Plants as Persons: First-Millennium Mesopotamian Anti-Witchcraft Botany

This article examines the personification and agency of plants in first-millennium BCE Mesopotamian anti-witchcraft rituals and incantations. Focusing on so-called “Heilmittel incantations,” the study explores how vegetal ingredients were addressed as living, intelligent, and active participants within ritual performances. It analyzes the poetic and rhetorical strategies through which plants acquired therapeutic efficacy. Particular attention is devoted to the etymologies, metaphorical associations, and performative invocations of plants. The article argues that Mesopotamian anti-witchcraft botany cannot be understood merely in pharmacological terms, but must be situated within a broader relational ontology in which plants possessed agency, intentionality, and cosmological significance.