Free Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms by Gerard Russell Page A

sacred book is drunk as a ritual). It describes amulets made from bat’s wings inscribed with hoopoe blood and the blood of a rabid wolf; for a person who has been possessed by a demon on a Sunday (the Mandaean holy day), an ointment should be made from horse saliva, monkey and pigeon blood, the juice of mint and purslane, and olive and sesame oil, and then stuck into the victim’s nose.
    Some of these spells had clearly been handed down over the generations since Babylonian times. Drower discovered for sale a Mandaean magic scroll that could be buried beside a grave in time of plague to avert the disease’s spread; it began with “In the name of Libat, mistress of gods and men,” an invocation to the Babylonian love goddess Libat (also known as Ishtar). Drower was told by Mandaeans in her day that Libat was consulted for oracles and invoked for love spells. She also found a recent Mandaean amulet designed for separating lovers, which declared: “Sundered is Bel from Babylon, sundered is Nebu from Borsippa.” Nebu was the god after whom the king Nebuchadnezzar was named, and Borsippa has been a ruin for more than two thousand years.
    The commonest amulet among Mandaeans today is the skanduleh, which Nadia has hanging on her kitchen wall. It is placed under the pillow or mattress of small children, she told me, and is also placed in a basket of clothes belonging to a bride on her wedding day. (Remedies for the evil eye, in European tradition, are used in the same contexts; a traditional English poem tells a bride to wear “something borrowed” and “something blue” on her wedding day.) The skanduleh consists of a round disk with four animals pictured on it: a lion, a snake, a scorpion, and a wasp. These represent the forces of darkness and are used to frighten away evil spirits. In Uruk, in southern Iraq, German archaeologists discovered a scorpion amulet dating to the thirteenth century BC . The Ishtar gate of Babylon was decorated with mosaics of a snakelike creature with feline forelegs, possibly because it could evoke the sinister powers of both the lion and the snake.
    Nadia’s aunt had made a living in Baghdad from spell casting, as Nadia told me. The walls of this aunt’s house were thin, and when the young Nadia was playing there with her cousins, they could all hear the consultations in the next room between the aunt and her various clients. People would come to her desperate for something that might improve their lives; often they wanted their daughters to marry rich men, and they hoped an amulet might help. Once the aunt enlisted Nadia’s help. She asked the girl to scribble on paper whatever came into her head, and then she took away the bits of paper and gave them to customers as magical amulets. Nadia’s aunt believed in the effect of these things, because so often the customers really did find life improved for them afterward.
    Nadia’s aunt was a gentle, lovable character, which helps explain why people opened up to her. As a result, she had insight into every layer of Iraqi society—enough, even, to attract the attention of the secret police. “They tested me,” Nadia’s aunt said. “They sent undercover girls who sat down and checked exactly what I was doing. They told me I was in the clear because I did everything aboveboard.” Maybe they were trying to determine whether anything subversive was going on, for a soothsayer could be in a position to recruit conspirators. Or perhaps they were looking for evidence of the use of black magic (meaning curses; amulets and fortune-telling were considered harmless white magic), which might well have been punished.
    Nadia’s aunt was still casting spells in the 1990s, when Nadia was studying languages at Baghdad University and working part-time at a printing shop so that she could pay her university fees. Those were tough times: after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, United Nations sanctions destroyed its economy. Per capita income declined by 85