Assyrian Magic: Exorcism, Protective Demons, and the Ancient Art of Banishing Evil

The patient lies on a bed of reeds, burning with fever. The āšipu — the Assyrian exorcist-priest — kneels beside him, holding a clay figurine of the demon Lamashtu, the child-killer, the fever-bringer. He recites the incantation from memory — the words that have been passed down through generations of exorcist-priests, copied onto clay tablets in the great library of Ashurbanipal, tested and refined over a thousand years of practice. He burns the figurine. He sprinkles the patient with holy water. He ties a protective amulet around the patient's neck. And he waits to see whether the demon will depart.

Assyrian magic is the most fully documented magical tradition of the ancient world. The library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (668–627 BCE) — discovered in the ruins of Nineveh in the nineteenth century and now housed primarily in the British Museum — contained more than thirty thousand clay tablets, including the most complete collection of magical and medical texts from the ancient Near East. These texts — the Maqlu series ("Burning"), the Shurpu series ("Incineration"), the Udug-hul series ("Evil Demons"), and hundreds of individual incantations, rituals, and medical prescriptions — give us an extraordinarily detailed picture of how magic was practiced in ancient Assyria and Babylonia.

The Āšipu: The Exorcist-Priest

The central figure of Assyrian magical practice is the āšipu — the exorcist-priest, the specialist in the diagnosis and treatment of supernatural illness. The āšipu is not simply a magician in the modern sense. He is a trained professional — a member of a hereditary priestly family who has undergone years of training in the reading of omens, the recitation of incantations, the performance of ritual procedures, and the identification of the supernatural causes of illness.

The āšipu works alongside the asû — the physician, the specialist in natural remedies — in the treatment of illness. The Assyrian understanding of illness is not simply supernatural: illness can have both natural causes (imbalances in the body, the effects of diet and environment) and supernatural causes (the action of demons, the anger of gods, the effects of witchcraft). The āšipu addresses the supernatural causes; the asû addresses the natural ones. Together, they constitute the Assyrian medical system.

The āšipu's primary tool is the incantation — the spoken or chanted formula that addresses the supernatural cause of the illness, identifies the demon or the witch responsible, and commands them to depart. The incantations in the Assyrian magical texts are extraordinarily sophisticated: they identify the specific demon by name, describe its appearance and its methods, invoke the authority of the great gods (particularly Ea, the god of wisdom and magic, and Marduk, his son), and command the demon to leave the patient's body and return to the wilderness from which it came.

The Demons of Assyrian Magic

The Assyrian magical tradition recognizes a vast array of supernatural beings that can cause illness, misfortune, and death. These beings are not simply evil in the abstract — they are specific entities with specific characteristics, specific methods of attack, and specific vulnerabilities that the āšipu can exploit.

Lamashtu is the most feared of the Assyrian demons — a female demon, the daughter of the sky god Anu, who was cast out of heaven for her evil nature. She attacks pregnant women and newborn children, causing miscarriage, infant death, and childhood illness. She is depicted as a lion-headed woman with donkey's teeth and ears, bird's talons, and a dog and a pig suckling at her breasts. She is the demon of fever, of infant mortality, of the dangers of childbirth — the supernatural embodiment of the very real dangers that threatened mothers and children in the ancient world.

Pazuzu is the king of the wind demons — a being of terrifying appearance (a human body with a dog's head, eagle's talons, scorpion's tail, and four wings) who is associated with the hot, disease-bearing winds of the desert. Pazuzu is himself a demon, but he is also the enemy of Lamashtu — and his image is used as a protective amulet against her. The Pazuzu amulet — a small figurine of the demon, worn around the neck or hung in the home — is one of the most widely found protective objects in the ancient Near East. It works on the principle that a demon can be used to fight a demon — that Pazuzu's power over the winds gives him authority over Lamashtu, who travels on the wind.

The Udug (Akkadian: utukku) are a class of demons that can be either benevolent or malevolent — spirits of the dead who have not been properly buried or who have died violently, and who return to trouble the living. The malevolent udug cause illness, madness, and misfortune; the benevolent udug can be enlisted as protective spirits. The Udug-hul series — the "Evil Demons" series — is one of the most important collections of Assyrian magical texts, containing incantations for the exorcism of the malevolent udug.

The Asakku are demons of disease — beings that enter the body and cause specific illnesses. Each asakku is associated with a specific disease: the asakku of the head causes headaches, the asakku of the chest causes respiratory illness, the asakku of the stomach causes digestive illness. The āšipu's diagnosis involves identifying which asakku is responsible for the patient's illness and performing the specific incantation and ritual procedure that will drive it out.

The Maqlu Series: The Great Exorcism

The most important collection of Assyrian magical texts is the Maqlu series — a series of nine tablets containing incantations for the exorcism of witchcraft. The word maqlu means "burning" — referring to the central ritual of the series, in which figurines representing the witch or witches responsible for the patient's illness are burned as part of the exorcism.

The Maqlu series is performed at night, beginning at sunset and continuing through the night until dawn. It is one of the most elaborate ritual procedures in the ancient world: the āšipu sets up an elaborate ritual space, creates figurines of the witches from clay or wax, recites the incantations that identify and condemn the witches, burns the figurines, and performs a series of purification rituals that cleanse the patient of the witch's influence.

The incantations of the Maqlu series are addressed to the gods of the night — the stars, the moon, and the divine beings associated with the darkness — and invoke their authority to judge and condemn the witches. They describe the witch's methods in vivid detail: how she has tied knots to bind the patient, how she has buried figurines to cause illness, how she has spoken words of power to harm the patient. And they command the gods to reverse the witch's work, to untie the knots, to destroy the figurines, and to return the harm to the witch who sent it.

Protective Magic: Amulets and Apotropaic Figures

Alongside the exorcistic tradition, Assyrian magic includes a rich tradition of protective magic — the use of amulets, figurines, and ritual procedures to prevent supernatural harm before it occurs. The most important protective objects in the Assyrian tradition are the apotropaic figurines — small clay or bronze figures of protective beings that are buried beneath the threshold of a house or placed in the walls to guard against demonic attack.

The most common apotropaic figurines are the lamassu — the protective spirits depicted as winged bulls or lions with human heads, whose colossal stone versions guarded the entrances to Assyrian palaces. The lamassu are not demons. They are divine guardians — benevolent supernatural beings whose power protects the household from malevolent forces. Their placement at the threshold — the most vulnerable point of the house, the boundary between the protected interior and the dangerous exterior — reflects the Assyrian understanding of the home as a sacred space that must be actively defended against supernatural intrusion.

The dog figurines — small clay dogs, often painted in specific colors and inscribed with specific names — are another important class of protective objects. Dogs are associated in the Assyrian tradition with the healing goddess Gula, and their figurines are buried beneath the threshold to guard against illness and demonic attack. The names inscribed on the dogs — "Expeller of Evil," "Biter of His Enemy," "Don't Think, Bite" — reflect the aggressive protective function they are intended to serve.

The Legacy of Assyrian Magic

The Assyrian magical tradition did not disappear with the fall of the Assyrian Empire (612 BCE) or the Babylonian Empire (539 BCE). It was transmitted to the Greek world through the Hellenistic period, influencing the Greek magical tradition that is documented in the Greek Magical Papyri — a collection of magical texts from Greco-Roman Egypt that draws heavily on the Mesopotamian tradition. From the Greek tradition, elements of the Assyrian magical system passed into the Jewish magical tradition (the Talmudic demonology, the Kabbalistic tradition of protective magic), the Christian tradition (the exorcism rituals of the early Church), and the Islamic tradition (the Quranic verses used for protection against the evil eye and demonic attack).

The Pazuzu amulet — the demon used to fight a demon — became famous in the modern world through William Peter Blatty's novel The Exorcist (1971) and the film adaptation, in which a Pazuzu figurine found in an archaeological excavation is the catalyst for the demonic possession that drives the story. The novel's use of the Pazuzu figure reflects a genuine understanding of the ancient tradition: Pazuzu is indeed a demon associated with possession and with the protection against other demons, and his appearance in a story about exorcism is entirely appropriate.

The āšipu who knelt beside his patient three thousand years ago, reciting the incantations that had been passed down through generations of exorcist-priests, was practicing a form of healing that recognized the full complexity of human suffering — its physical, psychological, and spiritual dimensions — and that brought the full resources of the tradition to bear on its treatment. The specific demons he named are no longer part of our cultural vocabulary. But the understanding that illness has dimensions that go beyond the purely physical, that healing requires attention to the whole person, and that the spoken word has power to transform reality — these insights are as relevant today as they were in ancient Assyria.