The opening sentence of an unofficial Romanian prayer (molitvă) to exorcise the năjit – a worm-like demon that invades the head in order to cause toothache, headache, etc. – contains obscure refences to the năjit emerging from a "dried...
moreThe opening sentence of an unofficial Romanian prayer (molitvă) to exorcise the năjit – a worm-like demon that invades the head in order to cause toothache, headache, etc. – contains obscure refences to the năjit emerging from a "dried sea" and to the divine intercessor's "food being ready." A Neo-Babylonian formula for treating a demonic tooth-worm has many similarities with the Romanian historiola. The Akkadian text mentions that the worm had emerged from a marshland, swamp or mudflat and describes how ripe fruits were initially offered to it for food. The problematic opening of the Romanian text may preserve a garbled and highly condensed memory of this generative marsh/mud and ready-to-eat food. In addition, the genre of the Babylonian text – a cosmogony set at the dawn of creation – makes sense of an otherwise opaque description of the năjit as "the beginning of the beginnings and of all the diseases."