Tag: curses

Personal misfortune or sickness was often blamed on witches or demons. Witches were also thought to secretly put curses on people. Priests developed rituals to counteract malign influences and collected them in nine Maqlu tablets, first compiled around 1600 BCE. They were passed down through generations of ashipu for about the next thousand years. A collection of 100 incantations, across eight of the tablets, enabled the ashipu to identify and tame evil magic; the last tablet gives instructions for a ritual to banish a curse, which involved burning a figurine of the witch responsible. Exorcists often doubled as doctors, and another tablet contains a spell calling on Gula, the goddess of health, to drive out the ghost making a patient ill.

— A History of Magic, Witchcraft and the Occult, Chapter 2

Beneath the official pantheon, including the likes of Enlil, the Assyrian sky god, and Ea, the god of wisdom, was a layer of demons, such as Lamashtu, who threatened pregnant women, and Namtaru, the plague-demon, who needed to be mollified. Natural phenomena such as floods and lightning, or epidemic diseases, were not scientifically understood despite Mesopotamian advances, and so people at all levels of society preferred supernatural explanations. Disasters were believed to be caused by mamitu (curses) laid by witches, by victims committing offenses (sometimes unknowingly) against the gods, or through unintentionally ignoring divine signs. Kings guarded against these occurrences by consulting temple priests, in particular ashipu (exorcists), who performed magical rituals, and baru, who interpreted omens. Palace archives were stocked with collections of clay cuneiform tablets containing spells, incantations, and omens. Huge numbers have been recovered from the palace library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal. Ordinary people also called on the services of ashipu to cast protective spells, and used amulets and enchanted figurines to dispel evil spirits.

— A History of Magic, Witchcraft and the Occult, Chapter 2

Conan:

It’s the leader. He’s a wizard!

[touches his empty sheath.]

My dagger’s gone. You kill him!

Malak:

Not me! It’s bad luck to kill a wizard.

— “Conan the Destroyer” (1984)

Jamis:

May thy knife chip and shatter.

— “Dune” (1984)

This is a common Fremen taunt. In a magical world, this could be a proper curse—speaking it to make it happen.

…A sorcerer uses their arts and powers to live off peoples’ fear of them. In myths and folktales, from sources as widely spread apart as Russia’s koldun and the mangkukulam from my own country, the sorcerer or witch is depicted as making demands backed up by threats of curses, essentially blackmailing the community. In other words, terrorism….

— The Sorcerer as Terrorist – Hari Ragat Games

Thank the gods for the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, else I could not have linked to the source blogpost.