Sacred Texts · Babylonian · Anti-Witchcraft Ritual · c.1000 BCE

The Maqlu

"Burning" — Mesopotamia's great anti-witchcraft ritual series, eight tablets and nearly a hundred incantations performed across a single night, in which the victim of a curse identifies, confronts and destroys the witch responsible before the sun rises on a new, cleansed day.

Maqlu is best understood not as offensive black magic but as its precise opposite — a defensive, state-sanctioned ritual performed by licensed exorcist-priests (āšipu) on behalf of people who believed themselves the victims of witchcraft. In the Mesopotamian legal and religious worldview, sorcery (kišpū) was a genuine crime, and Maqlu functioned as both spiritual remedy and a kind of ritual court case against an unknown or unidentified attacker.

Section 01

What Is the Maqlu?

The Maqlu — Akkadian for "burning" — is a series of ritual incantations from ancient Mesopotamia, preserved primarily in copies from the Neo-Assyrian period (roughly 1000–600 BCE) though drawing on considerably older material. It survives across eight tablets containing close to one hundred individual incantations, making it one of the longest and most structurally complete magical ritual texts to survive from the ancient Near East.

The ritual's premise is that the patient — the person commissioning the ceremony — has been afflicted by a curse cast by an unknown kaššāptu, a witch, whose sorcery has caused illness, misfortune, or social and psychological suffering. Rather than treating the affliction directly, Maqlu works by identifying and symbolically destroying the source: figurines representing the witch, made from materials such as wax, tallow, dough or bitumen, are ritually addressed, cursed in return, and finally burned or otherwise destroyed — an act intended to unmake the witchcraft along with its physical stand-in.

The entire ceremony was performed by a professional exorcist-priest, the āšipu, over the course of a single night, beginning after dark and building toward a climax timed precisely to coincide with sunrise — the returning daylight itself functioning as ritual confirmation that the curse had been successfully burned away and the natural order restored.

Unlike some Mesopotamian magical texts aimed at causing harm, Maqlu is explicitly protective and corrective in intent — closer in function to a legal remedy or medical treatment than to an act of aggression, even though its imagery of burning effigies and cursing an unnamed enemy can appear, to modern eyes, remarkably similar to the "black magic" it was actually designed to counter.

Section 02

The Eight Tablets

Tablets I–II
Invoking the Night
Opening invocations address the gods of night — particularly the fire god Girra and the sun god Shamash in his nocturnal underworld aspect — establishing the cosmic witnesses to the ritual about to unfold.
Tablet III
Naming the Witch
Incantations addressed directly to the unknown kaššāptu, cataloguing the many possible forms her sorcery might have taken and symbolically stripping her of anonymity and power.
Tablets IV–V
The Turning-Back
A central ritual and legal concept: the witchcraft is declared to be turned back upon its caster, a formula of reversal that recurs throughout Mesopotamian protective magic.
Tablets VI–VII
The Burning of the Figurines
The ritual's central act: effigies representing the witch are addressed, cursed and destroyed by fire, water or burial — the practical climax toward which the entire night's liturgy builds.
Tablet VIII
The Dawn Blessing
Closing incantations performed at sunrise, purifying the patient's house and body and formally declaring the curse ended as the returning daylight confirms the ritual's success.
Section 03

Key Concepts

Kaššāptu
The Witch Figure
The kaššāptu is almost always grammatically feminine in the incantations, reflecting Mesopotamian anxieties around female ritual power operating outside sanctioned religious institutions — a pattern with long, uncomfortable echoes in later witch-persecution traditions.
Ṣalmu
The Substitute Figurine
Effigy magic — using a crafted image to stand in for a person and act upon them by proxy — is central to Maqlu's technique, an early and highly developed example of sympathetic magic practiced across many later traditions.
Turru
The Reversal Formula
A recurring legal-magical formula declaring that whatever harm was intended for the patient should instead fall upon its originator — a structure of symmetrical retribution embedded throughout the ritual's language.
Overnight Timing
Ritual Bound to Sunrise
The ceremony's precise alignment with the night-to-dawn transition is not incidental — it ties the ritual's spiritual logic directly to an observable cosmic event, giving the patient tangible confirmation that the rite has worked.
Section 04

A History of the Ritual

Old Babylonian roots
Earlier Anti-Witchcraft Traditions
Individual anti-witchcraft incantations circulated in Mesopotamia long before Maqlu's compilation, reflecting an established, ongoing concern with sorcery accusation and ritual defence throughout Mesopotamian history.
c.1000–700 BCE
Standardisation
The individual incantations were compiled, ordered and standardised into the eight-tablet series known today, most likely during the Neo-Assyrian period, alongside its close companion ritual, Šurpu.
7th century BCE
Nineveh Library Copies
Multiple copies were preserved in the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, alongside the Enuma Eliš and the Epic of Gilgamesh — the same archaeological accident that preserved so much of Mesopotamian literature for the modern world.
Late 19th–early 20th century
Early Decipherment
Finnish Assyriologist Knut Tallqvist produced the first substantial scholarly edition of Maqlu in 1895, establishing the foundation for all later study of the text.
20th–21st century
Modern Critical Editions
Gerhard Meier's mid-20th-century edition and Tzvi Abusch's more recent critical work have significantly refined the text and its interpretation, situating Maqlu within the broader corpus of Mesopotamian magical and legal thought.
Section 05

The Legacy

Maqlu offers a genuinely rare window into how a major ancient civilisation formally processed the fear of witchcraft — not through informal accusation and mob justice, but through a licensed professional ritual specialist operating within an established religious and quasi-legal framework. This distinguishes Mesopotamian anti-witchcraft practice sharply from the far more destructive witch-hunting episodes of early modern Europe, where accusation frequently substituted for any structured ritual or legal remedy at all.

The text's core techniques — effigy magic, ritual reversal formulas, and precisely timed ceremony — recur throughout the later history of protective and apotropaic magic across the ancient Mediterranean and Near East, including within the Greek Magical Papyri and, considerably later, within Islamic occult manuals such as the Shams al-Ma'arif, which likewise employs symbolic destruction of malevolent influence as a central technique.

Alongside its close companion text Šurpu, Maqlu represents one half of Mesopotamia's formal ritual response to affliction: where Šurpu addresses guilt, sin and self-caused misfortune through purification, Maqlu addresses externally inflicted harm through identification and destruction of its source — together forming a remarkably complete Mesopotamian theology of why bad things happen to people, and what could formally be done about it.

Essential Reading
Tzvi Abusch's The Witchcraft Series Maqlû is the standard modern critical edition and translation. Abusch's earlier Mesopotamian Witchcraft situates the ritual within the broader legal and religious context of Mesopotamian sorcery accusation.
The Honest History
Maqlu's surviving text is a standardised compilation, not a spontaneous single-author composition — like Gilgamesh and the Enuma Eliš, it represents the endpoint of a long editorial process drawing on older, looser incantation material whose original individual authorship is entirely unknown.
Connections
Maqlu connects to Šurpu (its companion purification ritual), the Epic of Gilgamesh & Enuma Eliš (preserved through the same Nineveh library tradition), and the Shams al-Ma'arif (a much later Islamic occult text employing related techniques of symbolic destruction against malevolent forces).