ABSTRACT
The demons issuing from the lower abyss had, like the sorcerers who held intercourse with them, a particular preference for the darkness in which they originated. They liked to profit by the gloom, and so to slip into the world and to work evil there. Darkness was itself a visible manifestation of the evil principle, as light was a manifestation of the good. The primitive Accadians appear to have had the same terror of the night as the Aryas of the Vedic ages ; in this idea they were very different from the Chaldaio-Babylonians of earlier times, who delighted in the sight of the starry firmament, and knew no higher, no more splendid expression of the divinity than those starry hosts to which their worship was addressed.
