of the different registers of the exorcist’s speech reveals its diverse purposes: although the exorcist could mediate divine speech or, more generally, divine presence to his clients, he could also mediate his clients’ concerns to the gods, speak for them, and represent them. Additionally, he could present himself as a mere human servant, meticulously performing his ritual tasks. These complementary tendencies reveal constant shifts in the exorcist’s identity as an essential element of his self-presentation, which highlights his function as a mediator.

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