This One Weird Trick Was Used to Trap Demons in the Dark Ages: You Won’t Believe How It Works

In the British Museum, there is a fascinating object -- a magical offering bowl dating back to dark ages. These kinds of bowls are often referred to as “incantation bowls” or “magic bowls,” and they were especially prevalent in regions like Mesopotamia, Persia, and parts of the Levant. Their use was surprisingly widespread, with similar artifacts turning up in ancient Egypt, as well as across North Africa and the Middle East. This suggests that such bowls may have once been a common medium for magical working and spirit communication throughout these regions. They were typically buried under thresholds, in homes, or near the foundations of buildings as a form of protective magic, intended to ward off evil forces and hostile spiritual influences.

The particular bowl in the British Museum is inscribed in Aramaic, a language that was once the lingua franca of the Near East and remains a subject of fascination for scholars due to its connection to various ancient religious traditions. The inscription contains a prayer that has been translated to evoke the image of a binding ritual, one aimed at subduing and controlling malevolent forces. Its contents are anything but subtle. It carries a prayer or incantation meant to subdue a host of supernatural threats. The translated text includes a dramatic litany of spiritual enemies: demons, devils, and various forms of the infamous Lilith, who is portrayed here not as a misunderstood feminist icon but as a fiery and dangerous night-stalker. These threats are bound and sealed away “by that hard, mighty and powerful and strong binding” language that’s as ceremonial and formulaic as it is emphatic. The spell specifically names and targets a host of malevolent forces, including known demons, destructive spirits, and sorcerers, and it invokes the aid of semi-divine figures like Metatron, “the Great Healer of mercies.”

The bowl is inscribed with a prayer that has been translated as follows: 

Bound and sealed are you, all you demons and devils and lilith(s), by that (2) hard, mighty and powerful and strong binding. For bound (are) SYṬYN and SYṬYN, Adur Dama Farruk, PRQ BYSP, son[s] of (3) GWʾL. Evil lilith that leads astray the heart(s) of human kind and appears in a dream by night and appears in a vision (4) by day, burning, casting down, by Nala as she falls, slaying boys and girls, (and) sucklings, male and female - be subdued and sealed, (away) from the house (5) and from the threshold of Bahram Gušnasp son of Aštad Anahid, by the talisman of Meṭaṭron, the great prince that is called the Great Healer of mercies that bless the season, (6) he that subdues demons and devils and evil enchanters and powerful magicians, (away) trom the house and from the threshold of Bahram Gušnasp son of Aštad Anahid. Amen Amen Selah. (7) Subdued be evil sorcerers and powerful magicians, subdued be the sorceresses, they, their sorceries and their magic and their curses and their invocations, from the four borders of [the house of Bahram Gušna]sp (8) son of Aštad Anahid. Subdued and trampled be the sorceresses, subdued on the earth and subdued in the heavens. Subdued be their constellations and their stars, bound be the works of their [h]ands. Amen Amen Selah. (translation after Segal 2000)

In the center of the bowl is a peculiar, crude drawing of what seems to be Lilith. 

When I looked at this image, it called to mind some Voodoo Veves but also the so called "seals" of Goetic demons.

The spooky sounding word "demons" gives Goetic magic a worse reputation than it probably deserves, and there's often a presumption that any association with demons means the conjuror is worshipping them or selling their soul to them. 

If you actually follow the prescribed conjurations of the standard goetic texts, they are very Christian and are actually using the power of God (via invocation of sacred names like Yaweh) to control the demons into subservience. The tradition is alleged to have begun with King Solomon, which is why this is often and perhaps more accurately called "Solomonic magic" ("goetia" is from a Greek word that just means any kind of magic.) The underlying premise of this system is that the practitioner can call upon the power of God to assert control over these spirits. Far from being an unholy pact, this approach emphasizes the supremacy of the divine, using the demons’ own prescribed seals -- intricate symbols believed to embody their essence -- as instruments of their subjugation.

Since it is associated with King Solomon, the magic also is used in Jewish and Islamic traditions. In Islamic texts the term "demon" is usually rendered as "djinn" which gives a different sense about what these entities are expected to do. Djinn can be both good and bad and although made of smokeless fire, they're not considered infernal.

The basis of the so-called Goetic system is that there are a certain number of known "demons" who can be conjured and put into service by use of their special “seals” or “sigils” that are unique to each spirit. These sigils are considered central to the working; in many cases, the sigil is treated as a kind of stand-in for the spirit itself. By drawing the seal correctly, the magician symbolically connects with the entity it represents. Some traditions even suggest the sigils are spiritually charged: they are not simply labels or identifiers but condensed forms of magical power.

Different texts can have different instructions about how these are to be made: sometimes they're supposed to be forged in metal, sometimes painted on virgin parchment, sometimes merely scratched into the dirt.

I have dabbled in goetic magic and read several different versions of the texts as copied from different manuscripts. One matter that often perturbed me is that for all the importance put upon the seals -- indeed they often are considered to effectively BE the spirits -- there are multiple versions of how to draw them, and no objective way to identify what of them is right if indeed any can be so called. This inconsistency is part of what makes studying and practicing Goetic magic both thrilling and frustrating. There’s no single canon. Instead, the tradition consists of a web of interpretations, adaptations, and contradictions -- each scribe and magician adding their own spin.

I feel as if I have asked myself this question before, but I am back on it now: what if these "sigils" are actually supposed to be little drawings of the demons?

Many versions of the goetic demon list do include descriptions of what the demon will look like when he or she manifests. Maybe these sigils were also intended as pictures? Imagery is often an important part of ancient magical practices. It would also clarify why some of the Solomonic grimoires begin talking about making wax images in parts of the text where no other references to such practice had come up and the topic appears to be yet on the demon summoning. 

One can easily imagine a copy of the Lilith drawing being copied and copied, sometimes from damaged manuscripts or by people who couldn't draw well whose work was then subsequently copied from the bad drawing by other magicians, eventually becoming so abstracted that it seems like nothing but a mysterious "symbol" meant to hold power, rather than the straightforward portrait drawing it was originally supposed to be.

As with so many theories of ancient and historical matter, to prove definitively the correctness of the theory is almost impossible; one would need a more continuous line of goetic listings and sigils than what are currently known to survive. I merely put this forward as an interesting speculation.