Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

384 FISH IN OFFERINGS, AUGURIES, ETC.This whole passage ought, however, to be regarded not asa Penitential Psalm so much as " a ceremony for cleansing aman from tahu, when he wishes to see something in a dream.It finds close connection with the Levitical charm, originatingfrom sympathetic magic, e.g.for cleansing the leper or leproushouse," i.e. by the two doves, as in Leviticus xiv. 4.1Langdon asserts that in the Sumero-Babylonian religioneach individual in normal conditions was guided by a divinespirit or god (cf. the ^aXm^v of Socrates and the genius of theRomans). When a man was possessed by the powers of evilhe was estranged from his personal god, because some demonhad attacked or driven out the protecting deity from his body.In this ancient period there seems to be no moral element whateverin the case. If a man became tahii (which the eating offish in other countries than Assyria would involve), or possessedby some dangerous unclean power, which made him unholyand filled him with bodily or mental distress, this state cameabout solely because at some unguarded moment a demonhad expelled the indwelling god.The demon had to be exorcised by some method of atonement,of which the most important element was in Sumerianmagic water, in Hebrew blood. " In view of the great influencewhich Babylonian magic appears to have exerted upon theHebrew rituals, it is curious it did not succeed in banishingthis gross Semitic practice. Blood of animals does not occuras a cleansing element in Babylonia," an omission due apparentlyto the culture of the Sumerians " not permitting such crudeideas, and to their teaching those Semites with whom theycame in contact a cleaner form of magic." 2In addition to the demons or spirits described above we findothers, which could and, unless the proper rites were paid tothe dead, did affect the living. The greatest misfortune whichcould befall a man was to be deprived of proper burial. ^ His^ Semitic Magic (London, 1908), pp. 181, 186.* Babylonian Magic (Bologna, 1914), pp. 237-8.' " In Israel not to be buried was a terrible disgrace which one could hardlywish 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 harmno one." Cheyne's assertion in Encyl. Bibl. {op. cit.), p. 1041, seems to me