[93] When a person, young or old, is dying, near relatives must not call out their names in case the soul may come back from the spirit world.  A similar belief still lingers, especially among women, in the Lowlands.  The writer was once present in a room when a child was supposed to be dying.  Suddenly the mother called out the child’s name in agonized voice.  It revived soon afterwards.  Two old women who had attempted to prevent “the calling” shook their heads and remarked:  “She has done it!  The child will never do any good in this world after being called back.”  In England and Ireland, as well as in Scotland, the belief also prevails in certain localities that if a dying person is “called back” the soul will tarry for another twenty-four hours, during which the individual will suffer great agony.

[94] A Journey in Southern Siberia, Jeremiah Curtin, pp. 103, 104.

[95] Vol. i, p. 305.

[96] Adi Parva section of Mahabharata, Roy’s trans., p. 635.

[97] Jastrow’s Aspects of Religious Belief in Babylonia, &c., p. 312.

[98] R.C.  Thompson’s trans.

[99] The Elder or Poetic Edda, Olive Bray, part i, p. 53.

[100] Babylonian Religion, L.W.  King, pp. 186-8.

[101] The Devils and Evil Spirits of Babylonia, R. Campbell Thompson, vol. i, p. 53 et seq.

[102] Omens and Superstitions of Southern India, E. Thurston, p. 124.

[103] The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, p. 110.

[104] Beowulf, Clark Hall, p. 14.

[105] Ezekiel, viii.

[106] Psalms, cxxvi.

[107] The Burden of Isis, J.T.  Dennis (Wisdom of the East series), pp. 21, 22.

[108] Religion of the Semites, pp. 412, 414.

[109] Egyptian Myth and Legend, pp. 45 et seq.

[110] Langdon’s Sumerian and Babylonian Psalms, pp. 319-321.

[111] Campbell’s West Highland Tales, vol. iii, p. 74.

[112] West Highland Tales, vol. iii, pp. 85, 86.

[113] If Finn and his band were really militiamen—­the original Fenians—­as is believed in Ireland, they may have had attached to their memories the legends of archaic Iberian deities who differed from the Celtic Danann deities.  Theodoric the Goth, as Dietrich von Bern, was identified, for instance, with Donar or Thunor (Thor), the thunder god.  In Scotland Finn and his followers are all giants.  Diarmid is the patriarch of the Campbell clan, the MacDiarmids being “sons of Diarmid”.

[114] Isaiah condemns a magical custom connected with the worship of Tammuz in the garden, Isaiah, xvii, 9, 11.  This “Garden of Adonis” is dealt with in the next chapter.

[115] Quotations are from Sumerian and Babylonian Psalms, translated by Stephen Langdon, Ph.D. (Paris and London, 1909), pp. 299-341.