From the Vault: The Necromantic Urge, Part 1

In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore the historic and psychological origins of necromancy: the ancient practice by which shamans, wizards and sorcerers sought communication with the dead. (Part 1 of 3, originally published 09/28/2023)

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I am Joe McCormick, and hey, Rob and I
are out this week for Fall Break, so we're bringing
you a few episodes from the vault. This is part
one of our series on necromancy, originally published September twenty eighth,
twenty twenty three.

Speaker 1 (00:25):
All right, let's jump right in. My heart is made
a necromancer's glass, where homeless forms and exile phantoms team,
Where faces of forgotten sorrows gleam and dead despairs, archaic
peer and pass gray longings of some weary heart that
was possessed me, and the multiple supreme, unwildered hope and

(00:48):
star in blazoned dream of questing armies, ancient queen and
lass risen vampire like from out the wormy mold, deep
in the magic mirror of my heart, behold their parish beauty,
and depart and now from black Ophelia and far and cold,
swimming in deathly light on charnal Sky's the enormous ghosts

(01:12):
of bygone worlds arise.

Speaker 3 (01:18):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (01:27):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your mind. My name
is Robert.

Speaker 2 (01:30):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick. And to continue a
stuff to blow your mind tradition, we are disregarding the
traditional Gregorian calendar and we have decided that October begins
in late September. It often does for us, if you
don't know, we do spooky content all October, and today

(01:50):
is the first day of that month long festival.

Speaker 1 (01:53):
That's right, I mean, yeah, Halloween has already begun. There's
no doubt about it. I'm going to haunt it house
tomorrow night. So it's begun. It has begun. And so
we kicked off this episode. This is going to be
the first of I believe two episodes. We'll see how
it goes. Regarding necromancy, that was a reading from the
early twentieth century poem Necromancy by the weird fiction, horror

(02:17):
and fantasy rider Clark Ashton Smith.

Speaker 2 (02:19):
Now, I actually suggested this topic because I became interested
in it when we were doing an episode a while back.
I think it was our series on oil and Water.
We were mainly focusing there on legends about how if
you pour oil and water it will settle the waves,
and how to some extent that is actually scientifically true.

(02:40):
So if you haven't heard that series, go back and
listen to it. It'll be a treat. But in that
series I did end up going on a large digression
about necromancy in the Hebrew Bible, and it got me
thinking about the idea that necromancy. When people use that
word today, they're almost always talking about a sort of
Dungeon and Dragons sorcerer that raises the dead and commands

(03:04):
them as a sort of shambling thrall of some sort,
whereas in the traditional understanding, necromancy means something different, and
it's usually a reference to the practice of divination with
the help of the dead, consulting the dead for information.
And that sort of gap in meanings between the popular
understanding and the original understanding I thought was very interesting

(03:27):
and maybe worth plowing into the history a bit. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (03:30):
Yeah, because if you're familiar with Dungeons and Dragons necromancers,
you know that within Dungeons and Dragons, this is a
magic practitioner who specializes in spells of the necromancy spell class,
So things like animate Dead, finger of Death, chill Touch,
that sort of thing. You know, lots of undead ish
magical spells and abilities, and the presentation of necromancers in

(03:53):
D and D has of course influenced tons of fantasy
and sci fi properties over the years. So there's this
strong pop culture echo of the dead raising necromancer.

Speaker 2 (04:03):
Now, I think, aligning with the traditional understanding of necromancy,
you do have a spell in Dungeons and Dragons which
is speak with Dead, which is almost always used for
necromancy purposes. It's like, you need to get some information
out of this corpse. And despite the evil connotations of
necromancy in general, I think anybody can use this spell.
Like in Balder's Gate, I have my very lawful, good

(04:25):
wizard speaking with dead most of the time.

Speaker 1 (04:29):
Yeah. I think one of the interesting things to keep
in mind about necromancy we'll probably get into this some more,
is that this idea of like speaking with the dead.
You know, it's like the medieval Christian experience and prohibition
against this sort of thing. I kind of cast a
long shadow where you know, this idea that you shouldn't

(04:50):
attempt to speak with the dead. You don't know what
we'll speak back, because speaking with the dead is not
possible by the rules of laws of God, as they
understood it to be, and therefore you know, it was
just dangerous to even think about such a thing. So
that'll be worth keeping in mind here. But the Dungis
and Dragon's idea of the necromancer, of course, you're all

(05:12):
on various traditions as well, including the discussion of necromancers
in necromancy and pre existing fantasy and weird fiction, including
that of Clark Ashton Smith, whose poem started off this episode.
For instance, he had a story titled The Empire of
the Necromancers from nineteen thirty two that involved a pair
of kind of like rogue necromancers who get exiled from

(05:36):
one kingdom, and so they go into this kingdom of
this deceased kingdom of tombs and start raising up people
to serve as their servants, and of course they end
up rising against them. That sort of.

Speaker 2 (05:47):
Thing is kind of a buddy comedy.

Speaker 1 (05:50):
No, no, it's it's no, you're not. You don't really
sympathize with these necromancers. They're awful and you're rooting for
the dead to overcome them the whole time, and so
it's satisfying when they do. It's also worth noting that j. R.
Tolkens the Hobbit features whispers of the mysterious necromancer in Mirkwood.
I think little is made out of this in the text,

(06:12):
but I think we're to understand that this is an
incarnation of the dark Lord Saarn prior to his return
to Mordor, and his final incarnation is the all Seeing Eye.
As to what sort of literal necromancy he might be
up to in Mirkwood, I don't know that we have
a clear answer on that.

Speaker 2 (06:29):
That's a good question. I don't know if Sauron would
be raising the dead to obtain information or for divinatory purposes.
I think he mainly does go more in the D
and D direction of like he raises what are they called,
you know, the ring rays. I guess those are those
are undead wraiths or revenants of some sort. They are
dead kings who are brought back to do his bidding.

Speaker 1 (06:51):
Yeah. Yeah, so that's that's necromancy and the raising the
dead sense. But in terms of the speaking with the dead,
I don't know that he has much to talk about.

Speaker 2 (06:59):
With him except like, yeah, do as I command, you
kneel before Zod.

Speaker 1 (07:03):
Yeah, so we're going to be talking about several different
angles regarding necromancy here. But one article that I found
pretty insightful in places was this paper by the Czech
academic andre J Kapcar titled the Origins of Necromancy or
how we Learned to Speak to the Dead, and I

(07:24):
thought this was pretty insightful. He points out that the
ultimate roots of necromancy can be found in the socioeconomic
impact of human death on individuals and communities, especially small communities.
And this is one of those things that I think
can seem like an outrageous overstatement of the obvious at first,
but as social animals, a great deal depends on the

(07:45):
social bonds created and nurtured by individuals within a group,
and when an individual dies, it potentially throws all of
that into disarray unless the bonds they established in life
can be carried on after their death by one or
the other. So it becomes important to retain bonds of
some sort with one's ancestors, which is not necessarily necromancy obviously,

(08:09):
and even you know, to seek their guidance, which is
more directly what we might think of as necromancy, but
again not necessarily necromancy, which is is going to be
a distinction. We'll come back to again and again.

Speaker 2 (08:21):
This is interesting. It gets into something I think I'm
going to talk about more in Part two than in
this part, but about how some ancient descriptions of alleged
necromancy practices might actually be sort of external misunderstandings of
essentially ancestor cult practices, that what is actually sort of

(08:43):
the care of one's dead ancestors as a sort of
god of sorts is misinterpreted by people who don't practice
the same thing with regard to their own ancestors as
an attempt to get information or power from the dead.

Speaker 1 (09:01):
Yeah, I think there's a lot of that going on.
We'll get into some Chinese sources here in a bit,
And like, the word necromancer pops up a lot in
translations of Chinese sources, and sometimes, really it seems like
a lot of the time necromancer is used sort of
interchangeably and elegant variation for just wizard, you know, and

(09:23):
which can make searching for information a little bit tricky
at times, because you'll see the word necromancer, but they're
not really talking about anything regarding necromancy specifically. And yeah,
and again, to your point, you end up asking questions like, well,
what's the difference between a spirit medium and a necromancer.
What's the difference between veneration of ancestors and necromancy. You

(09:44):
could say it's just a personal branding issue, or it
depends on which side you're standing on. If you are
on the outside of that culture, particularly with a European
Western European background, again kind of descended from this culture
in which the idea of speaking to the dead, you know,
was evil or dark in some fashion, then it's easy

(10:06):
to level the word necromancer, which you know drips a
certain amount of dread.

Speaker 2 (10:11):
Yeah, I think another important thing to understand is that
especially in the Christian context, but really I think any
religious context that enforces a kind of priesthood based orthodoxy,
there is usually going to be more restrictions on individual
practice of magic, and necromancy would be one form of that.
And you know, there are other cultural contexts where it's

(10:33):
more of a kind of magical ritual free for all,
and people engage in all different kinds of practices to
gain information or blessing and it's not condemned by the
religious institutions.

Speaker 1 (10:44):
Right right, Well, anyway, to go back to CapCar here,
according to him in broad strokes, necromancy covers anything that
involves divination practices that involve the spirits of the dead.
And I should also stress that I think he's using
the term divination here as well as its textbook definition
doesn't necessarily mean knowledge about the future, but can also

(11:06):
refer to the access of hidden knowledge, you know, the
interpretation of omens and so forth. So anytime you're trying
to find something out by speaking with a spirit of
a dead person, then that is broadly speaking, necromancy.

Speaker 2 (11:23):
Yeah, that's my understanding too, especially how it's used in
the academic literature as opposed to the popular fantasy.

Speaker 1 (11:29):
Yeah. Now, of course, necromancy is just a word, and
he also breaks down the origins of the word as follows.
So it's a seventeenth century English derivation of the Italian
word necromancia, which means black magic, which comes from the
Latin word necro mantia, meaning the same thing. The Latin
here borrows from the pre classical Greek word necromantia, and

(11:53):
so we have necros meaning dead or corpse, and mantia
meaning divination. So we're talking about corpse divination or divination
of the dead.

Speaker 2 (12:03):
And that's why you can see the same suffix mancy
used in other forms of divination like silinomancy, you know,
divination by looking at the moon and so forth.

Speaker 1 (12:12):
Yeah, and he cites the first use of the word
necromancy in this context to Oregon of Alexandria from third
century CE. He is saying the following, attributing it to
Simon the Magus quote, by means of ineffable a duration,
I called up the soul of an immaculate boy who

(12:33):
had been put to a violent death, and caused it
to stand by me. And by its means, whatever I
commanded is affected, and the soul, freed from the body,
possesses the faculty of fore knowledge. Whence it is called
forth for necromancy. This particular quote, it's from the Recognitions
of Clement, and it looks like it's from this is

(12:55):
mentioned in a book that he cites from nineteen ninety
five by Robertson Donaldson. Okay, but I guess it's important
to drive home, like it's kind of like three different
levels of talking about necromancy. It's like earliest if you're
looking for like the roots of it, Like how far
back can you go and find something that is described

(13:15):
with the word necromancy or necromancer. How far back can
you go to something that is being described that matches
these prerequisites for necromancy. And then ultimately, and we'll maybe
get into this later, like, what are some things in
the archaeological record that you can point to and say, well,
that might be something like necromancy, that might be an

(13:38):
example of some sort of practice that involved seeking guidance
or wisdom from the dead. Ah.

Speaker 2 (13:44):
Yes, because there are a lot of artifacts that without
literary sources to really explain what was done with them,
you can't be sure, but they're suggestive of possible practices
having to do with consulting the dead.

Speaker 1 (13:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (14:06):
Now, in this series, we're going to talk about examples
of necromancy or alleged necromancy in different times and places
throughout history. Let's see, I had some stuff today about
necromancy and ancient Mesopotamia, and Rob, I know you had
some stuff about in China. Do you want to do
China first?

Speaker 1 (14:24):
Sure? Yeah, I mean it is Auto Moon festival and everything,
So maybe we'll start with a Chinese example. So I
guess the first thing to point out is that we
should remind ourselves of the importance of ancestor veneration and
Chinese traditions. And this is by no means unique to
just Chinese traditions, but it is incredibly important, And I

(14:46):
suppose we should also remind ourselves that modern and ancient
people alike are capable of having multiple, even conflicting ideas
concerning the dead and the possibility of an afterlife. So
this may be important later on because again, in the
same way that you can have someone who doesn't logically
believe in ghest it doesn't logically believe you can contact
the spirit world, but that same individual, you know, given

(15:09):
certain emotional stresses, may seek out a medium and try
and find some solace there that sort of thing, Or
we can just sort of casually have multiple ideas about
the afterlife.

Speaker 2 (15:18):
Yeah, and well, while you're emphasizing the multiple ideas that
can exist within a single person, of course, it's even
more true of a populace across time. Like you know,
asking like what did ancient Chinese people or what did
ancient Mesopotamian people think about what happens after death? Is
kind of like asking what do Americans think about what
happens after death? I mean, you could represent you can

(15:41):
explain views that are commonly found, that some views are
going to be much more frequently believed than others. But
there's no single answer to that. There are a range
of beliefs, and so if you talk in generalities, you
can only talk based on the sources you have, and
even then that's probably only going to be talking at
best about like majorities of people or some commonly held ideas,

(16:03):
not about what everyone believed all the time.

Speaker 1 (16:06):
That's right. Yeah, we're dealing with a great deal of geography, culture,
and time when talking about like Chinese, even ancient Chinese
concepts regarding the dead. But I think it's safe to
say a certain amount of guidance by and communication with
is baked into the whole concept. Though the degree to
which this is this angle is emphasized is going to vary.

(16:29):
So veneration of ancestors does not equal necromancy. But that
doesn't mean there aren't some comparisons you could make, and
more to the point, it doesn't mean that there are
not examples of wizards in Chinese mythology and tradition who
are more expressly described as experts specialists with an ability
to communicate with or facilitate communication with the dead. And

(16:51):
by that you could classify them as quote unquote necromancers.
So again, that doesn't stop so many texts from described
wizards as necromancers, even though they're not necessarily doing anything
that is necromantic.

Speaker 2 (17:06):
Well yeah, and to people who listen to us often,
this should be obvious. But maybe it's worth saying that
when we use the term necromancer, we are not applying
any more attaching any moral ideas to that. It just
means literally somebody who's getting information from the dead, not
that that's good or bad. Whatever older sources might be
likely to I don't know, has some kind of stink

(17:26):
on the idea.

Speaker 1 (17:27):
Yeah, yeah, Now I want to stress that, as always,
my grasp with Mandarin is very limited and depends on
various references and tools, But it's my understanding that there
is no one word in Mandarin that expressly denotes necromancy
in the same way that our word necromancy does. But
in Chinese tradition, the specialist you would seek out for

(17:49):
any of your strong necromantic needs would be a fang shi,
which essentially translates to method master. You'll also see this
translated as alchemist, wizard, or basically any specialist magic user
terminology you can think of, including but not limited to necromancer. Again,
this is the elegant variation in play here. Though again

(18:11):
there are some cases where you have one of these
method masters, one of these things she who is doing
something that is very necromatic in nature, and so I'd
like to discuss one in particular. Okay, all right, this
is going to take us through the Han dynasty, so
second century BCE, this would have been the rule of

(18:33):
Emperor Wu of Han. More than one wizard and immortalists
served this guy. He, especially later in life, had a
fondness for surrounding himself with various magicians and magic users,
seeking things from them like immortality, and I have also

(18:54):
read that late in life he also became increasingly paranoid
about plots against him, and I think some of these
were inspired by dreams and so at the same time
that he was leaning into the talents of magicians to
help protect him, he also was very much supporting witchcraft
persecution of the day and harsh penalties against alleged magic users.

(19:20):
But for instance, one of the fun she's that worked
for him was Lee shao Yun, who claimed to be
a seventy year old immortal and preached immortality via diet
and commitment to the Kitchen God. Though he did die,
so maybe there were some holes in the plan. But
then there was another individual, a funk she known as
Shao Wing, and this apparently can be translated as young geezer.

(19:44):
It basically means like young old person.

Speaker 2 (19:47):
Wait, does that mean he was like an old person
who was young at heart or a young person who
was old at heart.

Speaker 1 (19:54):
That's a good question, because the other guy, Lee shau Jun,
like the whole thing is like he was young, but
he claimed to be seventy. He was like, look at me,
Look how young I look. This is because I have
secrets I can I can teach you. So I'm not
sure if young geezer here was old at heart or
old in body. Maybe he's young at heart and old

(20:15):
in body, you know. But where it gets interesting with
this particular practitioner, with Shao Wing is that there are
there are a lot of sources that discuss his alleged
use of some sort of necromancy and potentially shadow puppetry.

Speaker 2 (20:33):
Oh you mean not separately but together together.

Speaker 1 (20:36):
Yes, So shadow puppetry has a very long history in
China and likely originated there and or in India in
the first millennium BCE. I know, there are a lot
of a lot of articles out there and sources about
like where shadow puppetry came from. And you have some
very rich traditions of shadow puppetry and various cultures throughout

(21:00):
Asia in the Middle East, so you know, no matter
where it began, like, it has very distinct forms all
over the place. But one popular but academically controversial story
holds that its roots are shamanistic and key to our
discussion here necromantic.

Speaker 2 (21:18):
Okay, give me that controversial story, all right.

Speaker 1 (21:21):
So the story here that is often ruminated on is
that Emperor Wu had a favorite consort or concubine by
the name of Lady Lee. She was his absolute favorite,
and she began to grow rather ill and eventually died.
Towards the end of her life, she began to prohibit

(21:43):
him from seeing her face and then ultimately from hearing
her voice, and then she dies and Shao Wing offers
the emperor a chance to speak with her again, to
be in her presence again. The story is that he
brings the Emperor into this kind of chamber and there's

(22:03):
this fabulous silk screen offerings or placed for the spirits.
There's incense burning, you know, there's a you know, manipulation
of light and shadow, and he is able to summon
her spirit on the other side of the screen, and
there is something shade like or shadow like in her appearance.

Speaker 2 (22:22):
Ah, that's interesting because I wonder if that kind of
thing should meet our definition of necromancy or not. Is
just wanting to see and interact with someone again because
you miss them? A form of necromancy is that getting
information from them, not in the way I would normally
think of.

Speaker 1 (22:42):
Well, in some of these tales, apparently like first of all,
he's completely won over by this. He's he's like, oh
my goodness, it is her, and like he's so just
overcome by the sensation that she is there again on
the other side of the screen, that he composes a poem.
And I believe there are other accounts that say that,
like he would sit there for hours talking to her,
that sort of thing. So in those cases, you could,

(23:03):
I guess you could make an argument, well, yeah, this
is the necromancer here is allowing for some sort of
communication with the dead. But not everybody is crazy about
this story. And there are a lot of different interpretations
and misinterpretations of this, especially apparently when you get into
some like Western analysis of it, where you know, things
get crisscrossed and translation and so forth. I was looking

(23:26):
at a book called Chinese Shadow Theater, History, Popular Religion,
and Women Warriors by Fan Pin Lee Chin, and the
author here points out that many critic critics find it
ridiculous to believe that this court magician first of all,
invented shadow puppetry and then used it to fool the
emperor into thinking that this is the ghost of his

(23:49):
favorite comic cubine Like that, that just seems like quite
a stunt to pull off, even if you're a particular
daring and charismatic wizard.

Speaker 2 (23:59):
I mean, on one hand, yes, but then I don't
know by modern analogy. I mean, I think that there
are people who claim to have spirit medium powers and
stuff who perform tricks like this on people in the
modern world all the time.

Speaker 1 (24:13):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I think that's an important thing to
keep in mind. So, yeah, first of all, we should
not think it impossible that even a very powerful and
a very intelligent individual could not be convinced that there's
something going on here, and Chin also points out some

(24:33):
other facts that I think helped sort of circle the
idea here. So there's the idea that, first of all,
that Wu eventually finds out about the deception and has
this would be necromancer quietly executed, kind of out of embarrassment,
like he doesn't want to make a big deal out
of it because he feels like he has been duped,
but he definitely is going to have that wizard killed.

(24:57):
There's also this tidbit that Shall Wing had convincingly summoned
another consort spirit through the use of shadows, and that shadows, screens,
and incense were to some extent associated with this sort
of work. So there's maybe some sort of pre existing
formula or script for this, so it's not just coming
out of nowhere. There's also Lang Dynasty author that apparently

(25:20):
submitted that Shao Wing used something other than traditional three
dimensional puppets or two dimensional shadow puppets, and that quote
the necromancer had a statue carved out of magic stone
in the likeness of the consort. Now I'm not arguing
in favor of magic stone per se, but that makes
you think of something perhaps a little bit different, maybe

(25:43):
you know, higher production values or out of the ordinary
compared with what you know, they might have been used
to some sort of like pre existing shadow play shadow
puppetry performance. While the author is doubtful that any of
this suggests a shamanistic or for shadow puppetry, so any
idea that like shadow puppetry originates as kind of a

(26:05):
you know, shamanistic or religious ride of some sort. Authors
The author sites the importance of Han period belief that
certain fung shehi could summon the souls or shadows of
the deceased through special rights, which again, you know, a
pre existing script, a pre existing idea that this is
the kind of thing that certain magicians can do. And

(26:27):
the story also seems to have been somewhat corrupted in
Western retellings forging a link between seance and shadow puppetry,
when if I'm understanding Chen correctly on this, it's more
proper to think of this as a tale of a
would be necromancer using shadow effects to dupe the emperor
into thinking he has been visited by the spirits of
the dead. You know, this is kind of a familiar
trope throughout the world, the idea of like the dangerous

(26:52):
position held by a king's magical advisors. You know, you
have to walk that fine line because if you were,
if they see true what you're doing, you're obviously not
going to stick around court very long.

Speaker 2 (27:04):
Yeah, And I don't know, thinking more about the idea
that could could a clever magician really trick a king
like this, I think maybe that also assumes that the
king would be more likely suspicious or skeptical than a
person might naturally be if they do desperately want to
see someone again. I mean, if you if someone you

(27:24):
love has died and you want to see them again,
you might not be very you know, looking for holes
to pick in the experience of seeing them once again.
You might be quite ready to believe.

Speaker 1 (27:36):
Yeah. Yeah, I think that's important to keep in mind,
and I think it's it's also interesting to contemplate this account,
especially given that, you know, first of all, it's occurrence
in a culture that is traditionally more aligned with the
idea of communication with spirits of the deceased, again, as
opposed to Christian European culture, in which the idea of
speaking with the dead is seen as impossible and dangerous.

(27:57):
You know, you're just going to get a demon on
the other line anyway, so don't even attempt it. And
you know, perhaps it also speaks to a sort of
communion with the dead that goes beyond anything achievable via
veneration rights and even medium traditions. You know, the idea
that it's not just about like honoring her and knowing
that she's out there somewhere, but it's like here, she

(28:17):
is almost, if not quite physically here, just on the
other side. And I think that also kind of matches
up with this idea that you see in other accounts
of her kind of fading away from his life towards
the end, like he can't see her anymore, now he
can't speak with her anymore, and now she's dead. And
maybe there's some of that sprinkled in there as well.

(28:38):
And I also kind of like this whole this idea
of the screen, this kind of like thin veil that
is separating him from this possibly you know, resurrected spirit.
It's such a slight barrier, right as slight as the
barrier between life and death may seem at times. And
there's also something fitting in that ending the tellings of

(29:01):
the story in which he like finally can't have he
can't have it. He's like, I have to pull this
out of the way and see her for real. And
then when he looks behind the screen.

Speaker 2 (29:09):
What does he see.

Speaker 1 (29:11):
He sees his court magician doing, you know, something with
shadow puppetry or statues. And now the illusion is completely destroyed.

Speaker 2 (29:19):
Yeah, but before the illusion is destroyed, just the idea
that she is existing as a shadow on a silk screen.
It suggests something very delicate and fragile in a kind
of emotionally charged way about the memory of her.

Speaker 1 (29:37):
Yeah. Yeah, so I feel like, you know, there's a
there's a lot going on in this example, and perhaps
it brings up some ideas about necromancy and what necromancy
could be and what it's not that we can take
with us into other examples here.

Speaker 2 (30:00):
All right, Rob, are you ready to talk to some
ghosts in ancient Mesopotamia?

Speaker 1 (30:05):
Oh?

Speaker 2 (30:05):
Yes, So we're going to look at evidence for necromancy
in the ancient land between the rivers. This would be
Mesopotamia refers to the civilizations based on the river system
of the Tigris and Euphrates, so mostly centered in what
is modern day Iraq, and these civilizations would include, but
not be limited to, the Sumerians, the Assyrians, and the Babylonians.

(30:29):
Now the main source I was looking at here is
an article from nineteen eighty three by Irving L. Finkel,
called Necromancy in Ancient Mesopotamia, published in a journal called
Arkiev fur orient Forschung. And this author, Irving Finkel, is
a British seriologist and language scholar affiliated with the British Museum.

(30:51):
It seems like he specializes in Cuneiform inscriptions, but he
also seems to have a range of interests, including everything
from Mesopotamian ghosts and magic to ancient board games like
the Royal Game of Or, which I think we I
think we discussed his work in particular in our Invention
series on board games.

Speaker 1 (31:10):
Yes, yes, I remember that episode.

Speaker 2 (31:12):
So I was looking for some general information about Finkel
in his background, and I found an absolutely delightful video
interview with Finkel from about five years ago that seems
to be part of a series the British Museum does
called Curator's Corner and this video is called Mesopotamian Ghost
Busting with Irving Finkel. It's on topic and I found

(31:34):
it very interesting, so I thought I'd go ahead and
summarize this before getting back into the paper. In this interview,
Finkel talks about some of his best guesses as to
what ancient Mesopotamians broadly believed about ghosts, the dead, and
the undead, based on literary and archaeological evidence available to us. So,

(31:54):
to be clear, I think this involves some speculation, but
it is well informed speculation, and also our same caveat
from earlier. You know, not everybody believed the same thing
in certain times and places in history, so you can
only talk about what seems to be common based on
the sources we have. So Finkel says, in ancient Mesopotamia
there was widespread belief that when someone died, it was

(32:17):
very important that they were given a proper burial in
the earth with specified rituals to seal the grave. In
Finkl's words quote, so they were jolly well locked in
and couldn't come back to cause trouble. So people who
for whatever reason do not receive a proper burial and
do not receive the correct rituals observed at their burial

(32:41):
would be expected to come back from beyond the grave
and haunt the living. And some examples given here would
be people who die on the battlefield, or people who
die out in the wilderness alone, people who just vanish
and are assumed dead. And he also mentions people who
die in childbirth, which I thought was an interesting example
because I'm not sure in this case what would prevent

(33:04):
someone who dies in childbirth from receiving a proper burial,
But I thought that was interesting. And this comes back
to something that we've discussed a little bit on the
show before. But I am frequently struck by the belief
in what seems like many ancient cultures that it is
extremely important to receive a proper burial, or at least

(33:27):
proper funeral rights according to your local customs. And I
don't know that it's always because of the kind of
ghost security concerns that Finkel is going to raise with
respect to ancient Mesopotamia, but it really does seem like
lots of ancient peoples that we read about seem truly
horrified by the idea of dying without receiving the appropriate

(33:50):
funerary customs, or not without having their body dealt with
in the way that their culture deems is proper. It's
not that I think people today just don't care at
all what happens to their bodies after death. We care somewhat,
but I sense way less sensitivity to this on average

(34:11):
in American culture today than is implied in many ancient
sources from different cultures around the world. And I don't
know exactly what to make of that, but it seems
significant to me. I feel like I would like to
understand more about it.

Speaker 1 (34:23):
Yeah, I mean, well, we've distanced ourselves from death and
physical death so much, and you know, we have an
entire industry obviously built up around it, so on one level,
it's kind of like we can just leave it to
the professionals. We can choose from like the menu items
of what we can and can't do with or have
done with our remains. And yeah, I think for a

(34:45):
lot of us too, like the actual form that takes
is less connected to our ideas of like what happens
to us or all of us beyond our body after
death be the answer, you know, nothing, or a whole lot.
It's I think, oftentimes thought to be rather disconnected from
the physical.

Speaker 2 (35:06):
There's an interesting other example of a connection between the
belief in what happens to your sort of soul or
spirit in the afterlife and what happens to your physical
body in a text that I'm going to get into
in a bit, But to come back to what Finkel
talks about in this interview, he says, you know, as
best we can tell from our sources, everybody we know
of in ancient Mesopotamia believed in ghosts. There is no

(35:28):
evidence of anyone saying that ghosts don't exist or you
don't have to worry about them. Seems like it was
just taken for granted that ghosts existed and were part
of life. However, and I thought this point was really interesting.
Finkel says that it is not universal that people regarded
ghosts with fear or terror. People were not always necessarily

(35:51):
frightened of them. Instead, he says, the more common attitude
seems to be one of sympathy for ghosts, kind of like,
if there is a ghost haunting you, that is a problem,
but it's not something that is terrifying, at least not necessarily.
It could be in some circumstances. So a ghost is somebody,

(36:12):
usually a family member of yours, who is like now
having a hard time after death. It's almost like somebody
in your family has a disease or something and because
of their condition, they are unable to find rest in
the underworld, that they can't settle down in another world,
and they need the help of the living. So while
they may not be frightening, they are in trouble and

(36:34):
they often cause trouble, all right.

Speaker 1 (36:37):
So that second part is very familiar with than it
to anyone who's ever seen a TV show that has
an episode about a ghost. Why do you deal with
that ghost? You got to like do that thing. It
makes them go away, that makes them content and lets
them move on. But the first part about it, like
it not being a frightful scenario but more of a
sympathetic scenario. You know, it kind of makes me think again.

(36:58):
It's like what happens when there is no room for
a particular type of supernatural belief or paranormal experience within
a given like rule system or worldview. For instance, if
your say religious worldview is like, hey, there are no
such thing as ghosts, those don't exist. Well, then when
something makes you think about ghosts or or or or

(37:20):
raises the specter of ghosts, or you have some sort
of a hallucination experience that is interpreted as ghosts, well
then that power structure cannot help you because they're like,
well out of our hands, because we already told you
that stuff's not real. And then likewise, I think if
with a certain you know, certain scientific positions, you could

(37:41):
take on everything you know, it's like you don't believe
in the supernatural. And if then if something like this
were to present itself, then suddenly it seems may it
may seem like science can't help you. I think we
would argue something different. We discussed that before. There are
various thoroughly logical, rational, scientific explanations for various supernatural experiences.

(38:03):
But I can imagine the attitude of being like, well,
something has now occurred, and it is outside the framework
that is supporting me. Therefore I am afraid.

Speaker 2 (38:13):
Yes, I think that is very interesting, and I think
that might be a good explanation for this difference, for
why our primary emotional reaction to ghosts in the modern
world or even in I don't know, say like medieval
Christian Europe would be fear, just like it doesn't fit
as a reality within your orthodoxy. Yeah, and so anyway,

(38:33):
in the context of ancient Mesopotamia, Finkle says, there were
people we know of who specialized in magic and rituals
designed to appease wandering ghosts and send them back to
their rightful place among the dead, send them back to
the nether world where they belong. And I think normally
in the literature, these would be referred to as exorcists,

(38:54):
which again can be confusing because of like the Christian
Catholic context of an exorcist being somebody who who casts
out demons from a person who is demon possessed. In
the case it's used in these academic works, it would
just be referred to it's somebody whose job it is
to get the ghost out of the place it's not
supposed to be and help it you back to where

(39:14):
it is supposed to be. Yeah, And he describes one
particular example based on a tablet in the British Museum's collection,
and this is pretty interesting. He says. This tablet depicts
a portly woman walking in profile holding a male figure
by a lead which I think attaches around the male
figure's neck. And Finkel says he believes that the woman

(39:37):
shown in this illustration is a ghost, probably the ghost
of someone's great aunt, who for some reason is wandering
the world of the living and causing trouble, and the exorcist,
called to deal with this problem decides that what this
ghost needs is a lover. So the exorcist makes one

(39:57):
clay model of the ghost woman another clay model that
is a sexy man, a young, muscular, handsome man with
a large beard, and these two clay effigies are buried
together in a pit with an assortment of grave goods,
and then the idea is that this burial would allow
the ghosts to settle down into the underworld and stop

(40:19):
causing distress for the living.

Speaker 1 (40:21):
Hmm. That's that's interesting. It reminds me a little bit
of the topic of ghost marriage and Chinese tradition that
we I think Christian and I did an episode on
years and years back, but you know, basically involves sort
of a similar principle, like something is out of whack.
There's a structural incompleteness that is involved with the family unit,

(40:42):
and it needs to be supernaturally and or symbolically fixed
in order for these you know, now ancestors to completely
pass on and sort of be properly organized in you know,
the afterlife or what have you.

Speaker 2 (41:00):
Right, I think that's a good comparison. But to come
back to the illustration on the tablet, he says, it
seems to show this ghost woman holding on to I
guess her new lover by this like lead. So there's
like no chance he gets away there together forever. Now,
coming back to this idea from a minute ago, that
the ghosts were not necessarily thought of as frightening in

(41:21):
ancient Mesopotamia, Finkle says that there were some ghosts who
were who actually were frightening and dangerous, and he offers
his opinion that these were probably understood to be the
ghosts of people who were themselves frightening and dangerous when
they were alive. So, you know, regular person with a

(41:42):
proper without proper burial means a you know, a sort
of sympathetic but troublesome ghost. Somebody is a problem you
need to deal with, or a ghost you need to help,
not necessarily scary, whereas a wicked person without a proper
burial that could be a scary ghost.

Speaker 1 (41:59):
Okay, it makes sense.

Speaker 2 (42:00):
And he says these malevolent ghosts were thought to slip
in through a person's ear while the victim was asleep,
and if the ghost gets in through your ear canal,
it could bring on extreme headaches like migraines, or it
could even cause madness. And Finkel describes a couple of
other types of effigies that would be crafted by ancient

(42:21):
Mesopotamian exorcists in order to drive away malevolent ghosts. First,
there's a kind of king figure who would be placed
near a bed to project authority and general warding magic.
And then second would be a model of a vizier
figure that would be placed on top of a pole
in a way that it could rotate around the pole

(42:43):
like a kind of spin around it like a propeller,
and this would, he suggests, sort of fan the air
around and drive spirits away. Okay, And finally he makes
the point that these elaborate rituals with like paid exorcists
were these almost certainly would have been the things that
were available to the elite, to the richest people in society,

(43:04):
and we have way less insight, maybe no insight really
into how regular people dealt with ghosts if they did
it all. And then he sort of humorously suggests that
regular people might not have had time to see ghosts,
or if they did, perhaps they just sort of like
waived at them and went about their business. But we
don't really know, but I do think that's kind of

(43:26):
funny to imagine that, Like, I don't know if this
is true, but I mean I wonder if like ghosts
are more likely to be a problem that you're dealing
with if you have excess like time and leisure and
riches and stuff.

Speaker 1 (43:40):
Maybe I could see that argument. But yeah, it also
seems kind of to his point as well, equally as
possible that the people regular people had their own traditions
and their own experts, but we just have no surviving
mention of them.

Speaker 2 (44:05):
Now, to come back to Finkle's nineteen eighty three paper
on necromancy in Ancient Mesopotamia, all of that I was
just talking about was ghostbusting or exorcism. Back to necromancy specifically,
I want to note quickly that this article I'm talking about,
I think it was very interesting, so I do want
to talk about it, but it was not written for
a popular audience. This is for Mesopotamian specialists, and several

(44:27):
parts kind of assume familiarity with ancient languages, which I
certainly do not have. I think I was able to
make sense of all the main points by doing some
secondary research, but please just know I'm doing my best here,
I am outside my area of expertise. So he starts
off this paper by saying, you know, our sources from
ancient Mesopotamia don't contain a lot of references to necromancy,

(44:51):
but there is some evidence of its practice. And here
he defines necromancy as quote, the delicate art of summoning
the spirits of dead in order to learn the future
from them. So this is the definition you'll find more
often in academic works, not about you know, summoning skeleton
soldiers or something, but again for divination purposes. He specifically

(45:12):
says to learn the future. But I think some of
the examples he mentions are not really so much about
the future. They're just more generally the getting information thing.
And so Finkle writes that some of the clearest evidence
of necromancy is actually lexical, meaning related to vocabulary. There
are these ancient cuneiform texts from Mesopotamia known as lexical lists,

(45:37):
and they go way back. There are tons of these
tablets you can find in the archaeological record, you know,
lots of them to translate and interpret, and they are
essentially ancient glossaries that just list collections of words often
with translations of the terms between different languages, and these

(45:58):
could include lists of names, or lists of gods, or
lists of different categories of natural objects like lists of
plants or lists of birds, or simply lists of nouns
or words. And one of the most famous Cuneiform lexical
text traditions is the professions list known as lou And

(46:19):
so in this list it names a bunch of jobs
jobs people can have there. And so there are words
for professions in this list that we can tell refer
to necromancers because of the way the words are constructed.
And this is one of those sections where, because this
is for specialists, I wasn't able to tell exactly what

(46:40):
the terms here cash out to in English. But I
think what this means is there are sort of listed
professions that are called something like dead spirit, raiser or something.
And Finkel says there are male and female versions of
these professional names, but unfortunately we don't have connected literary
texts that show how all these terms were used. However,

(47:03):
Finkel says there are several passages in Mesopotamian texts that
were already widely known at the time this paper was published,
which do describe forms of necromancy in practice, and one
of the most interesting ones is found in the Sumerian
narrative known as Gilgamesh in key Do and the Nether World.

Speaker 1 (47:25):
Good old Gilgamesh.

Speaker 2 (47:26):
Yes, Now, this is a story of the two characters
Gilgamesh and in key Do, who are the heroes of
the famous Gilgamesh epic. You know they they have that.
I mean, that's a buddy cop story for you. You know.
They they go slay the demon Humbaba together in the
Cedar forest, and they get up to all kinds of mischief,
but then tragically in key Do dies, and then that

(47:49):
sends Gilgamesh on his quest for immortality. I think that
Gilgamesh in key Do in the Nether World is, from
what I understand, best thought of as a separate story
that is out of continuity with the rest of the
Gilgamesh epic, even though it is sometimes tacked on at
the end of the larger epic as a kind of

(48:09):
discontinuous chapter, because like in key Do dies earlier in
the story, and then here he is suddenly alive again
at the beginning of this story. But here are the
broad strokes of Gilgamesh in key Dou and the nether world.
So Gilgamesh's stuff keeps falling into the underworld, like he
has this stuff called I don't know exactly what these

(48:33):
possessions of Gilgamesh's are supposed to be. There's one thing
called an lag written in English e llag that like, oh,
it fell into the underworld, you know. So his his
stuff is like tumbling out of this world into the
infamous house of dust where the dead go to dwell.
And so Gilgamesh's friend and or servant in Key Dou

(48:54):
offers to go into the underworld to get his stuff
back for him. Unfortunately, once he goes down there, he
breaks all the rules and is thus not allowed to
return to the world of the living now he is dead.
And in the version that Finkel sites, there is a
scene in which a demon named Nrgal conjures up the
ghost of Inky do at Gilgamesh is bidding, and the

(49:17):
ghost of Inky Doo is said to rise up through
a hole or a crack in the ground like the wind.
In order to have a conversation with Gilgamesh about what
the underworld is like now, I went looking for a
full translation of the story so I could zero in
on a few sections the One version of this text
that I found online, which I should note has a

(49:38):
few small differences from exactly what Finkel describes, was on
an Oxford hosted website called the Electronic Text Corpus of
Sumerian Literature. So I want to look at a few
different things. First of all, the list of things that
Gilgamesh tells Inkey do not to do in order to
survive his trip to the nether World. There's like a oh,

(50:00):
I don't know, like the you know, the rules in
how to survive a slasher movie, and keydu gets one
of those for the nether World. So he says, you're
definitely not supposed to wear clean garments because if you
wear clean garments, they're gonna know you're not dead, you're
not one of them. That they'll they'll get really mad.
You should not anoint yourself with fine oil from a
bowl because then they will surround you because they will

(50:22):
smell that you smell nice, and you're not supposed to
smell nice down there. Very sensible, exactly, Yes, he says,
don't start hurling throw sticks in another world. Those struck
down by the throw sticks are going to get mad
at you and surround.

Speaker 1 (50:35):
You okay, also sensible, he says.

Speaker 2 (50:38):
Don't hold a Cornell wood stick in your hand. He
says that the spirits will feel insulted by this for
some reason. I don't know what that means.

Speaker 1 (50:47):
But good advice. You wouldn't think of it, and therefore
is even more important that you'd be willing exactly.

Speaker 2 (50:52):
He says, you shouldn't put sandals on your feet, you
should not shout in another world. I guess maybe in
Keydu's wife had he says you should neither kiss nor
hit your wife. And then in key Dou's child had died,
and you said you should neither kiss nor hit your child.

Speaker 1 (51:11):
Okay, So basically, like you're supposed to be like these
shades of the dead. You're not showing any emotion. You're
not you're not either good or bad, like you're doing
nothing but just being there, hanging out like a shade. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (51:25):
And I guess getting the lag and the other stuff
back to bring that back. But in key Do fails.
He does literally everything Gilgamesh warns him not to do
in the underworld, every single one of the things, and
he is seized and trapped there forever.

Speaker 1 (51:40):
Oh that went south.

Speaker 2 (51:42):
So in this version, I was reading Gilgamesh gets somebody.
It's not the demon Naerkal in this version, he gets
somebody named Utu to open a hole in the underworld
to allow in key Dou to come up and share
information with him. And so I want to describe this
scene where in Keydu's ghost is called up. It reads
this fall. They hugged and kissed, They wearied each other

(52:03):
with questions, did you see the order of the nether world?
If only you would tell me, my friend, if only
you would tell me? And then in key Do responds,
if I tell you the order of the nether world,
sit down and weep, and in key Dou tells him
that the nether world is like a garment infested with worms,
and it is like a crevice filled with dust. And

(52:25):
then they end up talking at length about the fates
of the dead. So there are all these different things
that sort of reflect, I guess, ancient Mesopotamian views about
what the good life is like. It seems that in
key Doo thinks the dead who have a lot of
airrors are pretty happy, and the ones that have fewer
airrors are unhappy. But then a bunch of other different
kinds of fates people can have are described. They say,

(52:49):
for example, did you see the spirit of him who
has no funerary offerings? In Key? Who says I saw him?
Gilgamesh says, how does he fare? In Key? Who says
he eats the scrap and the crumbs tossed out in
the street, And again, bad things when funeral rites are
not observed. But I wondered about that. Does he mean
the scraps and crumbs tossed out in the street in

(53:11):
the nether world or on Earth in the cities of
the living. I took it maybe more to be the second.

Speaker 1 (53:18):
Mm, yeah, I mean I could see it going either way.
I mean, basically, you did not symbolically offer food to them,
and so they have no sustenance in the afterlife.

Speaker 2 (53:26):
But then there's one thing here that has some interesting
metaphysical information. Gilgamesh says, did you see him who was
set on fire? And in Kidu says, I did not
see him. His spirit is not about. His smoke went
up to the sky. So the person who is burned

(53:47):
is not in the nether world at all. They go
wherever their smoke goes up in the sky. What happens
to them there?

Speaker 1 (53:55):
It kind of sounds like they end up in the
wrong place. It's like, yeah, it seems to be the message,
Like you, I don't go cremating the dead, because then
how are they going to get to this wonderful it's
wonderful afterlife that is being presented here.

Speaker 2 (54:08):
I mean to be clear, it seems okay for people
who had a bunch of errors. He says, they are
like gods. They sit in judgment of everyone else. But anyway,
I thought this was interesting because this is depicting an
example of necromancy. I think that does meet the strict definition.
Like Gilgamesh is trying to get hidden information, but it's

(54:28):
not so much like personal future fortune telling type stuff. Instead,
he is using this consultation with the dead to get
information about what happens to different people after they die.

Speaker 1 (54:41):
Yeah, and also sort of reconnect with an old friend, like, so, hey,
where you live.

Speaker 2 (54:45):
In these days? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (54:47):
After life? Well what's it? What's it like? Well, it's hashy,
It's like dustin a crevis, you know.

Speaker 2 (54:55):
Yeah, that's what you should say next time you reconnect
with an old friend. Well, you know, garment, garment eaten
by worms, credits full of dust. But anyway, coming back
to Finkle's paper, so he mentioned a couple of other
sources pre existing at the time of this paper that
mentioned necromancy, or at least potentially mention it in a
more prosaic context. One is an old Assyrian letter from

(55:17):
Cultepe which contains the lines quote here we asked the
female oracle givers, the female diviners, and the spirits colon
Assur repeatedly upbraids you, and so I interpret this to
be a reference to a person who consults the spirits
of the dead to get information. Possibly the information they're
getting is about the fact that the god a seer

(55:39):
who is like a god of Assyria, is angry with someone.

Speaker 1 (55:43):
Okay, they have inside information.

Speaker 2 (55:45):
Another is also a letter, this one Neo Assyrian, which
exists in damaged form and has been interpreted and translated
different ways. One of those interpretations implies that necromancers have
asked the spirits to predict whether a certain person will
become a king, but this interpretation of the letter is
not certain, but anyway. After these examples, Finkel goes on

(56:07):
to describe two previously unpublished Babylonian tablets from the first
millennium BCE held by the British Museum that he says,
deal in totally unambiguous terms with necromancy, and boy, these
are a trip. Are you ready?

Speaker 1 (56:23):
I'm ready.

Speaker 2 (56:24):
The first one is called b M three six seven
O three. It is a late Babylonian text and it
includes instructions for a necromantic ritual. It says you call
upon the ghost and he will answer you, and then
there's an incantation where the necromancer says who are you?
Who are you? It then lists the names of known

(56:45):
malevolent spirits and demons that we know are supposed to
be evil spirits and demons because they appear in other
texts about exorcism, and Finkel says that this part of
the ritual seems to be a kind of safety precaution,
trying to protect against the possibility that in summoning the
dead for divination you accidentally summon a vicious, evil monster instead.

(57:09):
It's like a security step to prevent you dialing the
wrong number and accidentally calling Freddy Krueger or whatever.

Speaker 1 (57:16):
Oh wow. Yeah, And we'll eventually see reverberations of this
on up into like medieval Christian traditions, you know again,
where it's more like you will always get a wrong
number because this number cannot possibly connect to who you
want to reach.

Speaker 2 (57:30):
Right, But that's not the context here. They think you
can dial the right number. You just got to be careful.
You got to do the right incantations and warding magic.
Now next in this tablet, there's a part that is damaged,
but it appears, based on context, to be steps for
what to do if the ritual doesn't work. I do
wish we could know what it's said here. Then it
goes on to the ritual itself. Here I'm gonna read

(57:53):
from Finkel, and the context is that this is an
Akkadian incantation that is addressed to the god Shamash, and
it is asking for the help of the god Shamash
to summon a ghost literally of the darkness. And so
then reading from Finkel, now quote, this ghost, once brought

(58:14):
up from its place of rest, is then supposed to
enter into a skull placed there for that purpose. The
reciter of the incantation says, quote, I call upon you,
o skull of skulls. May he who is within the
skull answer me. Then there follows in line seven to ten,
a magical ritual that involves an oily preparation of animal

(58:37):
parts being mixed up and left to stand overnight. Do
you want to know what is in this necromancer cocktail route? Oh,
I suppose we should know, Okay. So it says you
crush up a male and female partridge, dust from a crossroads,
dust of a jumping cricket, of the step, and an

(58:58):
upturned potch from a crossroads in puru oil. Then you
mix all that together, you leave it to stand overnight,
and in the morning you will Then there are a
number of things you can actually do. So Finkle goes
on to explain that you either use this mixture to
anoint the skull itself or the ghost. And I'm not

(59:21):
sure exactly how you anoint the ghost with it, and
then or the And then it's a word here that's
represented as N A M, and I think the meaning
of that is ambiguous. Finkle says it might refer to
it might be referring to someone called the man, but
it's unclear in the context of the tablet who this

(59:42):
would refer to, unless maybe he says it means like
a figurine of the dead person who you're trying to summon,
like like we saw with the other ritual that would
make sense. And then to pick up again, reading from
Finkle's description of the ritual, quote, at this point you
call upon him and he will answer you. In the context,

(01:00:04):
the word elemou, no doubt, refers to a representation of
the ghost, and the ritual would have the same effect
whether applied to this representation, to the nam or to
the skull itself. It's not quite certain whether all three
elements were necessary. The idea, however, is quite clear. It
is quite appropriately Shamash who has the power and authority

(01:00:26):
to bring up a ghost from the underworld, and the
whole operation is put under his auspices. Somehow the ghost
will enter into the skull and answer the questions put
to him.

Speaker 1 (01:00:37):
I love that those skull of skulls indeed.

Speaker 2 (01:00:40):
Okay, So that's the first tablet. There's a second tablet,
another previously unknown text being published, I guess at the
time of this article that is known as K two
seven seventy nine, which is a neo Babylonian tablet, which
contains some of the same material as the previous text,
but also some original stuff. And this text, interestingly also

(01:01:01):
contains what appeared to be security precautions. For example, there
is a ritual and incantation that is to quote, avert
the evil in the crying of the ghost or the
crying of a ghost. Sorry, and Finkel notes from the
contemporary texts that it was believed that personal contact with
a ghost usually led to really bad consequences for a

(01:01:24):
living person, often death. So if you are a necromancer,
you could be doing something really dangerous. You are attempting
personal contact with a ghost in order to get privileged information,
but this contact comes with a high likelihood of a
death curse, so you have to employ protective magic to
counteract that danger. Now, I was kind of wondering how

(01:01:48):
to square this with Finkel's own characterization that was from
an interview decades later of ghosts not for the most
part incurring a reaction of fear in the ancient Mesopotamians,
but other of kind of like sympathy. I don't know
exactly how to square that, but it makes me wonder
if maybe most of the ghost encounters people thought they

(01:02:08):
were having weren't actually like personal face to face contact
or talking to a ghost or hearing the cry of
a ghost, but more like indirect indications that a spirit
is restless and wandering or seeing what appears to be
evidence of a dead family member from Afar. I don't know,
but I wonder.

Speaker 1 (01:02:27):
Yeah, kind of it reminds me of some of these
traditions involving.

Speaker 2 (01:02:30):
Like the evil Eye.

Speaker 1 (01:02:31):
You know, the idea that it is out there, it
is aware, but it's not necessarily honing in on you
unless you give it reason to. And so you know, similarly,
you could you could live in a world of ghosts,
but have you done anything personally to attract the ghost
or to encourage the coast, Well, then you're probably fine.

Speaker 2 (01:02:48):
Finkel also says it's notable that K two seven seventy
nine is a is a type of text called anmberbie,
the primary purpose of which is describing ways to avert
evil and unexplained phenomena. So it's kind of surprising that
rituals for intentionally summoning up a ghost and prying information
out of it under the auspices of Shamash or whoever

(01:03:11):
would be included, because the rest of the text is
basically like a ghostbusting manual. It is how to keep ghosts, demons,
and any other weirdness away from you.

Speaker 1 (01:03:22):
Yeah, it raises all sorts of questions about like what
is sort of what is the day to day activity
in the ghostbusting and necromancer professional world of this time period.

Speaker 2 (01:03:33):
Okay, but I think I promised you there was another
necromancer cocktail coming. This one is from Let's see well,
I think this actually is derived from both both texts,
and this is a concoction you would put together that
is part of an incantation to enable a man to
see a ghost. So the text says, you crush moldy wood,

(01:03:54):
fresh leaves of euphrates poplar, in water, oil, beer, and wine.
You dry, crush and sieve snake, tallow, lion, tallow crab,
tallow white honey, a frog that lives among the pebbles,
hair of a dog, hair of a cat, hair of

(01:04:15):
a fox, bristle of a chameleon, and bristle of a
red lizard, claws of a frog, end of intestines of
a frog, the left wing of a grasshopper, and marrow
from the long bone of a goose.

Speaker 1 (01:04:30):
Oh wow.

Speaker 2 (01:04:31):
You mix all this in wine, water and milk with
amhara plant, and then you recite the incantation three times,
and you anoint your eyes with it, and you will
see the ghost and he will speak with you. You
can look at the ghost, he will talk with you.
And yes, I said that twice because the text says
it twice. So any mixologists out there who want to

(01:04:55):
take these as an inspiration for a Halloween themed drink,
I don't know how exactly you make a a safe
version of that, but take it. Take it as an inspiration.
You know, it's a challenge.

Speaker 1 (01:05:06):
Yeah, don't actually do that, but yes, I do love
instructions like this for magic potions or homunculi or whatever
you happen to be concocting in olden times. Though the
moldy wood gave me pause, like it makes me. It
reminds me of other examples I believe from Chinese traditions,
where the idea that you had, like a rotten broom handle,

(01:05:29):
it might have some sort of ghostly possession about it,
and there might be some even something going on with
illuminated micro organisms in the soft wood, you know.

Speaker 2 (01:05:41):
Oh yes, yeah, it might make it kind of glow
in the dark. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:05:45):
But I mean as for like the hair of the
cat and the dog and so forth, I mean, I
don't know, imagine that you're just getting into symbolic territory
at that point.

Speaker 2 (01:05:52):
Once you've used your end of intestines of a frog
in this though, what do you do with the start
of intestines of the frog you've got left over?

Speaker 1 (01:05:59):
Well, you got to say that for later. That's another recipe, right, Yeah, Well,
this has been fascinating snapshots into worlds where necromancy. Worlds
in places, in particular places where necromancy is more common
necromancy of one form of the other, and in some
cases there are there are rules, there are laws in
place spelling out exactly how one one professional is supposed

(01:06:24):
to carry all this out.

Speaker 2 (01:06:26):
Again, I do think it's interesting and significant that both
of these instruction manuals for necromancers have have these safety precautions,
like you've got to go through you've got to like
put on the safety goggles and stuff in a magical
metaphorical sense. And I wonder if that's always true about
necromancy everywhere, or is there anywhere where it's just kind

(01:06:48):
of more like loosely regulated, fly by the seat of
your pants, nothing to worry about kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:06:54):
Yeah. I don't know. There are different ways to slice it, right,
because on one hand, if you're looking at it like
completely skeptically, you can say, well, well, of course a
professional necromancer is going to outline the extreme risks that
they are taking when they carry out their nechromatic acts.
You don't want. It's not necromancy for the masses, it's
necromancy for me, and you're going to pay me to

(01:07:14):
do it. Therefore, there need to be certain skills involved
that the ordinary people are not going to attempt to do.

Speaker 2 (01:07:20):
That's a good point. Yeah, I wonder if this is
in some way justifying of economic incentives.

Speaker 1 (01:07:26):
Yeah, But then on the other hand, I mean, just
use magic systems in general, other models of the afterlife
in general, you see in various cultures like it is
often a realm in which there are various dangers and
there are rules that need to be followed to the
letter if you were to survive like the journey, or
survive you know, the dipping into this world a little

(01:07:47):
bit to gain knowledge and so forth.

Speaker 2 (01:07:50):
You want to talk about necromancy some more on Tuesday.

Speaker 1 (01:07:52):
Yeah, yeah, I think we have a lot more we
can we can chat about. So join us on Tuesday
as we come back for our second helping of nec manci.
Not I think we'll get into Greek necromancy a little bit.
I'm not sure what else we'll get into, but I'm
sure it will be a good seasonal time and we'll
be we'll definitely be in October at that point. All right,

(01:08:12):
We're gonna remind you once more that Stuff to Blow
Your Mind is primarily a science podcast, but you know,
we do get into other topics like this one, especially
during the month of October. Obviously we get into some
some Halloween content for sure, So stay with us this
entire month of October as we explore other topics of

(01:08:33):
the spooky nature. Also join us for our Weird House
Cinema episodes on Fridays. Weird House Cinema is our time
to set aside most serious concerns and just talk about
a weird film. And you know, we're gonna be watching
some horror movies this month, so you can watch along
with us, or you can just tune in and listen
to our discussions of these films if you're a little
too creeped out to view them for yourself. And then

(01:08:53):
on Mondays we do listener mail and on Wednesdays we
do a short form monster fact or artifact.

Speaker 2 (01:08:58):
Huge thanks to our excellent your producer JJ Posway. If
you would like to get in touch with us with
feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest topic
for the future, or just to say hello, you can
email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com.

Speaker 3 (01:09:20):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.