and protecting them from malign influences.  If they abandoned or forgot him, he avenged himself for their neglect by returning to torment them in their homes, by letting sickness attack them, and by ruining them with his imprecations:  he became thus no less hurtful than the “luminous ghost” of the Egyptians, and if he were accidentally deprived of sepulture, he would not be merely a plague to his relations, but a danger to the entire city.  The dead, who were unable to earn an honest living, showed little pity to those who were in the same position as themselves:  when a new-comer arrived among them without prayers, libations, or offerings, they declined to receive him, and would not give him so much as a piece of bread out of their meagre store.  The spirit of the unburied dead man, having neither place of repose nor means of subsistence, wandered through the town and country, occupied with no other thought than that of attacking and robbing the living.  He it was who, gliding into the house during the night, revealed himself to its inhabitants with such a frightful visage as to drive them distracted with terror.  Always on the watch, no sooner does he surprise one of his victims than he falls upon him, “his head against his victim’s head, his hand against his hand, his foot against his foot.”  He who has been thus attacked, whether man or beast, would undoubtedly perish if magic were not able to furnish its all-powerful defence against this deadly embrace.* This human survival, who is so forcibly represented both in his good and evil aspects, was nevertheless nothing more than a sort of vague and fluid existence—­a double, in fact, analogous in appearance to that of the Egyptians.

* The majority of the spells employed against sickness contain references to the spirits against which they contend—­“the wicked ekimmu who oppresses men during the night,” or simply “the wicked ekimmu,” the ghost.

With the faculty of roaming at will through space, and of going forth from and returning to his abode, it was impossible to regard him as condemned always to dwell in the case of terra-cotta in which his body lay mouldering:  he was transferred, therefore, or rather he transferred himself, into the dark land—­the Aralu—­situated very far away—­according to some, beneath the surface of the earth; according to others, in the eastern or northern extremities of the universe.  A river which opens into this region and separates it from the sunlit earth, finds its source in the primordial waters into whose bosom this world of ours is plunged.  This dark country is surrounded by seven high walls, and is approached through seven gates, each of which is guarded by a pitiless warder.  Two deities rule within it—­Nergal, “the lord of the great city,” and Beltis-Allat, “the lady of the great land,” whither everything which has breathed in this world descends after death.  A legend relates that Allat, called in Sumerian Erishkigal, reigned alone in Hades, and