The use of a common sign is significant as pointing to the common origin of the two classes of superior powers that thus continue to exist side by side.

A god is naught but a spirit writ large.

As already intimated in a previous chapter, a large part of the development of the Babylonian religion consists in the differentiation between the gods and the spirits,--a process that, beginning before the period of written records, steadily went on, and in a certain sense was never completed.

In the historical texts, the gods alone, with certain exceptions, find official recognition, and it is largely through these texts that we are enabled to distinguish between the two classes of powers, the gods and the spirits; but as a survival of a primitive animism, the demons, good, bad, and indifferent, retain their place in the popular forms of religion.

Several hundred spirits occur in the incantation texts, and almost as many more in other religious texts.