CHAPTER XLI
THE FISH OF TOBIAS—DEMONIC POSSESSION
The fish in Tobit, apart from its ichthyic, possesses two other points of interest, its magical and its medical power. As in Assyria we have found beliefs in magical charms very prevalent, and exorcisms of demons or devils accomplished by various methods, so with the Jews, especially with the Babylonian Jews, the interest in magical charms was very strong, and the means employed for exorcism very similar.
In both nations it is necessary to have some object into which the spirit may be attracted or driven, in point of fact a Leyden jar in which the malign influence may be isolated under control. It is all the same whether the devils are sent into the Gadarene swine or the jinni corked up in the brass bottle of Solomon. The disease (or oppressing devil) must be gently or forcibly persuaded to leave the human body and enter the dead animal or waxen figure close at hand, and so be brought into subjection, or by cleansing with water or fumigation (often with a censer) banished, and its possession or persecution of the person made of no effect.[1067]
As nowadays even Macaulay’s schoolboy wots little of the Apocrypha, a short résumé of the book of Tobit seems not amiss.
Tobit has become blind, and fallen on evil days in Nineveh; he bids his son Tobias set forth and fetch a sum of money deposited with Gabael in Media. He chooses as a trustworthy companion Azarias, who turns out to be no other than the angel Raphael, whom God, compassionating both Tobit’s plight and Sara’s subjection to a demon, has sent purposely from heaven.
On the journey Tobias (R.V.) “went down to wash himself in the Tigris and a fish leaped out of the river and would have swallowed him. But the angel said unto him, ‘Take hold on the fish.’” And the young man caught hold of the fish and cast it on the land. The angel bids him, “Cut the fish open, and take the heart, the liver, and the gall, and put them up safely,” giving as his reasons, “touching the heart and liver, if a devil or evil spirit trouble any, we must make a smoke thereof before the man or woman, and the party shall be no more vexed. As for the gall, it is good to anoint a man that hath white films in his eyes, and he shall be healed.” Of the healing of his father’s blindness we read later in xi. 11-13, where Tobias “strake of the gall on his father’s eyes.”
The great act of the drama, however, is staged in Ecbatana, where the travellers break their journey at the house of a kinsman Raguel, whose daughter Sara “had been given in marriage to seven husbands, but Asmodeus the evil spirit (or demon) slew them before they had lain with her.” Tobias, not to be daunted, marries Sara, not, however, before Raguel “took paper and did write an instrument of covenant (or marriage contract) and sealed it.”
“And when they had finished their supper, they brought Tobias in unto her. But as he went he remembered the words of Raphael, and took the ashes of the incense, and put the heart and the liver of the fish thereupon, and made a smoke therewith. But when the devil had smelled the smell he fled into the uppermost parts of Egypt, and the angel bound him” (viii. 1, 2, 3). Cf. Milton, P.L. iv. “Asmodeus of the fishy fume,” etc.