Culpability for Curses in Jewish Law and Mystical Lore הארי פוטר בהלכה ובאגדה (original) (raw)
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In the past, paradoxes and similar rhetorical figures, summarized in the term “essentially oxymoronic concepts”, have been frequently applied to describe mystical experiences or, more generally, “change” representing the uncertain or unknown. Thus their usage was primarily a privilege of the arts, literature or the occult sciences. Today, however, essentially oxymoronic concepts are increasingly permeating scientific, legal and other public discourses as much as advertisements or daily conversations. Concepts like “globalization paradox”, “co-opetition”, “piracy paradox” or products labeled “ice tea”, “Sports Utility Vehicles (SUVs)” as well as films entitled “True Lies” are just a few examples testifying to this wider trend. Their usage appears especially prevalent in attempts to scientifically describe and understand the often complex relations between two or more different phenomena or fields. In this regard, the relation between law and magic may mean no exception as it can also be framed by or gives rise to several paradoxes. For instance, in early history and later in the context of colonialism, laws have often outlawed magic as “witchcraft” or “charlatanry” based on the belief in their irrational as opposed to law’s rational character. Paradoxically though, contemporary laws and legal practice still maintain a large degree of rites, rituals and rhetoric similar to those that were applied in magic. Similarly, as Jerome Frank remarked, despite the focus of law on certainty it striking to see how often uses its language uses “magical phrases”. The apparent contradictions in the nature and language of the law is therefore taken as an opportunity to cast some light at various issues linking law and magic in order to gain some insights about the nature, origin, and role of law generally.
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Max Weber said that the curse of the poor is the weapon of democracy. In 2011 a lead curse tablet inscribed in Greek was discovered in an immense peristyle building in Jerusalem from the late Roman period. A certain Kyrilla deployed the 24 line tablet against her adversary Iennys (Iannēs) which invokes Greek, Mesopotamian, and Gnostic gods of the underworld to strike seven vulnerabilities of her opposition. " I strike and strike down and nail down the tongue, the eyes, the wrath, the ire, the anger, the procrastination, the opposition of Iennys… " This preemptory juridical malediction, inscribed by a professional, parallels imprecations from Kourion, Cyprus and was probably motivated by a legal or business dispute. Kore-Persephone executes the curse, reopening the possibility of a Kore cult in Jerusalem. The discovery of this text and others like it raises broader implications for how the diffusion of curses influenced legal and economic mechanisms in Mediterranean cultures. The force behind performative speech is that the proper person utters appropriate words in specific social contexts. Yet written curse texts like this one notoriously complicate matters, blurring magic and religious practices, private and public enacted rituals, oral and written curse acts, and conventional and unconventional juridical procedures. Ancient blessings and curses are often delineated as magical phenomena, but the relationship between magic and religion has historically been notoriously slippery to pin down. Some argue that the dichotomy between magic and religion is merely a product of western monotheism, the enlightenment, or both…little more than a semantic trap to avoid at all costs. James Frazer famously drove a wedge between magic and religion. For Frazer, magic was a kind of religious parasite, a wholesale perversion of a great religious tradition, involving rituals driven by completely natural forces that emerged from a primitive worldview. 1 Religion, on the other hand, emerged from the supernatural world of faith. Seasoned specialists and general readers alike can immediately detect problems with this simplistic dichotomy. Max Weber reduced somewhat the absolute separation of magic and religion, but still held to the belief that magic and religion were opposites. 2 Marcel Mauss proposed a social Durkheimian definition of magic, where any rite that is not a part of an organized cult is considered privatized folk religion and thus derives from the realm of magic.