The ancient rabbis instruct that “no one should venture out at night time on Wednesday or Saturday, for Agrath, the daughter of the demon Machloth, roams about accompanied by eighteen myriads of evil demons, each one of which has power to destroy.” The rabbis claim that the air, land and sea are full of demons, all bent on evil and destruction of man. In this respect the learned rabbis differ but little from the superstitious Koreans and Australian savages. The rabbis warn the pious Jew that “should he forget to fold his prayer cover, he is to shake it thoroughly next morning, in order to get rid of the evil spirits that have harbored there during the night.” The evil spirits are infinite in number. Thus the Talmudic authorities are in full accord with the ancient Babylonians, Assyrians, and with the lowest savages, ancient and modern, obsessed by the fear of spirits, by Demonophobia. One cannot help agreeing with the English anthropologist, Frazer, who after his study of the subject, arrives at the following conclusion: “In India from the earliest times down to the present day the real religion of the common folk appears always to have been a belief in a vast multitude of spirits of whom many, if not most, are mischievous and harmful. As in Europe beneath a superficial layer of Christianity a faith in magic and witchcraft, in ghosts and goblins has always survived and even flourished among the weak and the ignorant (and apparently cultivated) so it has been and so it is in the East (and we may say also in the West). Brahmanism, Buddhism, Islam may come and go, but the belief in magic and demons remains unshaken through them all, and, if we may judge of the future from the past, it is likely to survive the rise and fall of other historical religions. For the great faiths of the world, just in so far as they are the outcome of superior intelligence, of extraordinary fervor of aspiration after the ideal, fail to touch and move the common man. They make claims upon his intellect and his heart, to which neither the one nor the other is capable of responding. With the common herd who compose the great bulk of every people, the new religion is accepted only in outward show.... They yield a dull assent to it with their lips, but in their heart they never abandon their old superstitions (and fears of evil and mysterious miraculous agencies); in these they cherish a faith such as they can never repose in the creed which they nominally profess; and to these, in the trials and emergencies of life, they have recourse as to infallible remedies.” And he quotes Maxwell to the effect that “The Buddhists in Ceylon, in times of sickness and danger ... turn to demons, feared and reverenced in the same way as do ‘the Burmese, Talaings, and Malays.’”