Roots of Magic episode

April 8, 2026

Daniel Schwemer on the Bit Meseri Ritual

Roots of Magic Interview 10

We discuss another interesting ritual from the ancient Akkadian milieu: Bit Meseri, the ‘House of Enclosure’. Daniel Schwemer is currently preparing an edition of this very popular, well-attested ritual practice from the first millennium BCE, and has thought deeply about its contents. The ritual, taking place over four days, involves an ashipu surrounding the house of a person suffering from demonic attack with a host of protective spirits in the form of activated statues and paintings, such that the house is transformed into a kind of divinely-protected enclosure.

Main topics discussed (among others) are:

• The textual history of this ritual, and a general first-millennium dating based, among other things, on its clear affinities with the Enūma eliš and Erra epics,
• The types of dangers against which this ritual was performed,
• The actual course the ritual took (it gets complicated),
• The apkalu-sages, the protective spirits invoked (and indeed temporarily embodied) during the ritual: their nature, ranks, and functions in the divine economy, and
• The surprising prominence of the astral deity Lugalirra in the ritual, and Schwemer’s reading of this fact.

Interview Bio:

Daniel Schwemer is an Assyriologist and Hittitologist with a special interest in magic; his three-volume Corpus of Mesopotamian Anti-Witchcraft Rituals, with Tzvi Abusch, has set the standard for the field and enabled scholarship tremendously. He is a Principal Investigator of the MagEIA project at Würzburg, leads the project The Corpus of Hittite Festival Rituals, and is chairman of the board of directors of one of the leading platforms for digital editions of cuneiform texts. He is currently finishing an edition of the Bit Meseri ritual texts.

Works Cited in this Episode:

Our episode with Frank Simons is here.

Both the Enūma eliš/Poem of Creation and the epics Erra and Išum are available in critical editions through the Electronic Babylonian Library:

Enūma eliš: https://www.ebl.lmu.de/corpus/L/1/2

Erra and Išum: https://www.ebl.lmu.de/corpus/L/1/5

Both can be found in English translation in Benjamin R. Foster. Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature. CDL Press, Bethesda, MD, 3rd edition, 2005 (newer edition from Eisenbrauns).

Recommended Reading:

Borger, Rykle. 1994. The Incantation Series Bīt Mēseri and Enoch’s Ascension to Heaven, in: I Studied Inscriptions from Before the Flood. Ancient Near Eastern, Literary, and Linguistic Approaches to Genesis 1–11 (Sources for Biblical and Theological Study 4), ed. Richard S. Hess and David Toshio Tsumura, Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 224–33.

Geller, Markham J. 2016. Healing Magic and Evil Demons (BAM 8), Boston and Berlin: De Gruyter.

Schwemer, Daniel. 2011. Magic Rituals: Conceptualization and Perfor­mance, in: The Oxford Hand­book of Cuneiform Cultures, ed. Karen Rad­ner and Eleanor Rob­son, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 418–42.

Schwemer, Daniel. 2015. The Ancient Near East, in: The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West. From Antiquity to the Present, ed. David J. Collins, Cambridge MA: Cambridge University Press, 17–51.

Schwemer, Daniel. 2023. Bīt mēseri at Aššur, ZA 113, 51–72.

Wiggermann, Frans A. M. 1992. Mesopotamian Protective Spirits. The Ritual Texts (CunMon 1), Groningen: Styx.

 

Themes

Apotropaic Magic, Astral Religion, Interview, Monotheism, Polytheism