Where Do You Learn About Sumerian Magic? I'm Really Interested But Can't Find Anything About It! Thanks

Where do you learn about sumerian magic? I'm really interested but can't find anything about it! thanks in advance!

Hell yeah, another Sumerian magic lover! I actually pulled out my notes for this one, because you're right. Sumerian sources are very hard to find because, well...they're so old.

Few written records on Sumerian magic have survived. Much of what we know comes from excavated clay figures and jewelry, most of which were protective. The Met has a lot of great articles about the ancient Sumerians.

But in terms of funerary rites and death spells, historians know quite a bit! The Sumerians believed that the dead should be consistently fed and nurtured. They had temporary spirit houses between the death and the funeral, extensive divination methods, and even funerary water pipes for their offerings.

The article "Soul Emplacements in Ancient Mesopotamian Funerary Rites" by JoAnn Scurlock details a lot of this. If you want to learn about afterlife beliefs and mythos, read Dina Katz's The Image of the Netherworld in Sumerian Sources. Dion Fortune's Through the Gates of Death has some info on Sumerian beliefs as well.

For first-hand accounts, we don't have a lot. The Maqlû tablets are the biggest, baddest, most well-known Akkadian magic source. Most of its contents are chants to guard one against malicious magic (often translated to "witchcraft").

Šumma ālu ina mēlê šakin are a serious of cuneiform tablets that list omens, along with some divination tips. It's harder to find online, but researchers have translated it.

I hope this helps! Good luck!

In Armenian, when we want to say “damn you” or “go to hell”, we use the expressions "գրողը քեզ տանի" [groxy qez tani] or "գնա գրողի ծոցը" [gna (kori) groxi tsocy], which translate to “may the writer take you away” or “go and get lost in the writer’s embrace” in English. You might wonder, “Who is this writer-person?” and “Why is it considered a curse?”

According to traditional Armenian belief, Grox (the writer) is a spirit who records a person's deeds during their lifetime, determining the purity of their soul. This concept may be linked to Tir, the god of writing and literature in Armenian mythology. In some interpretations, it was believed that anyone whose name Tir wrote in his notebook would die. This is where the curse "may the writer take you" originates.

During the Christian era, Grox was mistakenly represented as a Christian spirit who no longer recorded human deeds but instead determined each person's fate, inscribing it on their foreheads. Over time, Grox came to be depicted as an evil spirit, sometimes identified with Satan. Thus, the curse "get lost in Grox’s embrace," which originally signified death, took on a more negative connotation. However, this was not originally characteristic of Grox in Armenian traditional beliefs.

So, if you want to get creative with your curses, instead of saying “go to hell,” you can use the phrase “get lost in the writer’s embrace”.

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their "takedown form" demands that you give them your full legal name and address. they do not say what they're doing with your personal details. there's no proof that this form works

until ao3 comes out with a proper statement or manages to lock their scrapped, just lock your fics for registered users

Margaret Atwood, from The Door: Poems; “Sor Juana works in the garden”

inspired by the works of @/mischievousdog (both on tumblr and twitter)