THE FISH OF TOBIAS—DEMONIC POSSESSION
The fish in Tobit, apart from its ichthyic, possesses two other points
of interest, its magical and its medical power. As in Assyria we have
found beliefs in magical charms very prevalent, and exorcisms of demons
or devils accomplished by various methods, so with the Jews, especially
with the Babylonian Jews, the interest in magical charms was very
strong, and the means employed for exorcism very similar.
In both nations it is necessary to have some object into which the
spirit may be attracted or driven, in point of fact a Leyden jar in
which the malign influence may be isolated under control. It is all the
same whether the devils are sent into the Gadarene swine or the jinni
corked up in the brass bottle of Solomon. The disease (or oppressing
devil) must be gently or forcibly persuaded to leave the human body and
enter the dead animal or waxen figure close at hand, and so be brought
into subjection, or by cleansing with water or fumigation (often with a
censer) banished, and its possession or persecution of the person made
of no effect.[1067]
As nowadays even Macaulay’s schoolboy wots little of the Apocrypha, a
short résumé of the book of Tobit seems not amiss.
Tobit has become blind, and fallen on evil days in Nineveh; he bids his
son Tobias set forth and fetch a sum of money deposited with Gabael in
Media. He chooses as a trustworthy companion Azarias, who turns out
to be no other than the angel Raphael, whom God, compassionating both
Tobit’s plight and Sara’s subjection to a demon, has sent purposely
from heaven.
On the journey Tobias (R.V.) “went down to wash himself in the Tigris
and a fish leaped out of the river and would have swallowed him. But
the angel said unto him, ‘Take hold on the fish.’” And the young man
caught hold of the fish and cast it on the land. The angel bids him,
“Cut the fish open, and take the heart, the liver, and the gall, and
put them up safely,” giving as his reasons, “touching the heart and
liver, if a devil or evil spirit trouble any, we must make a smoke
thereof before the man or woman, and the party shall be no more vexed.
As for the gall, it is good to anoint a man that hath white films in
his eyes, and he shall be healed.” Of the healing of his father’s
blindness we read later in xi. 11-13, where Tobias “strake of the gall
on his father’s eyes.”
The great act of the drama, however, is staged in Ecbatana, where
the travellers break their journey at the house of a kinsman Raguel,
whose daughter Sara “had been given in marriage to seven husbands, but
Asmodeus the evil spirit (or demon) slew them before they had lain with
her.” Tobias, not to be daunted, marries Sara, not, however, before
Raguel “took paper and did write an instrument of covenant (or marriage
contract) and sealed it.”
“And when they had finished their supper, they brought Tobias in unto
her. But as he went he remembered the words of Raphael, and took the
ashes of the incense, and put the heart and the liver of the fish
thereupon, and made a smoke therewith. But when the devil had smelled
the smell he fled into the uppermost parts of Egypt, and the angel
bound him” (viii. 1, 2, 3). Cf. Milton, _P.L._ iv. “Asmodeus of the
fishy fume,” etc.
Dr. Gaster has given us a version, hitherto unpublished, in which
“Tobiyah took the heart of _a_ fish and put it in a censer and burnt
it under the clothes of Sarah. And Ashmedai (the demon) received the
smells and fled instantly.” This contra-demonical property in a fish
appears elsewhere, _e.g._ in the Macedonian charm, which prescribes
for one possessed the wearing of and the fumigation with the glands of
a fish, to ensure that “the demons will flee from him.”
The jealous passion of demons or devils for maidens colours Asian,
African, and European folk-lores. They lie in wait for married couples;
sternly guard their so-called brides.[1068] Otherwise they were usually
innocuous. Tobias argues with the angel, “If I go in unto her, I die
as the others before: for a wicked spirit loveth her, which hurteth
nobody, but those that come in unto her” (vi. 14).
According to the Testament of Solomon, Asmodeus (the demon) avows, “my
business is to plot against the newly wedded, so that they may not know
one another. I sever them by many calamities, and I waste away the
beauty of virgin women.” In Asmodeus we recognise a male counterpart
of Lilith and her dangerous relations with men. The demon, in fact,
regards the virgin as his own, himself as her true and constant lover,
and resents, prevents, or “avenges any infringement of his _jus primæ
noctis_.”[1069]
The misconception, evident in the last eight words of this learned
writer, as to what constituted the _jus primæ noctis_ prevails widely.
As the _jus_ is the child, strange as the parentage may appear, of
the tale of Tobias and Sara, it seems worth our while to notice the
strangely erroneous views held both as to the possessor of the _jus_
and the occasion of its exercise, and shortly to explain, even at the
risk of seeming to stray from fishing into folklore, the origin and the
establishment of the custom.
According to popular belief the superior or lord of the fee, among
other feudal privileges, possessed, as such, the vested right of
connection with the daughters of his tenantry or of holders of land
under him on the first night of their marriages. Some writers on the
French Revolution, indeed, indignantly class the wide and brutal
exercise of this right on chaste maidens by licentious _seigneurs_
as not the least, perhaps one of the most provocative, of the social
causes, which led to the detestation and subsequent massacre of the
_noblesse_ in many _départements_ and to the overthrow of the old
landed system!
But alas! “this sad old romance, this unchivalrous story” (to vary
_Lucille_) must go to the wall. The _jus, as thus conceived and
described_, never in fact existed anywhere in civilised Europe. The
figment of its ruthless exercise as a legal right by licentious
lordlings owes its existence to a vivid imagination uninfected by one
germ of truth, as Lord Hailes, M. L. Veuillot, and others clearly
demonstrate.[1070]
It must come as a severe shock to preconceived ideas to run up against
the dull facts of history, and thence discover that the _jus primæ
noctis_, so far from being the barbarous privilege of deflowering an
unwilling bride, was merely a right accorded by the Church to the
husband on the payment of a varying fee to the bishops, etc., for the
privilege of disregarding the ecclesiastical ordinance, which required
that his bride should remain in a state of virginity for one, two, or
three days![1071]
Continence for one night was first enjoined in the decree passed by the
Fourth Council of Carthage in 398 A.D.[1072] This, extended to “two or
three days,” figured not only in the Capitularies of Charlemagne,[1073]
but was received into the Canon Law, and was twice repeated in the
decretals of the Catholic Church.[1074]
But what, it may be fairly asked, has the _jus primæ noctis_ got to
do with our Tobias and Sara? The history of the connection deserves
tracing, not only to clear away its obscurity, but also to show how a
custom—important in result but based simply on a variant version of
Tobit—was by the Church early adopted and widely inculcated. The days,
during which the continence enjoined on the newly married could only be
disregarded if the husband had previously paid for the privilege a fee
to some religious authority, came to be known as “Tobias Days.”
No searching, however diligent, of the Septuagint or of our A. or R.
Versions, nor (it seems) of the Aramaic text of the tale of Tobit sheds
light on the origin of the custom or of the application of the name.
The Vulgate, however, which the Roman Church adopts, sets forth the
story of the abstinence of Tobias from Sara. “Then Tobias exhorted the
virgin, and said unto her: Sara, arise, and let us pray to God to-day,
and to-morrow, and the next day: because for these three nights we
are joined to God: and when the third night is over we will be in our
wedlock. For we are the children of the Saints, and we must not be
joined together like the heathen who know not God.”[1075]
From this (apparently) solitary and quite different version sprang the
custom of the “Tobias Days,” and the _jus primæ noctis_, of which the
usual conception is “a monstrous fable born of ignorance, prejudice,
and confusion of ideas.”[1076]
The custom of continence for varying periods probably springs from the
common widespread belief (of which _Tobit_ affords a Semitic example)
that demons lie in wait to harm newly-married couples, and from the
hope that if allowed free scope for making love to the bride their
jealous wrath might be appeased, or the danger, at any rate, minimised.
The alternative to appeasement was deception of the demon; whence women
sometimes disguised themselves as men, and even wore false beards!
We find, on returning from this semi-folklore excursion, Prof. Langdon
asserting that in Sumero-Babylonian religion each individual is guarded
by a divine spirit or god.[1077] He is called the “Man’s God,” and the
man is defined, in a religious sense, as a “Son of God.” But this term
applies to no females.
This can hardly be attributed to accident, for our sources of
information mention hundreds, even thousands, of men bewitched, and by
demonic force abandoned by their indwelling gods, _but never a woman_.
Women not infrequently figure as causing the condition of tabu, but
never as having fallen to the powers of devils, or witches, or as
being under the protection of a personal god. They never appear in the
private penitential psalms.
But when we recall the high position occupied by women, not only
in Babylonian society, but also in the eye of the civil law, which
regarded their rights, as often as not, equal to those of men, and that
women are often found as priestesses of religious orders, Langdon’s
statements, resting on recent discoveries, create grounds for surprise.
To explain the anomaly he conjectures that when the texts refer to
sinners, penitents, or sufferers, the title “son of his god” applies in
all probability also to women.
The book of Tobit, whether Persian in its source or Aramaic in its
original text, furnishes an example of demonic possession of a woman, a
Hebrew of the Hebrews.
The Jewish conception of demonic possession resembles, indeed probably
descends from, the Babylonian. The “seven devils” of Matt. xii. 45,
Luke xi. 26, and viii. 2, simply reflect the evil spirits, called in a
famous incantation _The Seven_, who play no small part in Babylonian
mythology.[1078]
The N.T. confines the instances of evil spirits possessing mankind—more
frequently in the psychical rather than in the physical sense—to the
Gospels and the Acts, which illustrate demonic possession of women
by (_inter alias_) the Canaanitish woman (Matt. xvi. 22) and Mary
Magdalene, “from whom seven devils had gone out” (Luke viii. 2).[1079]
FOOTNOTES:
[1067] Cf. R. Campbell Thompson, _Semitic Magic_, p. 18. Not analogous
but not unakin seems the passage in Theocritus (_Idyll_, II. 28-9) of
the love-slighted maiden melting the wax, “so that Delphis may be soon
wasted by my love.” Diaper (in his _Nereides or Sea Eclogues_) imitates
the scene, but for the waxen image of the lover and its wasting,
substitutes a poor dog-fish, which is pierced so as to torture Phorbas
by proxy. Cf. Virgil, _Ecl._, VIII. 80.
[1068] J. G. Frazer, _Folk-Lore in the Old Testament_ (London, 1918),
520 ff.
[1069] R. Campbell Thompson, _Semitic Magic_ (London, 1908), pp. 74-75.
[1070] _Annals of Scotland_ (Edinburgh, 1797), III. Appendix 1, pp.
1-21; _Le Droit du Seigneur_ (Paris 1864), 191 ff., 232-243, and 276
ff. As to the supposed exception owing to the mythical law by that
mythical king, Evenus or Eugenius, by the provisions of which according
to Boece (who in his _History of Scotland_, published in 1527, seems to
have been the first to resurrect or create the law, and the monarch)
landlords were permitted to “deflower the virgin brides of their
tenantry,” see Cosmo Innes’s _Lectures on Legal Antiquities_, 1872, “in
Scotland there is nothing to ground a suspicion of such a right,” and
J. G. Frazer, _op. cit._, vol. I. pp. 485-493.
[1071] See the judgment delivered in 1409 in the case brought to the
Bishop of Amiens against the Mayor, etc., of Abbeville to establish
his right to receive such fees, which were “sometimes ten, sometimes
twelve, sometimes twenty Parisian sous.”
[1072] See Martine, _de Antiq. Eccles. Ritibus_, I. ix. 4.
[1073] J. P. Migne, _Patrologia Latina_ (Paris, 1862), tom. I., p. 859,
par. 463.
[1074] Lord Hailes, _op. cit._, iii. 15.
[1075] Tobit, viii. 4 and 5 (Douai version). The fatuity of his
reasoning, although with seven predecessors slain by the demon much
must be pardoned to Tobias, is obvious, when we discover that the
practice of deferring the consummation of marriage for a certain time
is older than Tobit and Christianity, and has been observed by heathen
tribes, not on any ascetic principle, in many parts of the world.
Hence, “we may reasonably infer that far from instituting the rule and
imposing it on the pagans, the Church, on the contrary, borrowed it
(like much else) from the heathen, and sought to give it a scriptural
sanction by appealing to the authority of the angel Raphael.” Frazer,
_op. cit._, I. 505.
[1076] The whole question is fully treated by J. G. Frazer, _op.
cit._, vol. I., pp. 485-530, and _Adonis, Attis, and Osiris_, 3rd ed.,
vol. I., pp. 57-60. Some writers hold that the period of continence
originated at an ancient time when it was deemed advisable that the
deflowering should be effected by a god or his representatives—In
Israel the Sacred Men—so that the woman should receive strength to bear
children to her husband. For the practice they rely on Hosea iv. 14,
and for the deferment to the seventh night on Gen. xxix. 27, and in the
correction of the reading in Judges, xiv. 18, from “before the sun went
down” to “before he went into her chamber.” The evidence to my mind is
far from convincing.
[1077] _Babylonian Magic_ (London, 1914), pp. 223-224, and _Le Poème
Sumérien_, already cited, p. 72, note 3.
[1078] Maspero, _Dawn of Civilisation_, pp. 634, 776.
[1079] It would seem that the Babylonians intelligently, if
unconsciously, anticipated our law of germs, for “the doctrine of
disease was that the swarming demons could enter a man’s body and cause
sickness.” On a fragment of a tablet, Budge has found six evil spirits
mentioned by name, each of which specialised in attack, the first going
for the head, and so on. See _Encyc. Bibl._, 1073.