Lord, all demons and evil spirits who eat flesh and drink blood: who crush the bones and seduce the children of men; drive them away, O Lord, by the power of these thy names and by the prayer of thy holy Disciples, from thy servant.” In an even more curious Syriac exorcism the Seven Spirits are described in detail almost exactly as they were pictured by the earlier inhabitants of Mesopotamia. The charm is to protect the flocks and herds, and it may be noted that there has come down to us an Assyrian protective incantation which is almost exactly similar. The Syriac runes go thus: “For the fold of cattle. ‘Seven accursed brothers accursed sons! destructive ones, sons of men of destruction! Why do you creep along on your knees and more upon your hands?’ And they replied, ‘We go on our hands, so that we may eat flesh, and we crawl along upon our hands, so that we may drink blood.’ As soon as I saw it, I prevented them from devouring, and I cursed and bound them in the name of thy Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, saying: ‘May you not proceed on your way, nor finish your journey, and may God break your teeth, and cut the veins of your neck, and the sinews thereof, that you approach not the sheep nor the oxen of the person who carries (sc. these writs)! I bind you in the name of Gabriel and Michael, I bind you by that Angel who judged the woman that combed (the hair of) her head on the eve of Holy Sunday. May they vanish as smoke from before the wind for ever and ever. Amen.’ ”
The twenty-second formula of the Cuneiform Inscription of Western Asia, which was published by Sir Henry Rawlinson and Mr. Edwin Morris in 1866 contains the following curse against a Vampire:
The phantom, child of heaven,
Which the gods remember,
The Innin (hobgoblin) prince
Of the lords
The …
Which produces painful fever,
The vampire which attacks man,
The Uruku multifold
Upon humanity,
May they never seize him!
The earliest Vampire known is that depicted upon a prehistoric bowl, an engraving of which has been published in
