which opens their ‘gate’ for you, it has planted offspring, it has planted offspring.
Incantation-spell.
(Worthington 2005 : 13 198′– 201 ′; see Collins 1999 : 277 f.
(unpub.); Foster 1993 : 875 ; Finkel, 1998 : 81 )^2The incantation rubric refers to something not being retained in the patient’s body
or head, presumably body fluids. The imagery of the red worm, rainwaters, and even
the red farmer with his red implements is not easy to comprehend. The implication
seems to be that nature is corrupted in several ways, since the colour red in medical
contexts is usually dangerous, associated with samanû-disease, with symptoms of fever
or bleeding, or inflammation (see, for example, Fincke 2000 : 153 ). The last line of
the incantation is difficult, suggesting some ‘solution’ to the problem. Anyone who
opens the orifices (lit. gates) and hence relieves the excess fluid which is trapped, at
the same time will somehow ‘perpetuate’ the remedy (if the translation is correct).
A Sumerian incantation in the same text is hardly more informative, but is more
relevant: ‘the hair is shorn, the hair is strong, the hair grows, the hair which remains
grows; incantation for the hair left on the head to grow’ (Worthington 2005 :
159 ′– 161 ′). The relevance to the medical passage is found in the previous context
which refers to the patient’s hair falling out as a result of his illness, with the medical
recipe being designed to retain what remains of the patient’s hair. The Sumerian
incantation itself, however, offers little in the way of explanation or even an invocation
to gods, but simply reiterates the wish that the hair should grow (back). Another
incantation in the same passage is mumbo-jumbo, or possibly a phonetic Sumer-
ian incantation in an unusual orthography which makes it difficult to decipher
(Worthington 2005 : 13 : 175 ′– 177 ′). A similar pattern occurs in incantations within
eye-disease texts, which contain incantations showing an ‘abracadabra’ pattern (Fincke
2000 : 302 ), as well as incantations which describe some cause for eye disease, either
‘wind’ or else a foreign body in the eye (ibid. 302 f.). Potency incantations also include
a number of abracadabra incantations (see Biggs 1967 : 46 f.).
The leitmotif of colour associated with disease in a medical incantation, similar to
the one cited above, occurs within a medical text against cough, and the particular
incantation is directed against bile (martu); (see Collins 1999 : 231 f. and Cadelli 2000 :
198 , 215 ). It is sufficient to cite the opening line of the incantation: ‘the goat is
green, its young is green, its shepherd is green, its herdsman is green’. The incantation
explains that the goat eats green grass from a green field and drinks green water from
a green canal, and the goat was not fazed by having a staff or clod thrown at it, and
only when a mixture of thyme and salt was thrown at the goat did the bile dissolve
like a cloud.^3
The nursery-rhyme character of the two incantations treated here has not been
considered by those who have commented on these texts. The simplicity and even
humour of ‘medical’ incantations distinguishes these brief compositions from the
more formal (and usually longer) incantations from the magical corpus. This nursery-
rhyme quality occurs in another ‘bile’ incantation, in which the bile addresses those
eating food and drinking beer and says, ‘when you eat food and drink beer, I will
pounce upon you and you will belch like an ox!’ (Cadelli 2000 : 215 ; Collins 1999 :
230 ). A similar example of a simple nursery-rhyme type of incantation occurs within
the same genre of incantations against ‘cough’, in a two-line incantation against ‘wind’
— M. J. Geller —