In Babylonian thaumaturgy nothing is more significant than the magic power of the Word, whether spoken or written: and the Word, as we have noted, was raised to a cosmic divine power and possessed inherent creative force.[295.4] This is only a reflection upon the heavens of the human use of the magical or mesmeric word or set {296} of words. This use of them is found, indeed, all round the globe. What seems unique in the Mesopotamian culture is that religion, religious literature, and poetry should have reached so high a pitch and yet never have risen above or shaken off the magic which is its constant accompaniment. Men and gods equally use magic against the demons; the most fervid hymn of praise, the most pathetic litany, is only part of an exorcism-ritual; and so inevitably does the shadow of magic dog religion here that Dr. Langdon is justified in his conjecture[296.1] that in a great hymn to Enlil, which contains scarcely a prayer but chiefly ecstatic description of his power, the worshipper is really endeavouring to charge himself with higher religious magic by this outpouring. In fact, here and elsewhere, a magic origin for the practice of theologic exegesis may be obscurely traced; narrative might acquire an apotropaeic effect; thus tablets containing the narrative of the achievements of the plague-god, hung up before the houses, could avert pestilence,[296.2] or, again, the reading aloud the tablet narrating the victory of Shamash and Ramman over the seven demons who attacked the moon-god Sin served to defeat the seven demons by the same sympathetic magic as would be worked by a dramatic representation of that event.[296.3] There is no record or hint that the Hellenes recited hymns to Demeter or wrote up passages of Homer to avert demons. It belongs to the magic use of formulae that minute exactness in respect of every syllable is necessary to the power of the spell or the spell-prayer. An Assyrian {297} king who is consulting the sun-god concerning success in a war with which he is threatened, prays that the ritual which the enemy may be employing may go wrong and fail; and in this context occurs the curious petition, “May the lips of the priest’s son hurry and stumble over a word.”[297.1] The idea seems to be that a single slip in the ritual-formulae destroyed their whole value; and such a view belongs to magic rather than to religion. Now it is probable that in his earliest mental stage the Hellene had been in bondage to the religious magic of sacred formulae and sacred names; and as a tradition of that stage, the divine epithet whereby he appealed to his deities according to his needs retained always for him a mysterious potency; but otherwise we have no proof that he worked word-magic by means of his sacred texts.