tos
said, in honey, were unresurrectably dead, dead to the earth, dead to
the Silver Sky. Yet though that was an article of faith, through a
paradox profoundly poetic, there was a belief equally general, in
ghosts, in hobgoblins, in men with the faces of ravens, in others with
the bodies of scorpions, and in the post-mortem persistence of girls
that died pure.

These latter, in searching for someone whom they might seduce, must
have afterward wandered into the presence of St. Anthony. Perhaps,
too, it was they who, as succubi, emotionalized the dreams of monks.
Yet, in view of Ishtar, they could not have been very numerous in
Babylon where, however, they had a queen, Lilit, the Lilith of the
_Talmud_, Adam's vampire wife, who conceived with him shapes of sin.
In these also the Babylonians believed, and naively they represented
them in forms so revolting that the sight of their own image alarmed
them away.

From these shapes or, more exactly, from sin itself, it was very
properly held that all diseases came. Medicine consequently was a
branch of religion. The physician was a priest. He asked the patient:
Have you shed your neighbour's blood? Have you approached your
neighbour's wife? Have you stolen your neighbour's garment? Or is it
that you have failed to clothe the naked? According to the responses
he prescribed.[27]

[Footnote 27: IV. R. 50-53. _Cf._ Delitzch: _op. cit._]

But the priest who was a physician was also a wizard. He peeped and
muttered, or, more subtly, provided enchanted philters in which
simples had been dissolved. These devices failing, there was a series
of incantations, the _Ritual of the Whispered Charm_, in which the
most potent conjuration was the incommunicable name. To that all
things yielded, even the gods.[28] But like the Shem of the Jews, it
was probably never wholly uttered, because, save to the magi, not
wholly known. In the formulae of the necromancers it is omitted, though
in practice it may have been pronounced.

[Footnote 28: Lenormant: La Magie chez les Chaldeens.]

Even that is doubtful. A knowledge of it conferred powers similar to
those that have been attributed to the Christ, and which the Sadducees
ascribed to his knowledge of the tetragrammation. A knowledge of the
Babylonian Shem was as potent. It served not only men but gods.
Ishtar, for purposes of her own, wanted to get into Aralu. In the
recovered epic of her descent, imperiously she demanded entrance:

Porter,