Such dubious coincidences, balanced by still more striking diversities, are but frail supports for the hypothesis of race-contact.
In Babylonian thaumaturgy nothing is more significant than the magic power of the Word, whether spoken or written: and the Word, as we have noted, was raised to a cosmic divine power and possessed inherent creative force.[295.4] This is only a reflection upon the heavens of the human use of the magical or mesmeric word or set of words. This use of them is found, indeed, all round the globe. What seems unique in the Mesopotamian culture is that religion, religious literature, and poetry should have reached so high a pitch and yet never have risen above or shaken off the magic which is its constant accompaniment. Men and gods equally use magic against the demons; the most fervid hymn of praise, the most pathetic litany, is only part of an exorcism-ritual; and so inevitably does the shadow of magic dog religion here that Dr. Langdon is justified in his conjecture[296.1] that in a great hymn to Enlil, which contains scarcely a prayer but chiefly ecstatic description of his power, the worshipper is really endeavouring to charge himself with higher religious magic by this outpouring. In fact, here and elsewhere, a magic origin for the practice of theologic exegesis may be obscurely traced; narrative might acquire an apotropaeic effect; thus tablets containing the narrative of the achievements of the plague-god, hung up before the houses, could avert pestilence,[296.2] or, again, the reading aloud the tablet narrating the victory of Shamash and Ramman over the seven demons who attacked the moon-god Sin served to defeat the seven demons by the same sympathetic magic as would be worked by a dramatic representation of that event.[296.3]
There is no record or hint that the Hellenes recited hymns to Demeter or wrote up passages of Homer to avert demons.
It belongs to the magic use of formulae that minute exactness in respect of every syllable is necessary to the power of the spell or the spell-prayer. An Assyrian king who is consulting the sun-god concerning success in a war with which he is threatened, prays that the ritual which the enemy may be employing may go wrong and fail; and in this context occurs the curious petition, “May the lips of the priest’s son hurry and stumble over a word.”[297.1] The idea seems to be that a single slip in the ritual-formulae destroyed their whole value; and such a view belongs to magic rather than to religion.
Now it is probable that in his earliest mental stage the Hellene had been in bondage to the religious magic of sacred formulae and sacred names; and as a tradition of that stage, the divine epithet whereby he appealed to his deities according to his needs retained always for him a mysterious potency; but otherwise we have no proof that he worked word-magic by means of his sacred texts.
Babylonian sorcery, whether legitimate or illegitimate, was intended to work upon or through demons; and its familiarity with the names and special qualities of demons is its peculiar mark. In the ritual of exorcism of the demons, idols play a prominent and often singular rôle. The following performance is probably unique: in the exorcism of disease two idols, male and female, were set up before the sick man, then the evil spirits of sickness are invited thus: “Oh ye all wicked, all evil, who pursue so-and-so, if thou art male, here is thy wife; if thou art female, here is thy husband.”[297.2] The intent of the exorciser seems to be to attract the demon of disease, of whose sex he is not sure, into one or the other of these images, and he lures it by amorous enticement into the figure of opposite sex to its own; having got the demon into the image, he doubtless takes it out and burns or buries it. Or the evil spirit may be attracted from the patient by means of its own image placed near him. One document prescribes various images of bestial form, all of which are to be taken by night to the bank of the river, probably that they may be thrown in and carry the impurity of sickness away.[298.1] Another shows us how to deal with Labartu, the daughter of Anu;[298.2] her image, made of clay, is placed above the head of the sick man, so as to draw her or her power out from him; it is then taken out, slain, and buried. And this exorcism is all the more notable because Labartu is rather an evil goddess than a mere demon, being styled in another text “August lady,” “Mistress of the dark-haired men.”[298.3] Such magical drama, in which the demon-image might be slain to annul its potency, seems characteristically Babylonian: it entered also into the ritual of the high gods. For, at the feast of the New Year, when Nebo arrived from Borsippa, two images are brought before him and in his presence decapitated with the sword. Dr. Langdon interprets them[298.4] as representing probably “the demons who aided the dragon in her fight with Marduk; they are the captive gods of darkness which ends with the Equinox.” This is dramatic magic helpful to the gods.
The elaboration of exorcism must have led to a minuter articulation of the demon-world; the exorciser is most anxious to know and discover all about his unseen foes: he gives them a name, a sex if possible, and a number: he says of the powerful storm-demons Utuk “they are seven, they are seven, they are neither male nor female, they take no wife and beget no children;”[299.1] for knowledge of the name or nature of the personality gives magic power.
Many of these examples, which might easily be multiplied, show us magic applied to private but beneficent purposes, the healing of disease, the exorcism of spirits of moral and physical evil. It was also in vogue for national purposes—for instance, for the destruction of the enemies of the king; one of our documents describes such a process as the making of a tallow-image of the enemy of the king and binding his face with a cord, so as to render the living foe impotent of will and speech.[299.2]
We have already noticed that the Babylonian gods themselves work magic, and that it was also worked on behalf of the gods.[299.3] And in the ritual-records much that might be interpreted as religion may find its truer account from the other point of view; for instance, the ritual of placing by the bedside of a sick man the image of Nergal or those of the “twins who overthrow the wicked Gallu”[299.4] might appear at first sight as a religious appeal to the deities to come to his aid; but as in form it is exactly similar to the use made on the same occasion, as noted above, of the images of demons, we may rather suppose that the intention was magical in this act also, and that the divine idols were supposed to combat the demon of sickness by their magical influence. Or, again, in part of the ritual of exorcism we find acts that bear the semblance of sacrifice, such as throwing onions and dates into the fire; but they were charged with a curse before thrown, and the act is more naturally interpreted as a magic transference of evil.[300.1]
For the purpose of the exorcism, to deliver a “banned” person, the high god, Marduk or another, might be called in; but Marduk also works the effect by magic: a rope is woven by Ishtar’s maidens, which Marduk (or his priest) turns round the head of the sufferer, then breaks it through and throws it out into the desert.[300.2] This looks like symbolic magic; the knotted rope represents the ban, which is then broken and thrown away.