The Semitic scholar, R. H. Harper, writes of the Assyrians and Babylonians as follows: “There is no place in the universe where evil spirits can not penetrate. Every manner of evil and disaster is ascribed to them, from pestilence, fever, and the scorching wind of the desert, down to the trifles of life,—a quarrel, a headache, a broken dish, or a bad dream. They walk the street, slip into the door, get into the food, in short, are everywhere, and the danger from their presence is always imminent.... Corresponding to a widespread belief in demons was a similar belief in witchcraft. It was not at all strange that the demons, who worked in every possible corner of the universe, should take possession of human beings....”
The tablets excavated in the imperial library of Ashurbanipal show the spirit of the people even of the highest classes debased with delusions and religious hallucinations due to self-preservation and fear instinct, so dominant in man who, when common-sense departs from him, may be regarded as the irrational animal par excellence.
We may give the following illustration taken from one of the many tablets of the Shurpu series:
“The evil spirits like grass have covered the earth. To the four winds they spread brilliancy like fire, they send forth flames. The people living in dwellings they torment, their bodies they afflict. In city and country they bring moaning, small and great they make to lament. Man and woman they put in bonds, and fill with cries of woe. Man they fall upon and cover him like a garment. In heaven and earth like a tempest they rain; they rush on in pursuit. They fill him with poison, his hands they bind, his sides they crush.”
According to the ancient rabbis, a man should not drink water by night, for thus he exposes himself to the Shavriri, demons of blindness. What then should he do if he is thirsty? If there be another man with him, let him rouse him up and say: “I am thirsty,” but if he be alone, let him tap upon the lid of the jug (to make the demon fancy there is some one with him), and addressing him by his own name, let him say: “Thy mother bid thee beware of the Shavriri, vriri, riri, ri.” Rashi, a mediaeval commentator, says that by this incantation the demon gradually contracts and vanishes as the sound of the word Shavriri decreases.
The ancient rabbis instruct that “no one should venture out at night time on Wednesday or Saturday, for Agrath, the daughter of the demon Machloth, roams about accompanied by eighteen myriads of evil demons, each one of which has power to destroy.” The rabbis claim that the air, land and sea are full of demons, all bent on evil and destruction of man. In this respect the learned rabbis differ but little from the superstitious Koreans and Australian savages. The rabbis warn the pious Jew that “should he forget to fold his prayer cover, he is to shake it thoroughly next morning, in order to get rid of the evil spirits that have harbored there during the night.” The evil spirits are infinite in number. Thus the Talmudic authorities are in full accord with the ancient Babylonians, Assyrians, and with the lowest savages, ancient and modern, obsessed by the fear of spirits, by Demonophobia.
One cannot help agreeing with the English anthropologist, Frazer, who after his study of the subject, arrives at the following conclusion: “In India from the earliest times down to the present day the real religion of the common folk appears always to have been a belief in a vast multitude of spirits of whom many, if not most, are mischievous and harmful. As in Europe beneath a superficial layer of Christianity a faith in magic and witchcraft, in ghosts and goblins has always survived and even flourished among the weak and the ignorant (and apparently cultivated) so it has been and so it is in the East (and we may say also in the West). Brahmanism, Buddhism, Islam may come and go, but the belief in magic and demons remains unshaken through them all, and, if we may judge of the future from the past, it is likely to survive the rise and fall of other historical religions. For the great faiths of the world, just in so far as they are the outcome of superior intelligence, of extraordinary fervor of aspiration after the ideal, fail to touch and move the common man. They make claims upon his intellect and his heart, to which neither the one nor the other is capable of responding. With the common herd who compose the great bulk of every people, the new religion is accepted only in outward show.... They yield a dull assent to it with their lips, but in their heart they never abandon their old superstitions (and fears of evil and mysterious miraculous agencies); in these they cherish a faith such as they can never repose in the creed which they nominally profess; and to these, in the trials and emergencies of life, they have recourse as to infallible remedies.” And he quotes Maxwell to the effect that “The Buddhists in Ceylon, in times of sickness and danger ... turn to demons, feared and reverenced in the same way as do ‘the Burmese, Talaings, and Malays.’”
The Jews firmly believed in demoniacal agencies. “When the even was become, they brought unto Him many that were possessed with devils; and He cast out the spirits with His word, and healed all that were sick.” “And in the synagogue there was a man which had a spirit of an unclean devil; and he cried out with a loud voice.” “And devils also came out of many ..., and He rebuking them suffered them not to speak.” “And there was a herd of many swine feeding on the mountains.... Then went the devils out of the man, and entered into the swine, and the herd ran violently down a steep place, and were choked.” “Casting out devils” was a sure proof of divine mission.
Perhaps a quotation from the Talmud will make clear the fear of demons which obsesses the Jew: Abba Benjamin says, “if the eye were permitted to see the malignant spirits that beset us, we could not rest on account of them.” Abai, another sage, says: “They outnumber us, they surround us as the heaped up soil in our garden plots.” Rav Hunna says: “Every one has a thousand on his left side and ten thousand on his right.” Rava claims: “The crowding at the schools is caused by their (demons) pushing in; they cause the weariness which the rabbis experience in their knees, and even tear their clothes by hustling against them. If one would discover traces of their presence, let him sift some ashes upon the floor at his bedside, and next morning he will see their footmarks as of fowls on the surface. But if one would see the demons themselves, he must burn to ashes the after-birth of a first born black kitten, the offspring of a first-born black cat, and then put a little of the ashes into his eyes, and he will not fail to see the demons.”