A sprinkling of ashes on the ice drove away evil spirits, and there were incantations and songs when leaving shore, when sighting the whale, and before throwing the spear, all of them songs that the "great kashak (priest)" sang when he created the whale.
More down-to-earth is "Kinaynahora" (which sounds at once like a Japanese place name and a Yiddish incantation to ward off the evil eye).
When the trapdoor to the cellar mysteriously flies open during dinner, Ash and Scotty go down to investigate and find the Naturon Demonto, a Sumerian version of the Book of the Dead, along with a tape recording of incantations, which, when played, unleashes evil demons and spirits.
In such cases, the expert in white magic, the āšipu or mašmašu, was able to help both in diagnosing the cause of the evil and in performing the appropriate rituals and incantation to fight it off.
Silvia Jimenez did look like a Duncan fury as her evil counterpart, but was persuasive in her witchlike incantations.
The treatment then applied was to lure the errant soul back to its proper habitat within the body or to extract the evil intruder, be it dart or demon, by counterspells, incantations, potions, suction, or other means.
There was a significant amount of translation from Sumerian; translations include incantation series such as the Utukki lemnuti ("The Evil Spirits"), laments for destroyed temples, penitential psalms, and others.
The apocalypse is just as guaranteed in Nina Simone's 22nd Century, but the song's swirling incantations - "Man became his eagle, man became his evil" - seem all the more striking for being part of such an awesome and beautiful piece of music.
They whispered incantations into each corner, marking a boundary to keep out evil spirits.
