On the administrative side, we can certainly expect that many of the communal judicial venues at which Christians contracted marriages according to common law traditions were ecclesiastical audiences and that many of the local notables who served their communities as scribes, as witnesses, and in other judicial capacities had positions in the church. A recent survey of Syriac and Middle Persian seals belonging to Sasanian Christians, for example, includes a number that identify the holder as a deacon, priest, or metropolitan.68 In the late 600s, the Judicial Decisions of the East Syrian patriarch Hnanishoʿ I (r. 686–98) mention two marriage agreements that have been validated with the seals (Syriac singular ṭabʿā) of ecclesiastical officials, one a bishop and the other a traveling priest.69 These are likely examples of clergymen carrying on the legaladministrative functions of their Sasanian-era predecessors.
In sum, ecclesiastical figures in the Sasanian Empire were no doubt involved in the civil-legal business of the communities under their purview, including contracting marriages. But ecclesiastical law itself retained for the East Syrians a more restricted role. Rather than functioning as a comprehensive system that sealed off East Syrians from imperial legal institutions, it promoted appropriately Christian modes of conduct by regulating individual believers’ participation in Christian communion. Imperial and local civil traditions set the practical legal framework for marriage among Sasanian Christians in a manner similar to their Roman counterparts.
Religion, Magic, and Domesticity
Christian tradition put considerable claims on lay marriage and sexuality in the societies of late antiquity, but it ran up against other normative orders like imperial legal traditions, Greco-Roman sexual ethics, and Iranian marriage customs. As we have framed the story so far, much of this friction related to the public side of the institution of marriage: that is, the legal, moral, and theological statuses that those normative orders ascribed to men and women who had sex and cohabited with one another. For example, in the terms of Sasanian law a union between a woman and her nephew could be a valid marriage, while to East Syrian bishops it was unlawful fornication (zānyutā); sex between a man and a prostitute entailed no meaningful legal consequences in the Roman Empire, but it made the two into one flesh according to Christian theology. Before concluding, it is worth considering as well the relationship of Christian religiosity to some domestic aspects of late antique marriage, those that impinged less on public life. Late antique ecclesiastics prescribed norms for the private spaces of Christian households too; but again, practice varied considerably, and there is much evidence that the devotional side of household life was eclectic in ways that surreptitiously undermined the authority of Christian religious elites and their normative traditions.
Among the domestic activities that bore considerable attention from Christian theologians was sex itself, and we have seen that the prescription of monogamy and procreation characterized their traditions from an early date. Within the household, this translated into an emphasis on abstinence during fasting seasons and sexual restraint in general,70 as well as condemnation of the sexual exploitation of slaves. How completely the Christian moral-theological vision impelled householders to reorganize domestic life in these terms, which occurred behind closed doors in ways that divorce or taking a third spouse did not, varied over time and space. But if the lawfulness of specific sexual practices within domestic spaces received a good deal of ecclesiastical concern, it is also as important to recognize that late antique societies knew an entire realm of ritual practices related to sexuality, domesticity, and the inner affairs of households, neighborhoods, and kin networks far different from the doctrines and modes of piety prescribed by ecclesiastics. Essentially, we are dealing with what modern scholars call, with an imprecise but heuristically useful term, “magic”: a wide array of practices that tapped into the extrahuman, unseen powers that filled the universe in order to effect healing, protect against personal and familial calamities, or visit negative effects on one’s enemies.71 Such practices typically included “amulets, recitations of incantations, and performance of adjurational rituals.”72 These were frequently administered by learned practitioners other than religious professionals like bishops; in such cases, the latter tended to denigrate and proscribe magic as unlawful, unholy “sorcery” (Syriac ḥarrāshutā). Yet magic remained ubiquitous in the late antique Mediterranean world and western Asia, and it was practiced and patronized across the religious spectrum. Some Christians must have understood that magic fell outside the bounds of what the bishops considered properly Christian,73 but it remained an integral part of the life courses of untold numbers of laypeople formed less exclusively in the church’s high doctrine. Talismans, amulets, and adjurations were a way to look after one’s interests that coexisted largely unproblematically with one’s religious affiliation.
For our purposes, the important point is that magical practices were deeply connected to domestic realms over which more institutionalized normative traditions also claimed authority.74 If Christian soteriology was constructed around a particular ordering of human sexuality, much late antique magic was geared toward coping with the more immediate disorders and destructive possibilities of sex, as well as with other dangers that routinely beset ancient households—charming an indifferent beloved and attracting their desire, preventing against the dangers of childbirth, and warding off diseases that might befall loved ones are all common aims of late antique magical texts. Indeed, the fact that male religious professionals frequently conceptualized magic in negatively gendered terms—as arcane, unholy feminine knowledge—underscores its close connection to private, domestic spaces that bishops (as well as rabbis) could not always regulate so simply.75
The hundreds of Aramaic incantation bowls excavated from southern Iraq make for an evocative example of late antique domestic magic that involved religious-ritual practices and gender categories different from those of Christian orthodoxies. Dating to the sixth and seventh centuries (and perhaps to the fifth and eighth), the bowls are inscribed with incantations that seek healing or protection for the households of the clients who commissioned them: for themselves, their children, and their livestock and other property.76 The bowls are written in several scripts and dialects, including Jewish Aramaic, Mandaic, and Syriac. Client names indicate that individuals from across the religious spectrum—Zoroastrians, Jews, Christians, Mandaeans, Manicheans—made use of the bowls, and the incantations invoke a host of Hellenistic, Iranian, Jewish, and Christian deities, demons, and religious symbols.77 The incantations are also gendered in idiosyncratic ways. Clients are usually identified by their matronymics—that is, descent in the maternal line—which is incongruous with the largely patrilineal social organization of the Sasanian Empire, and may speak to the incantations’ connection to distinctly domestic realms understood in feminized terms.78 We can take as an example a bowl inscribed for one Bar-Sahde, a Christian name meaning “son of martyrs,” whom the inscription identifies further as the son of Ahata, a feminine Aramaic name. The magical practitioner who composed the incantation was presumably Jewish, to judge by its Hebrew script. The bowl’s target is a lilith, a female demon who has taken up residence “upon the threshold of the house of Bar-Sahde” and “strikes [and smites and k]ills boys and girls.” The lilith has effectively become a malevolent, unwanted member of Bar-Sahde’s household: the incantation expels her from it by writing her a deed of divorce so that she can no longer harm her human fellow householders, Bar-Sahde, his wife Aywi, and especially their children. In order to accomplish the divorce, the incantation invokes “the name of Joshua bar Peraḥia,” a rabbi whose demon-fighting powers appear often in bowl texts, as well as an Iranian entity, “Elisur Bagdana, the king of demons and dēvs,