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 fumiga- 
tion (often with a censer) banished, and its possession or 
persecution of the person made of no effect.1 
As now-a-days 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 
1 Cf. R. Campbell Thompson, Semitic Magic, p.18. Not analogous but not 
unakin seems the passage in Theocritus (Idyll, II. 28-9) of the love-slighted 
maiden melting the wax, ‘‘ so that Delphis may be soon wasted by my love.” 
Diaper (in his Nereides or Sea Eclogues) imitates the scene, but for the waxen 
image of the lover and its wasting, substitutes a poor dog-fish, which is pierced 
so as to torture Phorbas by proxy. Cf. Virgil, Ecl., VIII. 80. 
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