Pill IV: The Incantation Bowls, or Lilith Under the Floor
2026-11-03
A shallow clay bowl seen from above. Lines of handwritten Aramaic script run in rings from the rim toward the centre, and in the middle is a drawn human figure with dark hair, large round eyes and striped legs, holding a branch-like object over its head. A wedge-shaped piece of the rim is missing.
Incantation bowl with an Aramaic inscription and a central figure, from Nippur, Mesopotamia, 6th–7th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. L.1999.83.3 (loan). Photograph by Marie-Lan Nguyen, 2011, released into the public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
For three Pills, Lilith lived in books: a satirical medieval alphabet, a whispered Name, a Zohar full of mirrors. This one is about clay. In the houses of late antique Babylonia, ordinary people paid scribes to write her a bill of divorce on the inside of a kitchen bowl, turned it upside down, and buried it under the floor.
“We may say that the Lilis and Liliths are the demons of the family life.”
— James A. Montgomery, Aramaic Incantation Texts from Nippur (1913)
In “Pill I” we met Lilith as Adam’s first woman, in a story that only took its famous shape in the Middle Ages. In “Pill II” she spoke the Ineffable Name and flew away, and three angels went after her. In “Pill III” the Zohar gave her a consort, a kingdom and a place in the architecture of evil.
All of that is literature. Learned, strange, beautiful literature, but literature.
This Pill is different, because it is about objects. Bowls you can hold in your hands. Bowls that were bought, written on, buried and forgotten by people who were not writing theology, but trying to get through the night.
The incantation bowls are the place where Lilith stops being an idea and becomes a household problem.
As always, a warning. I will tell you what these bowls are, who made them, who paid for them and what they say. I will not tell you how to make one. This is a history, not a manual.
[](#a-porridge-bowl-from-babylonia "Jump to this heading")A porridge bowl from Babylonia
Imagine the most ordinary piece of pottery in the house. Not a temple vessel. Not a ceremonial cup. A plain, unglazed clay bowl, the kind used for food.
That is exactly how Montgomery described them in 1913. They were, he wrote, “generally of the size and shape of a modern porridge-bowl”, wheel-turned and kiln-dried, with no slip or glaze, “a domestic ware, intended for foods”. The most common size, in the Philadelphia collection he studied, was about sixteen centimetres across and five deep.
On the inside of these bowls, a scribe wrote in ink. Usually the text begins near the centre or near the rim and runs in a spiral, round and round, sometimes spilling onto the outside. Often there is a drawing in the middle: a figure, sometimes with bound hands or feet, sometimes surrounded by a ring of writing like a fence.
These bowls come from Mesopotamia under the Sasanian Persian empire, mostly from the late antique centuries just before the Islamic conquests. Museums usually date them broadly to the fifth to seventh centuries, and some were still being made in the early Islamic period.
They were found at many sites in what is now Iraq. But the place where they first entered scholarship as a coherent group, found in their own houses, was Nippur.
[](#nippur-1888 "Jump to this heading")Nippur, 1888
Between 1888 and 1889, the University of Pennsylvania’s first expedition to Nippur, led by John Punnett Peters, dug into the ancient mounds of that old Sumerian city. They were looking for cuneiform tablets and great temples. Near the surface, above all that antiquity, they found something much younger.
Montgomery quotes Peters’s account of one hill whose whole surface “was covered with a Jewish settlement, the houses of which were built of mud-brick, and in almost every house we found one, or more, Jewish incantation bowls.”
Almost every house.
Some bowls lay in the ruins of homes. Others were found near a graveyard, beside slipper-shaped coffins. And, crucially, many were found upside down. Montgomery cites Hermann Hilprecht, who later led work at the site, reporting that “most of the one hundred bowls excavated while I was on the scene were found upside down in the ground.”
That detail is the key to the whole object. The bowl was not meant to hold something in. It was meant to hold something down.
[](#montgomerys-book "Jump to this heading")Montgomery’s book
The bowls went to Philadelphia, to what is now the Penn Museum. In 1913 the museum published James Alan Montgomery’s Aramaic Incantation Texts from Nippur, and with it the study of the bowls became a discipline.
Montgomery, a professor of Old Testament and Semitic languages, edited forty texts. Thirty were in the Jewish script, seven in a Syriac script and three in Mandaic, and he devoted a long introduction to the demons, the clients, the magicians and the formulas.
His book is more than a century old. Readings have been corrected, many more bowls have been published, and some of his judgments sound very much like 1913. But it is still the place where the conversation starts, and it is remarkably honest about what it does not know.
Most of the quotations in this Pill come from that volume, because I can read them there with my own eyes. Where I mention later scholars, I mention their work, not words I cannot check.
[](#the-house-of-a-thousand-demons "Jump to this heading")The house of a thousand demons
Who were the bowls against? Almost everyone.
The texts list demons, devils, spirits, evil eyes, curses, vows, spells, tormentors and afflictions of every kind. A good bowl spell is thorough. It names everything it can think of, because what is not named might slip through.
But among this crowd, one family stands out. Montgomery noticed it immediately:
“But it is the Liliths which enjoy the greatest individual vogue in our texts.”
Notice the plural. In the bowls, there is not only Lilith. There are liliths, female and male: the texts speak of the lilith and the lili, and of whole broods of them, with fathers, mothers and even grandmothers named. There is also a “king of the liliths”, whom later scholarship calls Bagdana.
This is the first thing the bowls teach us, and it quietly corrects a lot of popular writing. The Lilith of the bowls is not yet one great dark queen. She is a species.
Montgomery put it in a single phrase, the one I chose as the epigraph: they were “the demons of the family life”. He noted that the texts have them haunting the house, lurking “in the arches and thresholds”, dwelling inside the very home that the bowl protects.
[](#lilith-gets-divorced "Jump to this heading")Lilith gets divorced
Now comes the most extraordinary idea in the whole corpus.
Some bowl texts describe liliths appearing by night to men and women as phantom lovers, and claiming a kind of marriage over them. If the demon has a marital claim, how do you get rid of her?
The scribes’ answer was brilliant in its literalism. You divorce her.
A number of bowls are written in the form of a get, the Jewish bill of divorce. Montgomery called it “the magic get, divorce-writ, by which the sorcerer, like a Jewish rabbi, separates these obscene beings from their prey.” In his commentary he added, with dry humour:
“The logic of the procedure was very simple — if only the liliths were as submissive to divorce as their human sisters.”
He also noticed how carefully the scribes imitated the real legal document. In one parallel bowl, a date formula appears, as it would in a legal get. The names of both parties are given exactly, which is why the lilith’s own father and mother are named. Some texts use the phrase “take thy writ”, the formula that completes the serving of the document.
And because the defendant was not human, the writ needed a higher court. In the bowls, the divorce “has come down from heaven”.
Readers of “Pill II” will remember that Lilith once escaped from Adam by her own act. Here, in the bowls, the movement is reversed. She is not the one who leaves. She is the one who is sent away, by a document she is legally bound to accept.
[](#rabbi-joshua-bar-perahia "Jump to this heading")Rabbi Joshua bar Perahia
A divorce needs an authority behind it. Many Jewish bowls name one: Rabbi Joshua bar Perahia.
He was no invention of the scribes. Joshua ben Perahia is remembered in rabbinic tradition as one of the zugot, the “pairs” of sages who transmitted the Torah in the centuries before the Common Era. A saying attributed to him survives in the Mishnah, in Pirkei Avot. In uncensored manuscripts of the Talmud, a story even makes him the teacher of a certain Yeshu.
How did a sage of the Second Temple period become the patron of Babylonian demon-divorces several centuries later? Nobody knows. Montgomery doubted that the magical tradition was authentic, and saw in it the common habit of magic to appeal to “ancient great masters” and borrow their names.
He also noted something lovely: in the Syriac bowls, the same figure appears as “Rab Jesus bar P.” The name crossed communities along with the spell.
[](#the-bowl-of-rasnoi-and-geyonai "Jump to this heading")The bowl of Rasnoi and Geyonai
Let me show you one text, as Montgomery translated it. It is his No. 8, a bowl in the Penn Museum catalogued as CBS 9013, written for a couple called Geyonai and his wife Rasnoi.
The liliths it addresses are described with their “hair dishevelled and let fly behind your backs”. Their father is named Palhas and their mother Pelahdad. Then comes the divorce:
“A divorce-writ has come down to us from heaven and there is found written in it for your advisement and your terrification…”
A little later:
“Thou, Lilith, male Lili and female Lilith, Hag and Ghul, be in the ban …. \[of Rabbi\] Joshua b. P.”
And then the demand that the couple be left alone, “either in dream by night nor in slumber by day”.
I leave out the rest on purpose. What matters is the shape. A named household. A named demon, with a family of her own. A legal document from heaven. A famous rabbi’s authority. And a single, very human request: let this husband and wife sleep.
In the centre of that bowl, Montgomery tells us, there is a drawing of a lilith, “a typical obscene Lilith”, with “loose tresses, one of the characteristics of the species”. The demon is not only named. She is drawn, and placed in the centre, surrounded by writing.
A plain clay bowl photographed from above in black and white. Dense rows of handwritten square Aramaic letters run in concentric rings around the inside, leaving a small undecorated circle at the very centre.
Incantation bowl with an Aramaic inscription, Sasanian, ca. 5th–6th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. 86.11.259. CC0, Met Open Access, via Wikimedia Commons.
Not every bowl has a picture. Many, like the one above, are pure text, a spiral of letters closing in on the centre.
But many do. And the images have a recurring grammar. A figure, usually human-like, often female, often with wild or loose hair, frequently shown with bound hands or feet, or fettered, sometimes enclosed by a circle of text or a drawn line.
It is tempting to call every such figure “Lilith”, and popular books often do. The scholars are more careful. Some figures are labelled in the text; many are not. Some may be the demon, some may be the client, some may be a protective figure. The bowl at the top of this Pill, for example, has been described in its museum record as a figure waving a magic bough. I will not baptize it.
What can be said safely is this. Where the image is a demon, it is shown captured. The writing around it is the fence. The bound limbs are the chains. The bowl is a prison, and the picture in the centre is its prisoner.
[](#under-the-threshold "Jump to this heading")Under the threshold
Why upside down? Why under the floor?
The earliest explanation was already on the table in Montgomery’s time. The French scholar Henri Pognon, who published Mandaic bowls before him, had heard that they were found buried just below the surface, mouth down, sometimes in pairs fitted rim to rim, and suggested, in Montgomery’s summary, “that the inverted bowls were prisons for the demons”. The Nippur finds confirmed the position, and Montgomery accepted the interpretation.
The bowls were found under floors, in courtyards, near thresholds and corners, and, at Nippur, near graves. These are the porous places of a house, the edges where something from outside might come in.
I find this deeply moving. Lilith of the Zohar lives at the edge of the cosmos. Lilith of the bowls lives at the edge of the kitchen. And the people who feared her did not write treatises. They put a bowl in the ground, at the door.
[](#jews-mandaeans-christians-zoroastrians "Jump to this heading")Jews, Mandaeans, Christians, Zoroastrians
Here is the part that breaks the neat boundaries we like to draw.
Sasanian Mesopotamia was a crowded religious landscape. Jews lived there in great numbers; this is the world of the Babylonian Talmud. So did Mandaeans, the followers of a baptismal gnostic religion still alive today. So did Christians of the Church of the East, Manichaeans, Zoroastrians of the ruling Persian elite, and followers of older local cults.
The bowls belong to all of them.
They were written in three main scripts and dialects. Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, in the square Hebrew script, is the largest group. Then Mandaic, in its own distinctive alphabet. Then Syriac, in an Estrangela-type script, sometimes called Proto-Manichaean in the scholarship. A few bowls use other languages.
A clay bowl photographed from above in black and white. Faint lines of cursive Mandaic script curve around the inner wall in a spiral, partly worn away, with a damaged patch near the centre.
Incantation bowl with a Mandaic inscription, Sasanian, ca. 5th–6th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. 32.150.89. CC0, Met Open Access, via Wikimedia Commons.
And the clients did not always share the scribe’s religion. The names in the texts include many Persian names, and scholars have long observed that people commissioned bowls from specialists of other communities. A Zoroastrian household might own a bowl in Jewish Aramaic invoking the God of Israel and a Jewish sage. A spell could carry Jewish, Mandaean and Christian elements at once, as the “Rab Jesus bar P.” of the Syriac bowls shows.
As I wrote in “Tetragrammaton”, I like to keep traditions apart, because mixing them carelessly produces fake depth. But the bowls are a case where the mixture is not my invention. It is in the clay. In the houses of Sasanian Babylonia, protection was more important than orthodoxy.
[](#writing-that-says-nothing "Jump to this heading")Writing that says nothing
A plain clay bowl photographed from above in black and white. Rings of letter-like marks run around the inside, resembling Aramaic script, but they do not form readable words.
Incantation bowl with a pseudo-Aramaic inscription, Sasanian, ca. 5th–6th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. 86.11.260. CC0, Met Open Access, via Wikimedia Commons.
Look at the bowl above. It looks like Aramaic. It is not. The marks imitate letters, but they spell nothing.
Montgomery noticed these at once. Of the more than 150 catalogue numbers in Philadelphia, he counted about thirty that he called “original fakes”, inscribed “with letters arbitrarily arranged, or with pot-hooks, or even in some cases with mere scrawls”. He judged, with a certain Edwardian contempt, that they “were palmed off on the unlearned public as ‘quite as good’ as true incantations”.
Modern scholars are kinder and, I think, wiser. A significant share of known bowls, often estimated at around a tenth, carry such pseudo-script. They may have been cheaper products made by people who could not write. Or they may reflect a belief that the visible form of writing, its shape and its spiral, mattered as much as the words.
For a historian of occultism, this is a precious detail. Long before anyone spoke of sigils, people in Babylonia were trusting writing they could not read.
[](#children-childbirth-and-sleepless-nights "Jump to this heading")Children, childbirth, and sleepless nights
If you want to know what people fear, read what they pay to be protected from.
The bowls are written for named individuals, almost always identified by their mother’s name rather than their father’s, a convention of magical texts. They protect a man, his wife, their sons and daughters, their house, their cattle, their property. Many of them are commissioned by or for women.
And again and again, the danger is aimed at the most fragile moments of family life. Montgomery observed that the liliths “vent their rage on little children”, that the texts accuse them of throttling and devouring them and sucking their blood, and that one demon is called “Murderess daughter of Murderess”. In one Nippur text, a lilith is associated with barrenness and miscarriage.
He went further, in a sentence that shows both his insight and his age. The liliths, he wrote, were the products of the imagination “of the barren or neurotic woman, the mother in the time of maternity, of the sleepless child.” Strip away the condescension and the observation remains true. These bowls map the anxieties of childbirth, infertility, infant death and broken nights.
Here is where the Pills meet. In “Pill II”, the angels Senoy, Sansenoy and Semangelof forced Lilith to swear that she would spare any child protected by their names. That story was written down in the Middle Ages. The bowls show that the fear behind it, the demon who comes for mothers and newborns, was already being fought in Babylonian houses many centuries earlier, with clay and ink.
[](#the-scholars-who-came-after "Jump to this heading")The scholars who came after
Montgomery opened the door. Many others walked through it.
Joseph Naveh and Shaul Shaked published two influential volumes, Amulets and Magic Bowls (1985) and Magic Spells and Formulae (1993), which put the bowls alongside amulets from the Land of Israel and showed how the same formulas travelled between them.
Dan Levene published A Corpus of Magic Bowls (2003), an edition of Jewish Aramaic bowl texts, and has written extensively on the formulas and the women who appear in them.
Shaul Shaked, James Nathan Ford and Siam Bhayro, with colleagues, began the large edition Aramaic Bowl Spells, whose first volume of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic bowls appeared in 2013. Bhayro, Ford, Levene and others have also edited the bowls in the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin.
Thanks to their work, the bowls are now read not as curiosities but as one of the richest sources for the everyday religious life of Jews, Mandaeans, Christians and Zoroastrians on the eve of Islam. They also raise hard modern questions. Many bowls on the market have no secure archaeological origin, and the circumstances under which they left Iraq have become a serious subject of debate.
[](#what-the-bowls-tell-us-about-lilith "Jump to this heading")What the bowls tell us about Lilith
Let us gather the threads of the four Pills.
In the bowls, Lilith is not the defiant first wife. That story comes later. She is not yet the Zohar’s queen of the Other Side. She is something older and closer: a family of night-demons who claim husbands and wives, who come for mothers and infants, who live in the cracks and thresholds of the house.
The bowls show us that before Lilith was a myth, she was a fear. And they show us what people did with that fear. They did not argue with it. They divorced it, signed the writ in the name of an ancient rabbi, turned it upside down and buried it.
Lilith entered history not through a book, but through the floor.
The Zohar would later give her a throne. The bowls gave her a prison the size of a porridge bowl.
And somewhere under the dust of Nippur, a few of them are probably still holding her down.
--
Chamber of Reflections
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