[974] Semitic Magic (London, 1908), pp. 181, 186.
[975] Babylonian Magic (Bologna, 1914), pp. 237-8.
[976] “In Israel not to be buried was a terrible disgrace which one could hardly wish for one’s enemy: the spirits of the unburied wandered restlessly about. Burial alone so bound the spirit to the body that it had rest and could harm no one.” Cheyne’s assertion in Encyl. Bibl. (op. cit.), p. 1041, seems to me hardly warranted, at any rate by the O.T. passages which he adduces in support of this statement, in attributing to Israel the idea of the unburied dead being condemned to miserable wandering. For the Greek conception see inter alia the Antigone of Sophocles.
[977] See Egyptian Book of the Dead (London, 1910), ch. LIII., with reference to the deceased being obliged, from lack of proper food in the under-world, to eat filth—“Let me not be obliged to eat thereof in place of the sepulchral offerings.” To provide food for the dead, asphodel was planted near tombs (Odyssey, XI. 539 and 573) by the Greeks. From Hesiod (Op. 41) we learn that the roots of the asphodel were eaten as a common vegetable, as was the mallow. Merry states that in the Greek islands, where customs linger longer than on the mainland, this “kind of squill is still planted on graves.” If the Homeric ‘mead of asphodel’ turns out, as some editors maintain, to have had a strictly utilitarian significance, how many poets and poetasters have mistaken ‘greens’ for ‘greenery!’
[978] King, Babylonian Religion (op. cit.), p. 45, and Babylonian Magic and Sorcery (London, 1896), pp. 119 ff., where the incantation appropriate for exorcising demons is set out.
[979] Gilgamesh here learns how infinitely better is the condition of those to whom the rites of burial have been paid, compared with that of those who have been unburied. R. F. Harper, Assyrian and Babylonian Literature (New York, 1901), 363 ff.
[980] The Hebrew conception of Sheol coincides in regarding it as “a land whence none return,” Job vii. 9-10; as “a place of darkness,” Job x. 21-22; as a place of “dust,” Psalm xxx. 9, and Job xvii. 16.
[981] Priests dressed as fish or with some fish-like raiments often attend the Sacred Tree (see Ward, op. cit., Nos. 687, 688, 689). These are held by some to be genii of the deep. In Ward, No. 690, two fish-men are guarding the Tree of Life.
[982] Compare the exorcism by Tobias of Sara’s demon in Tobit. Langdon, Babylonian Magic and Sorcery (op. cit.), p. 223, commenting on the difficulty, which Semitic philology does not clear up, as to whether a wizard is one who cuts himself (as Robertson Smith and most scholars suppose), or whether he is one who casts his spell by whispering or ventriloquy, holds that “from the Sumerian word and the Sumerian ideogram of the word uhdugga which means one who whispers as he casts saliva, we can settle at once the most primitive method of sorcery known to us.”
[983] Cf. with those of Moses and Sargon the stories of Gilgamesh King of Babylon (Ælian, XII. 22), of Semiramis Queen of Assyria (Diodorus Siculus, ii. 4), and of Karna in the Indian Epic of Mahabharata (Cheyne’s Traditions and Beliefs of Ancient Israel London, 1907), p. 519. “It has been conjectured,” writes Frazer (op. cit.), II. p. 454 ff, “that in stories like that of the exposure of Moses in the water (in this case, unlike most others, all supernatural elements are absent) we have a reminiscence of the old custom as practised by the Celtæ on the Rhine, and according to Speke by some Central African tribes in the last century, of testing the legitimacy of children by throwing them into the water to sink or swim; the infants which sank were rejected as bastards. In the light of this conjecture it may be significant that in several of these stories the birth of the child is represented as supernatural, which in this connection cynics are apt to regard as a delicate synonym for illegitimate.” On p. 454 he touches on the question whether Moses, the son of Amram by his (Amram’s) paternal aunt, was thus the offspring of an incestuous marriage, and therefore exposed on the Nile.