384 FISH IN OFFERINGS, AUGURIES, ETC. 
This whole passage ought, however, to be regarded not as 
a Penitential Psalm so much as “a ceremony for cleansing a 
man from tabu, when he wishes to see something in a dream. 
It finds close connection with the Levitical charm, originating 
from sympathetic magic, e.g. for cleansing the leper or leprous 
house,”’ 7.e. by the two doves, as in Leviticus xiv. 4.1 
Langdon asserts that in the Sumero-Babylonian religion 
each individual in normal conditions was guided by a divine 
spirit or god (cf. the daiuwy 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 what- 
ever 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 atone- 
ment, 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.”’ 2 
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.3 His 
1 Semitic Magic (London, 1908), pp. 181, 186. 
2 Babylonian Magic (Bologna, 1914), pp. 237-8. 
3 “Tn 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 
