Between Worlds. J. H. Chajes

In this case, the demon actually collaborates with R. Shimon; the possession is a “setup” to allow R. Shimon to earn the favor of the Emperor by saving his daughter. This source, and its midrashic parallel,¹² refer to the demon’s entering the belly of the girl, the whispering of incantations into her ear by the exorcist R. Shimon, and the breaking of glass in the Emperor’s house as a sign of the demon’s departure. According to Bar-Ilan, this case ex-emplifies the centrality of charismatic, shamanistic Jewish leadership in the ancient world.

      Josephus provides one of the richest accounts of exorcism in ancient Judaism in his Antiquitates Judaicae, describing the exorcism of a demoniac by the Jew Eleazar before Vespasian and his court. As Josephus tells it, “Eleazar applied to the nostrils of the demon-possessed man his own ring, which had under its seal-stone one of the roots whose properties King Solomon had taught, and so drew the demon out through the sufferer’s nose. The man immediately fell to the ground, and Eleazar then adjured the demon never to return, calling the name of Solomon and reciting the charms that he had composed.”¹³ Josephus regarded demons as “spirits of the wicked which enter into men that are alive and kill them,” but which can be driven out by a certain root.¹⁴ It has been suggested that Eleazar was an Essene and that the Essenes were in possession of secret works, including one or more works on healing ascribed to King Solomon—perhaps to be identified with the work on healing hidden by Hezekiah.¹⁵

      In the third century, Origen testified to the broad recognition in the ancient world that Jews and Jewish formulas were particularly powerful agents against demons. He was carrying on a trope that shot through Greek and Roman literature for centuries.¹⁶

      In any event, it is clear that the Jews trace their genealogy back to the three fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Their names are so powerful when linked with the name of God that the formula “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” is used not only by members of the Jewish nation in their prayers to God and when they exorcise daemons, but also by almost all those who deal in magic and spells. For in magical treatises it is often to be found that God is invoked by this formula, and that in spells against daemons His name is used in close connexion with the names of these men.¹⁷

      Origen is mindful of the fact that the Jews remain the authorities in these matters. “We learn from the Hebrews,” he writes, “the history of the events mentioned in these formulae and the interpretation of the names, since in their traditional books and language they pride themselves on these things and explain them.”¹⁸ If, as Marcel Simon has suggested, “In the opinion of the ancients, magic was, as it were, congenital in Israel,” recent scholars have argued that the very concept of spirit possession is foreign to Greek thought in classical and Hellenistic times.¹⁹ A broad consensus in the ancient world to this effect is indirectly revealed by the many Jewish elements that found their way into both pagan and Christian exorcism rituals, as exemplified so well by the Greek Magical Papyri (PGM), a body of papyri from Greco-Roman Egypt dating from the second century B.C.E. to the fifth century C.E. The PGM contain a number of exorcism rituals featuring pronounced Jewish elements.²⁰

      Prominent among these exorcism techniques in the PGM are Hebrew magical names, references to the God of Israel and the Patriarchs, and to the saving acts of this mighty God.²¹ The following famous passage provides a good sense of the nature of these rituals.

      A tested charm of Pibechis²² for those possessed by daimons: Take oil of unripe olives with the herb mastigia and the fruit pulp of the lotus, and boil them with colorless marjoram while saying, “IOEL … come out from NN.” The phylactery: On a tin lamella write / “IAEO …” and hang it on the patient. It is terrifying to every daimon, a thing he fears. After placing [the patient] opposite [to you], adjure ….

      [The adjuration:] I adjure you by the God of the Hebrews, Jesus IABA … I adjure you by the one who appeared to Osrael in a shining pillar and a cloud by day, / who saved his people from the Pharaoh and brought upon Pharaoh the ten plagues because of his disobedience. I adjure you, every daimonic spirit, to tell whatever sort you may be, because I adjure by the seal / which Solomon placed on the tongue of Jeremiah, and he told …. I adjure you by the great god SABAOTH, through whom the Jordan River drew back and the Red Sea, / which Israel crossed, became impassable … I adjure you by the one who introduced the one hundred forty languages and distributed them by his own command …. I adjure [you] by the one in holy Jerusalem, before whom the / unquenchable fire burns for all time, with his holy name, IAEOBAPHRENEMOUN (formula), the one before whom the fiery Gehenna trembles, flames surround, iron bursts asunder and every mountain is afraid from its foundation. / I adjure you, every daimonic spirit, by the one who oversees the earth and makes its foundations tremble, [the one] who made all things which are not into that which is.²³

      The closing instructions of the exorcism adjure the exorcist himself to abstain from eating pork in order to ensure the effectiveness of the ceremony. He is instructed to keep himself pure, “for this charm is Hebraic and is preserved among pure men.”

      This procedure combines a number of components: gathering and cooking herbs, along with reciting spells during the process; attaching an amulet to the patient; adjuring the demon to disclose its identity; addressing the deity by various magical names; and recalling His works. As the adjuration in the name of Jesus makes clear, the procedure is not of Jewish provenance, though it obviously has many Jewish elements and is touted as “Hebraic” by the enthusiastic and earnest magician-scribe.²⁴ Some components, like the use of herbs, may reflect Jewish influence but are nonetheless fairly universal in character.²⁵ Amulets too were not unfamiliar in Jewish and non-Jewish circles in antiquity, known in such everyday accoutrements of Jewish life as tefillin and mezuzot (phylacteries for placement on the arm and head during prayer, and upon the doorposts of the home, respectively) as well as in more esoteric forms of Babylonian magical practices.²⁶

      Our example from the PGM also illustrates another characteristic of exorcism rituals that was to remain a constant throughout history: the imperative to force the demon to speak and to name himself. We find this in sources ranging from the Gospel of Mark (5:1–20) to Rumpelstilzkin in Grimm’s Märchen, as well as in many of the Jewish procedures of the medieval and early modern periods. As Michel de Certeau has written, exorcists respond to the indeterminate “other” that speaks from the possessed

      through a labor of naming or designating that is the characteristic answer to possession in any traditional society. Whether in Africa or South America, therapy in cases of possession essentially consists of naming, of ascribing a term to what manifests itself as speech, but as an uncertain speech inseparable from fits, gestures, and cries. A disturbance arises, and therapy, or social treatment, consists of providing a name—a term already listed in a society’s catalogues—for this uncertain speech …. Thus exorcism is essentially an enterprise of denomination intended to reclassify a protean uncanniness within an established language. It aims at restoring the postulate of all language, that is, a stable relation between the interlocutor, “I,” and a social signifier, the proper name.²⁷

      Our text’s adjuration, “I adjure you by the one who introduced the one hundred forty languages and distributed them by his own command,” alludes to this destabilization of “the postulate of all language.” In this case, it also asserts an ultimate ordering subject, the “I” of “I am the Lord your God”—guaranteeing order behind the linguistic chaos of Babel.

      Finally, we find in the PGM passage a recounting of God’s mighty works, an example of what has been called “the authoritative discourse of precedent.”²⁸ This particular historiola places significant emphasis upon the crossing of the Red Sea and the Jordan River. In addition to calling upon the power manifested in these great acts, the specific references to bodies of water reflect the widespread notion that demons and witchcraft have no power against water, an idea found in ancient sources from Apuleius to the Talmud, and underlying the twentieth-century icon of the melting wicked witch upon her drenching by Dorothy.²⁹ It seems to have troubled few that water was also considered a favored domain of the spirits, and drinking a typical way of becoming possessed.

      Though