In addition to the periodic rites of the state cult, other ceremonies, designated by the Sumerian term SISKUR (‘‘ritual’’), were executed along with their attendant offerings only as need arose. These occasions included the (re)construction of sacred buildings, the purification of a defeated army (Beal 1995), rites of passage such as birth (Beckman 1983), puberty, and death (Kassian, Korolev, and Sidel’tsev 2002), and personal crises like impotence, insomnia, or family strife. It is these rituals that provide us with a window onto the popular religion of Hatti, in contradistinction to the worship performed in the temples, locations where the common man or woman would but rarely have set foot.
Many of the ritual texts were not composed in the Hittite capital of Hattusa, but were rather collected by royal agents throughout the territories controlled by Hatti. The tablets recording them were then deposited in the central archives so that the information they contained might be available for immediate use should the ruler or a member of the royal court be confronted with a situation they were intended to counter. The diversity of the geographic origin of the ritual texts is apparent because many of them are attributed to a particular ‘‘author’’ from a particular locality, for instance: ‘‘Thus says Alli, the woman from Arzawa: If a person is bewitched, then I treat him/her as follows...’’ (Jacob-Rost 1972). More than half of these authorities on magic were women (Beckman 1993), and we may confidently recognize the rituals as examples of ‘‘folk wisdom.’’ The practitioners of these rites were not the priests and temple employees of the state cult, but were most often called ‘‘seer’’ if male, or ‘‘old woman’’ if female.
Magical ceremonies might take place in a special small building reserved for purifications, in an uncultivated place, or at some other location far removed from habitations and agricultural plots - for instance, on a rock outcropping, on a river-bank, at a spring or well, or simply ‘‘in the open air.’’ Some rites directed toward chthonic deities required the digging of an artificial offering pit (Collins 2001).
World History
