My current book project explores how material apotropaia depicting the Mesopotamian demons Lamaštu and Pazuzu were conceived as magically efficacious. Deploying a phenomenological approach, my research foregrounds the intersection of human–object relationships, materiality, presence, scale, and textual inscription with the goal of reconstructing the vibrant histories of these objects and their ritual function and animation. In focusing on the somesthetic responses to obsidian, bronze, and clay, as well as processes of making and transformations through usage, this project reshapes existing understandings of Assyrian perceptions of divine and demonic bodies, their representations within and outside of contexts of imperial art, as well as the materialities of intangibility and ephemerality in the first millennium BCE.