15 Aramaic Incantation Texts between Orality and Textuality

Transferring performativity from speech to writing: illocutionary acts and incantation bowls

“…2 Once interred, their continuing efficacy as apotropaia was presumably guaranteed by the stability and permanence of the written word. Charles Häberl (2015) has recently argued from the use of performative utterances in the bowl texts that an oral ceremony lay behind the production of the bowls, and that the writing of the bowls was thus of secondary importance. Pace Häberl, this contribution argues that writing and writtenness were central to bowl praxis as a whole.…”