If you were ever saddened to learn that Santa Claus isn’t real (sorry), I am here to cheer you up by letting you know that the Ancient Mesopotamians believed in the existence of a fearsome toilet demon that could rise up out of the commode and attack a person at their most vulnerable. This was Sulak, aka “the Lurker,” aka “Dirty Hands,” who looked like a lion that walked upright, but attacked his victims by giving them diseases, medical strokes, or possessing them. One Old Babylonian text warns against using the lavatory (or “bīt musâti” aka “”fart-house” or “house of rinse/urine water”) in the autumnal month of Tasrītu, lest Sulak strike.
Wealthy Mesopotamians did have indoor lavatories, sometimes on pedestals and other times as mere holes-in-one ground. These could be filtered in different ways, including fancy pipes lined with ceramic rings that emptied into underfloor channels that flushed the waste away to a different space. One doubts these spaces smelled nice, and can imagine how easy it would have been to develop subconscious fears of being attacked from below. To combat terror of Sulak, the Mesopotamians used magical incantations, exorcism rituals, medical treatments, and use of figurines with protective magical properties.
The figurines portrayed centaurs with lions’ bodies, creatures that were thought to be able to take on the Sulak. One Babylonian text instructs those concerned about Sulak to “bury them (clay figurines of Lion Centaurs) at the doorway of the lavatory, left and right.”
You can see one of these benign lion-centaurs in combat with a Sulak demon in the Middle-Assyrian cylinder-seal in the picture here.
Source(s): “On Babylonian lavatories and sewers,” by A.R. George in _Iraq_, vol 77 (2015), pp 75-106. Image is from figure 12 in that article.
