Chapter IV
The Vampire in Assyria, the East, and some Ancient Countries
Among the elaborate and extensive demonology of Babylonia and Assyria the Vampire had a very prominent place. From the very earliest times Eastern races have always held that belief in the existence of dark and malignant powers, evil spirits and ghosts which is, we cannot doubt it, naturally implanted in the heart of man and which it remains for the ignorance and agnosticism of a later day to deny. The first inhabitants of Babylonia, the Sumerians, recognized three distinct classes of evil spirits, any one of whom was always ready to attack those who by any accident or negligence laid themselves open to these invasions. In particular was a man who had wandered far from his fellows into some haunted spot liable to these onsets, and Dr. R. Campbell Thompson tells us that this “is the interpretation of the word muttaliku, ‘wanderer,’ which occurs so often in the magical text to indicate the patient.”[1] Of the Babylonian evil spirits the first were those ghosts who were unable to rest in their graves and so perpetually walked up and down the face of the earth; the second class was composed of those horrible entities who were half human and half demon; whilst the third class were the devils, pure spirits of the same nature as the gods, fiends, who bestrode the whirlwind and the sand-storm, who afflicted mankind with plagues and pestilence. There were many subdivisions, and in fact there are few evil hierarchies so detailed and so fasciculated as the Assyrian cosmorama of the spiritual world.
The evil spirit who was known as Utukku was a phantom or ghost, generally but perhaps not invariably of a wicked and malevolent kind, since it was he whom the necromancers raised from the dead, and in an ancient Epic when the hero, Gilgamish, prays to the god, Nergal to restore his friend
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