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Thanks to Judith Starkston for contributing a new essay for my site today. Her new historical fantasy novel, Priestess of Ishana, is set in a land based on the history and culture of the ancient Hittites. She explains her world-building process below...
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Finding the Fantasy in Hittite History
Judith Starkston
“I invoke you, Lelani, Sungoddess and Queen of the world below. May this witchcraft be undone. May the tongue that spoke this evil and the hand that worked it burn into ash which I will bury in the world below.”
In Priestess of Ishana, I wanted to immerse my reader in the Near Eastern Bronze Age of the Hittites (~1200 BCE), but at the same time gain the storytelling power and freedom of fantasy. Guy Gavriel Kay, a renowned writer of historical fantasy, adopted the phrase “a quarter turn to the fantastic” to describe his melding of history and fantasy—that is, fiction that is “nearly our known history but not quite.” A blend of fantasy and history came naturally to writing the Hittites, steeped as their culture is in practices we call magic. Historical people and places lurk as inspiration behind my fictional world. That’s reflected in changed names that hint at the original (for example, Hittites to Hitolians).
Well-written fantasy has “rules” for the magic therein. My fantasy uses primary historical sources and Hittite beliefs for that framework. The novel’s magical rites are based on specific details taken from the written records—far stranger than anything I could have made up.
In my Hitolian fantasy world, curses are the last remaining magic (or so the characters assume), and the priestesses learn rites to counteract this pervasive danger. This focus arises from historical reality. Translations of the vast collections of clay cuneiform tablets from the royal archives reveal a Hittite obsession with curses in the prayers and rites.
In constructing a “How to Undo a Curse” scene for Priestess Tesha, I dug into the available fragments of curse rituals (nothing is complete or simple in Hittite primary texts). The opening lines in this post, for example, are adapted from a couple sources. The notion that words have tangible power is found in almost all Hittite rites; evil tongues and counteracting magical words abound. Words were the bridge to the gods, the road to accessing supernatural power. They are especially powerful when said in conjunction with analogical magic—actions that reflect what the practitioner wants to happen.
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Tesha crept next to the dead man. She raised the loaf high over him. “I invoke you, Lelani, Sungoddess and Queen of the world below. May this witchcraft be undone. May the tongue that spoke this evil and the hand that worked it burn into ash which I will bury in the world below.” The words calmed the beating of her heart.
She shut her eyes and knelt on the damp floor, wincing as the muck penetrated her gown.
She held the bread stuffed with absorbing chickpea paste. The rite decreed she start at the dead man’s forehead. The reek of burnt flesh tortured her nose and pulled her stomach.
She leaned over the body, touching with the bread what was left of the brow below his graying hair. The horror held her gaze. She hesitated. The rite had to be done perfectly. Usually this requirement for proper order gave her joy. Now she clung to it for courage, but something was wrong and she could not say what. Had she skipped a step? She hadn’t. She went on, bread held to the corpse.
“Come into this bread, foul curse. Your pollution endangers all who come near. I bind you into this bread.”
She moved downwards to the man’s chest and shoulders where his tunic had burned away, revealing flesh and bone, charred black.
“Come out of this body, evil curse, so that when this loaf is burnt into ash as you have burned this man, you may return to the dark realm below where you belong. As the smell of bread entices both the good man and the bad to eat, so let the smell entice you into this bread.”
Tesha rose and moved to the altar holding the chickpea stuffed loaf in front of her to avoid the pollution it contained.
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Tesha moves the curse from a dead body into a loaf of bread stuffed with chickpea paste, while saying, “As the smell of bread entices both the good man and the bad to eat, so let the smell entice you into this bread.”
The “stuffing” is meant to absorb the evil like a sponge and contain it until the priestess can burn the loaf and thus send it back to the Underworld where curses were thought to originate.
At this point you might be scratching your head, chickpea paste, curses in loaves of bread? I couldn’t make this stuff up. Fortunately, I didn’t have to. Careful reading of Hittite rituals provided me with great source material for fantasy. My Hitolian priestess is a skillful practitioner of magic that would sound very familiar to a Hittite priestess.
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Judith Starkston has spent too much time reading about and exploring the remains of the ancient worlds of the Greeks and Hittites. Early on she went so far as to get two degrees in Classics from the University of California, Santa Cruz and Cornell. She loves myths and telling stories. This has gradually gotten more and more out of hand. Her solution: to write fantasy set in the exotic worlds of the past. Fantasy and Magic in a Bronze Age World. Hand of Fire was a semi-finalist for the M. M. Bennetts Award for Historical Fiction. Priestess of Ishana won the San Diego State University Conference Choice Award. Judith has two grown children and lives in Arizona with her husband. For a free short story set in her Bronze Age historical fantasy world (and a cookbook of foods in her novels), sign up for the newsletter on her website.
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