d
to conjure the plague-demon, the demon who was afflicting the eye,
the heart, the head, or any other part of the body. Assertions are
not wanting in the cuneiform literature that beliefs and practices of
this kind formed no part of the true religion of Babylonia, and some
scholars regard it as a late degeneration. The analogy of similar
cases points, however, to the conclusion that magic is everywhere an
early form of religion which is only overshadowed, not killed, when a
great religion arises, and which tends to reappear. It may be said
that there is no evidence of any break in Babylonian religion; if the
Sumerians yielded to the Semites, this led to no religious
revolution; the religion is Semitic from first to last.

2. Animals.--A step above this trafficking with spirits is the
worship of animals, which Mr. Sayce considers to have been an early
form of Babylonian religion, and to afford an explanation of various
features in it. Like the gods of Egypt and those of Greece, many of
the gods of Babylon have animal emblems; this appears both in the
representations of them and in their legends. The winged bulls and
eagle-headed men of Babylonian art represent the same rise of the
gods which we know to have taken place in Egypt, from the animal to
the semi-human, and then to the fully human form. An intermediate
stage in Babylonia is that the god stands on the back of the animal
with which presumably he was formerly identified. We have an Assyrian
Dagon whose head and shoulders are covered with a fish's skin; we
have gods and goddesses who are human figures with the exception of
their wings; we have winged dragons; we have the great bulls with
human head and wings which stood as guardian deities to ward off evil
spirits at the portal of a palace. The following animals were also
connected with gods: the antelope, the serpent, which came to be the
embodiment of cunning and wickedness, the goat, the pig, the vulture.
We thus see that the rise from zoomorphism to anthropomorphism which
the Greeks afterwards carried to the highest point attainable by the
resources of art, began in Babylonia.

Like all early religions, that of Babylonia is broken up into a
multiplicity of local worships. There is no common system, but each
place has its own god or gods and its own sacred rites. In Egypt we
shall find reason to believe that this state of matters had its
origin in an early totemistic arrangement of society; whether the
same