Magic bowls, or spell or incantation bowls, are artefacts from Sassanian Mesopotamia (c. 200 to 600 CE). Jewish magic bowls were written in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, and typically were used to protect individuals, families, and their property from a cornucopia of harmful spirits or ill intent. The incantation was written in a spiral inside the bowl, sometimes around an image of the harmful thing being banished, and buried in and around houses, and in cemeteries. This activity adapts the purpose of the magic bowl to therapeutic ends. The activity first involves fashioning your own magic bowl, then performing a ritual of your creation to enact your intention.
PLEASE NOTE This activity is not intended to replace therapy.
Materials Pen and paper Clay or modelling clay Felt tip pens or ink and fine brush Directions 1. Setting your intention Determine the purpose of your bowl and ritual by responding to three questions: What do you want to remove? What do you want to receive? And what do you want to achieve?
Write this down.
(My gratitude to my spiritual director Reb Sandra Wortzel for the three questions, and for her guidance and encouragement throughout this project.)
2. The bowl Use clay or modelling clay to fashion a bowl big enough for both a picture and the incantation. If using clay, you can choose to fire the bowl or leave it raw, as it is intended to be disposable, or, at least, buried in the ground. While I do think it is worthwhile to create your own bowl, if you don’t want to go to that effort, you could consider sourcing a bowl for the activity. Be sure to find a bowl that will allow you to write on it. I cheated. I rolled flat air drying modelling clay and lined a good-sized bowl with it, just like a pie base. It isn’t pretty — but it doesn’t have to be.
3. The image Not all bowls have images, but for those that do, the images can be quite rough, as you can see in the reproductions below.
(All from Saul Shaked, James Nathan Ford, and Siam Bhayro, Aramaic Bowl Spells: Jewish Babylonian Aramaic Bowls,Volume One [Leiden: Brill, 2013], pp. 31-33.)
An image will help to focus your intention. Consider how you want to picture your intention — what you are trying to expel or receive, or what you want to achieve. Don’t worry about artistry. Draw the image with your felt-tipped pens or with ink and fine brush onto the middle of your bowl. Don’t take up too much space as you still need to write your spell in there too. I applied India ink with a fine brush to my bowl. I also used coloured inks, but this was soaked up by the clay and very little remained visible.
4. The incantation These are the words you will write on the bowl to bring about your intention. You can make up you own words, or adapt something you have seen for your purposes. The below is what I wrote in my magic bowl, and is adapted from Dan Levene, A Corpus of Magic Bowls: Incantation Texts in Jewish Aramaic from Late Antiquity (London: Kegan Paul, 2003), pp. 40-41, “Transcription of M101”.
Once you have written your spell out into the bowl, seal it all around with a circle.
4. The ritual Consider how you want to perform the ritual in which you will use your spell bowl. This should be personally meaningful, and tied to the intentions you set in step one above. Consider the phase of the moon or time of year you want to perform the ritual, whether it will be a one-time or multiple-times ritual, and whether you want to perform the ritual alone or with trusted others. Consider what other ‘props’ you might need in addition to the bowl. If you want to open and close a circle for the ritual, you can adapt the circle casting from Gershon Winkler’s Magic of the Ordinary: Recovering the Shamanic in Judaism (Berkeley: North Atlantic, 2003), pp. 96-99. Traditionally, magic bowls were buried upside-down in and around the house. You might feel this is a good way to finalise your ritual, or maybe not. There’s no reason you can’t keep your bowl. It’s up to you.
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