But although Tiamat was slain, the everlasting battle between the forces of good and evil was ever waged in the Babylonian world.  Certain evil spirits were let loose at certain periods, and they strove to accomplish the destruction of mankind and his works.  These invisible enemies were either charmed away by performing magical ceremonies, or by invoking the gods to thwart them and bind them.

Other spirits inhabited the bodies of animals and were ever hovering near.  The ghosts of the dead and male and female demons were birds, like the birds of Fate which sang to Siegfried.  When the owl raised its melancholy voice in the darkness the listener heard the spirit of a departed mother crying for her child.  Ghosts and evil spirits wandered through the streets in darkness; they haunted empty houses; they fluttered through the evening air as bats; they hastened, moaning dismally, across barren wastes searching for food or lay in wait for travellers; they came as roaring lions and howling jackals, hungering for human flesh.  The “shedu” was a destructive bull which might slay man wantonly or as a protector of temples.  Of like character was the “lamassu”, depicted as a winged bull with human head, the protector of palaces; the “alu” was a bull-like demon of tempest, and there were also many composite, distorted, or formless monsters which were vaguely termed “seizers” or “overthrowers”, the Semitic “labashu” and “ach-chazu”, the Sumerian “dimmea” and “dimme-kur”.  A dialectic form of “gallu” or devil was “mulla”.  Professor Pinches thinks it not improbable that “mulla” may be connected with the word “mula”, meaning “star”, and suggests that it referred to a “will-o’-the-wisp".[83] In these islands, according to an old rhyme,

    Some call him Robin Good-fellow,
      Hob-goblin, or mad Crisp,
    And some againe doe tearme him oft
      By name of Will the Wisp.

Other names are “Kitty”, “Peg”, and “Jack with a lantern”.  “Poor Robin” sang: 

    I should indeed as soon expect
    That Peg-a-lantern would direct
    Me straightway home on misty night
    As wand’ring stars, quite out of sight.

In Shakespeare’s Tempest[84] a sailor exclaims:  “Your fairy, which, you say, is a harmless fairy, has done little better than played the Jack with us”.  Dr. Johnson commented that the reference was to “Jack with a lantern”.  Milton wrote also of the “wandering fire”,

    Which oft, they say, some evil spirit attends,
    Hovering and blazing with delusive light,
    Misleads th’ amaz’d night wand’rer from his way
    To bogs and mires, and oft through pond or pool;
    There swallowed up and lost from succour far.[85]

“When we stick in the mire”, sang Drayton, “he doth with laughter leave us.”  These fires were also “fallen stars”, “death fires”, and “fire drakes”: 

    So have I seen a fire drake glide along
    Before a dying man, to point his grave,
    And in it stick and hide.[86]