Occult lore
Incantation Bowl
Direct answer
Incantation Bowl: An incantation bowl is a plain clay bowl from late antique Mesopotamia with a protective spell written inside in a spiral, buried upside down in a house to keep demons away.
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At a glance
- Also called
- aramaic magic bowls, demon bowl, magic bowl mesopotamia
- Found in
- Spells & Occult Terms
- Related
- Amulet, Curse Tablet, Greek Magical Papyri, Lilith
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What were incantation bowls used for?
Incantation bowls, also called Aramaic magic bowls, are ordinary earthenware bowls with a text written in ink on the inside, usually spiralling from the rim to the centre or the reverse. Some have a drawing of a bound demon in the middle. They were placed upside down under floors, at thresholds and in the corners of rooms, and sometimes two were sealed mouth to mouth.
The texts name the householders they protect and the spirits they bar, Lilith among them, and call on angels and holy names. Several borrow the language of a Jewish bill of divorce to send a demon away for good. The bowls were made by and for Jews, Christians, Mandaeans and others who lived side by side, and they are among the few bodies of everyday writing to survive from that world.
On the tree of the hidden arts: Magic and protection.
What sets Incantation Bowl apart
The bowl is a spell given the shape of a lid. Its text runs in a spiral that has no exit, its centre often shows a demon in chains, and it was laid face down, so that words, picture and position all say the same thing: shut in. It is also personal. Each bowl names its clients by their mothers' names, which was the custom in magic of the period, and many name every member of a household and even its livestock.
- Date: about the fifth to the eighth century CE
- Region: Sasanian Mesopotamia, in present-day Iraq and western Iran
- Scripts: Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, Mandaic, Syriac, and imitation writing
- Key excavation: Nippur, University of Pennsylvania, from 1888
- First edition: James Montgomery, Aramaic Incantation Texts from Nippur, 1913
- Number known: roughly two thousand, many without a recorded findspot
Often mistaken for something else: A curse tablet is lead, folded and aimed at a named enemy; an incantation bowl is clay, open and aimed at spirits on behalf of a named household.
The story behind Incantation Bowl
The bowls date from about the fifth to the eighth century, in the Sasanian and early Islamic periods of what is now Iraq and western Iran. They are written in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, Mandaic and Syriac. Many were dug up at Nippur by the University of Pennsylvania from 1888, and James Montgomery published them in Aramaic Incantation Texts from Nippur (1913). Some two thousand are now known, a great many of them bought on the market with no record of where they were found.
Why Incantation Bowl matters
They preserve the actual words ordinary people paid for to protect their homes and children, where most ancient magic survives only in handbooks.
How to read Incantation Bowl
Scholars read them for the spoken Aramaic of the period and for the shared demon lore of its communities; museums show them as household protection made visible.
Incantation Bowl in practice: an example
A bowl in the Penn Museum names a family, lists the demons forbidden to enter their house, and ends with amen, amen, selah.
Where readings of Incantation Bowl go wrong
Bowls sold without a recorded findspot may come from looted sites, which is why many scholars will not publish them.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
Recorded here as history and lore. No rite is taught on this page.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Spells & Occult Terms
- Aliases
- incantation bowls, aramaic magic bowls, demon bowl, magic bowl mesopotamia, aramaic incantation bowl
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
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Common questions
What were incantation bowls used for?
They were buried in houses to protect the people named in them from demons, illness, the evil eye and curses. A few are aggressive and aim to send harm back on an enemy.
Why were incantation bowls buried upside down?
The usual explanation is that the upturned bowl trapped or covered the demon, which is why they are sometimes called demon traps. The texts themselves do not explain the custom, so this is an inference.
What language are incantation bowls written in?
Most are in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, with others in Mandaic and Syriac. A number carry scribbles that only imitate writing, perhaps made for buyers who could not read.
