CHAPTER XLI

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.