Roots of Magic episode

August 13, 2025

Frank Simons on the Mesopotamian Šurpu Ritual

Roots of Magic Interview 6

The ritual and incantation series Šurpu, ‘Burning’, is one of the longest and most complex magical texts to survive from the ancient world. We are only now really coming to grips with the history of this practice, and Frank Simons is at the forefront of that research project. We begin by discussing the state of the sources – loads of fragments of ritual instructions and incantations, switching between Sumerian and Akkadian, written upon clay tablets dating from a thousand-year-or-so period (people were still doing Šurpu under the Seleukids, and in all probability under the Romans as well).

• We discuss the long history of this text and the practice lying behind it. We learn something about the religious world-view lying behind the ritual, wherein ‘magic’ is all about getting the gods to do things for you,
• We talk about the extraordinary poetic qualities of the ritual litany,
• We discuss the roles of the ashipu, the practitioner who performs the ritual, of the scribes who copied the ritual texts (and may have been the same people as the ashipus), and of the ‘patients’, the ones suffering from ailments or other negative effects which have driven them to seek out Šurpu,
• Some extraordinary ritual parallels with healing practices performed today in Bali in a Hindu context,
• And finally Frank Simons leads us through the ritual, step-by-step.

Interview Bio:

Frank Simons is a Junior Research Fellow in MagEIA, and a PI on the Research Ireland funded Pathways Project, Mesopotamian Psychiatry. He is currently working on a critical edition of the Šurpu-ritual texts.

Works Cited in this Episode and Recommended Reading to follow

 

 

Themes

Addressative Magic, Divination, Exorcism, Interview, Medicine, Polytheism