Langdon asserts that in the Sumero-Babylonian religion each individual in normal conditions was guided by a divine spirit or god (cf. the δαὶμων of Socrates and the genius of the Romans). When a man was possessed by the powers of evil he was estranged from his personal god, because some demon had attacked or driven out the protecting deity from his body. In this ancient period there seems to be no moral element whatever in the case. If a man became tabu (which the eating of fish in other countries than Assyria would involve), or possessed by some dangerous unclean power, which made him unholy and filled him with bodily or mental distress, this state came about solely because at some unguarded moment a demon had expelled the indwelling god.
The demon had to be exorcised by some method of atonement, of which the most important element was in Sumerian magic water, in Hebrew blood. “In view of the great influence which Babylonian magic appears to have exerted upon the Hebrew rituals, it is curious it did not succeed in banishing this gross Semitic practice. Blood of animals does not occur as a cleansing element in Babylonia,” an omission due apparently to the culture of the Sumerians “not permitting such crude ideas, and to their teaching those Semites with whom they came in contact a cleaner form of magic.”[975]
In addition to the demons or spirits described above we find others, which could and, unless the proper rites were paid to the dead, did affect the living. The greatest misfortune which could befall a man was to be deprived of proper burial.[976] His shade, ran the common belief, could not reach Arallū, but wandered disconsolately about the earth. When driven by pangs of hunger it perforce ate the offal or leavings of the street. As the Egyptians, to ensure the continued existence of the dead and his ka, provided sepulchral offerings (the depictments of which included fish[977]), so did the Babylonians, not only for a similar but also for the additional purpose of preserving themselves from torments.
To leave a body unburied was not unattended with danger to the living. The shade of the dead man might bewitch any person it met and cause him grievous sickness. The wandering shade of a man was called ekimmu, i.e. spectre. Only sorcerers possessed the power of casting a spell whereby the ekimmu might be made to harass a man. On the other hand, the spectre sometimes settled on a man of its own accord, in the hope that its victim would be driven to give it burial to free himself from its clutches.[978]
The Babylonian conception of the condition of the dead was an utterly joyless one. Arallū, or the House of the Dead, was dark and gloomy. Its dwellers never beheld the light of the sun, but sat in unchanging gloom. The Babylonians possessed no hope of a joyous life beyond the grave, nor did they imagine a paradise in which the deceased would live a life similar to that on earth.
The nature of the under-world can be gathered from the description given to Gilgamesh by the spirit of Enkidu risen from the grave (sometimes cited as an instance of necromancy), “the place where was the worm that devoured, and where all was cloaked in dust.”[979] The Hymn of the Descent of Ishtar into Hell goes farther:
“To the land whence none return, the place of darkness, To the house wherein he who enters is excluded from the light, To the place where dust is their bread and mud their food.”[980]
The very curious bronze of the Le Clerq collection in Paris, in which ichthyic garments and gods of the under-world, Arallū, occur, must be my excuse for this too lengthy and almost fishless digression on the Babylonian dead. It shows several figures, two clad in garments of the form of a fish, with their scales very visible.
Two explanations of the bronze have been offered. The first, hitherto generally accepted, suggests that the figures are representations of the gods of the under-world, or of the dead waiting on a sick person, together with some demons of the under-world and two priests wearing fishlike raiment.[981]
My friend Professor Langdon has furnished me with another explanation, more detailed and more interesting.