Marinella Ceravolo, L’historiola nella Mesopotamia antica. Mito, rito e performatività
Ceravolo Marinella, L’historiola nella Mesopotamia antica. Mito, rito e performatività, Bulzoni, Roma 2022, pp. 344, ISBN: 978-88-6897-284-4
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1Marinella Ceravolo, in L’historiola nella Mesopotamia antica, offers an innovative contribution to the understanding of Mesopotamian ritualistics. Ceravolo starts with a fundamental question: how can words transform and influence reality through ritual? To answer this question, the author focuses on the historiola, a short mythic narrative recited during rituals, which serves as a key element in ensuring the effectiveness of the ritual itself. This insight, based on the performative approach to language, has its foundation in speech act theory, developed by philosophers such as John L. Austin and John Searle. According to this theory, words do not merely describe reality but can modify it through their utterance. Ceravolo, therefore, does not simply treat historiolae as marginal elements of ritual, but on the contrary places them at the center of ritual action, highlighting their linguistic and therefore ritual performativity. Ceravolo develops an investigation of a phenomenon long neglected by both the history of religions and Assyriological studies. The historiolae, mostly treated as ritual “appendices” or literary embellishments, find here a new dignity and a central role.
2One of the great merits of the work is the adoption of an interdisciplinary perspective, merging expertise from the history of religions, religious anthropology, and pragmatic linguistics with a careful analysis of cuneiform texts, both in Akkadian and Sumerian. This approach, rarely used in the study of Mesopotamian ritual texts, demonstrates Ceravolo’s ability to bring new keys to an already known but not always fully understood material. The author places the historiolae in their ritual context, showing their practical and semantic relevance within Mesopotamian healing, building, and exorcism rituals. For example, in healing rituals, historiolae such as the well-known one of the “toothache worm” are recited to attribute to myth the task of directly intervening on the sickness, connecting the present, the hic et nunc of the ritual event, with mythical time. The illud tempus not only provides an antecedent that legitimizes the healing action, but also transforms the ritual into an effective act, capable of “doing something” through the use of words.
3The book is divided into three main parts, taking the reader on a journey from the general to the particular, concluding with a restatement of the initial reflections. The first part of the work, “Genesi e sviluppo dell’historiola,” deals with the theoretical definition of the historiola and its development in the history of historical-religious and anthropological studies. Ceravolo provides a thorough analysis of the origin of the term, which derives from the Latin historia (tale, narration), but only in modern times took on the meaning of “little story” associated with magical-religious rituals. The author highlights how, although the term has been present in philological studies for some time, the very concept of historiola as a functional and performative component of ritual is a relatively recent acquisition in historical-religious studies. Ceravolo explores the history of this term, highlighting how it has only recently been received as an autonomous analytical category, unlike other concepts such as “myth” and “ritual” that have had a long tradition of study. Of particular interest is the treatment of the relationship between myth and ritual. Ceravolo addresses the long scholarly debate that has pitted those who see ritual as primary against myth and vice versa. In this context, the author redefines the historiola as a junction between these two categories, showing that it is neither an appendage of myth nor a mere tool of ritual, but a central element that possesses intrinsic power.
4The second part of the book, “Dal generale al particolare,” focuses on the specific analysis of Mesopotamian historiolae. This chapter represents the heart of Ceravolo’s research, where the author tests the “general theory” of the historiolae, advanced in the first part de volume, by applying it to specific Mesopotamian ritual texts. Ceravolo examines a selected corpus of cuneiform texts, identifying different types of historiolae: from those related to healing rites to those connected to building rituals. Dialogic historiolae, such as those in the Marduk-Ea model, offer an example of how these narratives not only accompanied ritual, but served as a true performative “device” that connected the human world with the divine. A particularly illuminating case study is that of healing rituals. In these rituals, as the author shows, historiolae served not only to “explain” the origin of a disease, but actively participated in the healing process. By reciting the historiola during ritual, the exorcist was not merely recounting a myth but activating a performative process that contributed to therapeutic efficacy. Historiolae act as true ritual performative acts. In addition to healing rituals, Ceravolo analyzes other types of historiolae, such as those used in temple-building rituals. In this case, historiolae took the form of ritual cosmogonies, which linked the construction of the sacred building to the original act of the creation of the world by the gods. This mythical connection gave the ritual a cosmic significance and allowed human action to be legitimized in the divine context. The author demonstrates that historiolae were essential to confer meaning and power to ritual action, linking the present to mythical time and ensuring the participation of the gods in the process. Ceravolo also explores the use of historiolae in exorcistic rituals and magical practices. In these contexts, mythic narratives served to create a mythic precedent that legitimized the exorcist's action, allowing him or her to symbolically repeat the divine action in the present.
5In the third part, entitled “Ritorno al generale,” Ceravolo takes up the theoretical issues discussed in the first section and compares them with the data that emerged from the analysis of Mesopotamian texts. Here, the author further refines her definition of historiola, emphasizing how it cannot be reduced to a simple narrative form, but must be seen as a communicative act with a distinct pragmatic function. Historiola, often overlooked or reduced to embellishment, is here recognized as fundamental to the success of the ritual. An interesting aspect of this part is the reflection on the interplay between myth, ritual, and performativity. Ceravolo shows that the effectiveness of the historiola depends on its ability to create a bridge between mythic time and the ritual present. By reciting a historiola, the ritual operator symbolically reproduces a mythical event, the illud tempus, which serves as a model for ritual action in the present, the hoc tempus, through the process that anthropologist Ernesto De Martino calls “dehistoricization” of present elements in mythical time, but at the same time of demythologization of elements of myth in the ritual present. This process allows myth to become performative and directly influence reality.
6The volume also includes an appendix with a careful selection of cuneiform ritual texts accompanied by detailed translations and commentaries. This section is of crucial importance, as it allows the reader to come into direct contact with the primary sources on which Ceravolo’s analysis is based. The author not only provides accurate translations, but also an interpretive context that allows for a better understanding of the role of the historiolae within the rituals described. The appendix is thus a valuable support to the theoretical part of the volume.
7One of the most innovative aspects of the book is the author’s ability to go beyond the myth-ritual dichotomy that sees myth as descriptive narrative and ritual as pragmatic action. Ceravolo succeeds in showing how historiolae are a form of “narrative action,” integrating the mythic and practical aspects into a unique performative act. This approach is particularly fruitful and innovative for the study of Mesopotamian cultures. The work also highlights the centrality of speech in Mesopotamian culture. Ceravolo demonstrates that speech, and particularly mythic speech, possesses real and tangible power that can alter reality. Through the use of speech acts theory, the author reveals that words were not mere vehicles of meaning, but actions that “made events narrated happen.”
8In conclusion, Ceravolo’s book represents a fundamental contribution to the study of the history of ancient Near Eastern religions. The book stands out for the originality of its approach and the depth of its analysis, combining philological rigor and theories and methods of the history of religions and religious anthropology.
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Giole Zisa, « Marinella Ceravolo, L’historiola nella Mesopotamia antica. Mito, rito e performatività », Mythos [En ligne], 19 | 2025, mis en ligne le 01 novembre 2025, consulté le 13 décembre 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/mythos/8479 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/152u7
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