October 17, 2024 • 52 mins
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 2 of 3, originally published 10/03/2023)
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
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 today we're bringing you
another episode from the Vault. Rob and I are out
on fall Break this week. This is part two in
our series on necromancy. It's called The Necromantic Urge. This
episode originally published October third, twenty twenty three. Enjoy Ah Necromancy,
Sweet Ah Wizard air udet teach me the skill that
(00:33):
I instill. The pain surgeons assuage in vain, nor herb
of all the plane can heal.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick. And that poem I
just read was from Emily Dickinson and some of the
numbering systems. That's her poem, number one seventy seven. I
would say not one of her greatest efforts, But you know,
some of those poems in her collections seem like something
she just jotted on the back of a notepad real quick.
I think that's more one of those. But I still
(01:17):
like the forced rhyme of sweet with aeradite, and I
don't know, wizard feels more right than Wizard.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
I like the reading. Yes, and yeah, this was not
a poem of Emily Dickinson's that I was familiar with.
Sometimes just it's given the title ah Necromancy Sweet, it
is a note that like, basically I was gonna just
bust out another Clark Ashton Smith poem for this episode,
but then I was like, who else has some poems
about necromancy and necromancers? And lo and behold, Emily Dickinson
(01:48):
has not one, but two, which may surprise some of you,
may not surprise some of you who are more familiar
with her work.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
I would say I'm an Emily Dickinson fan, though I
would not have been able to tell you that she
had poems that use the word necromancy, though I know
a number of her poems are concerned with death.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
Yeah, she saw the skull beneath the skin, that's for sure.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
Oh skull of skulls. Well, anyway, we are back with
part two in our series on necromancy. Now, if you've
been listening to the podcast for a while, you probably
know that every year, for the whole month of October,
we focus our attention on topics of the beastly, ghostly,
devilish or uncanny sort. And also, as we often do,
(02:34):
we got started a little bit early this year, So
we got started last week even though it was still
technically September, with the first part in a series on necromancy,
the practice of communicating with the dead, usually for the
purpose of divination, of gaining access to hidden information or truth.
(02:54):
And in that episode we talked about accounts of necromancy
or pseudo necromatic legends from ancient China, as well as
methods of both speaking to and exercising ghosts in the
first millennium BCE in Mesopotamia. And today we are going
to continue our journey into the nether world talking about
necromancy practices and legends from ancient Greece and Rome.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
That's right, We're gonna be talking about Greek accounts of
necromancy or things like necromancy to some extent in this episode,
and who knows where we'll end up in a third
episode on necromancy. So one of the sources that I
mentioned in the last episode is a paper by Czech
academic Andrej CapCar titled the Origins of Necromancy or how
(03:40):
we learn to speak to the dead great title, and
according to CapCar, the earliest mentions of necromancy, they don't
require a lot of inference and interpretation, can be found
in ancient Greece. In this we're dealing with nekia, which
is the practice of calling forth and asking them about
(04:02):
the future, or as we'll get into, things that are
maybe not the future, but that are concerned with knowledge
beyond what an individual has at their disposal. You know,
the dead by virtue of being dead, they can tell
you things. They can tell you things from their life,
from their place of origin, and so forth. The primary
(04:24):
example that he deals with, and indeed of a primary
example you see in a lot of discussions of what
is or isn't necromancy in ancient Greek traditions, takes us
all the way back to book eleven of the Odyssey,
in which Odysseus receives instructions about how to question the
dead and then does so. Now, Joe correct me if
I'm wrong, But I think we've recounted this story before
(04:46):
on the podcast.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
Possibly, but it's been a while, so I think it's
worth refreshing on this story.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
All right, Well, I'll give everyone the basics here concerning
this episode. So basically, you know, the deal with Odysseus
is trying to get home, right, He's he's been off
to war, he's seen the Trojan Wars and so forth.
Wants to get home, wants to be reunited with his wife.
A lot of misadventures occur on the way, so he
takes the scenic route does he takes the scenic route
(05:14):
and one of the more scenic routes ends up taking
He and his crew wind up on the island of
Circe in the care you might say, or under the
dominion of the enchantress Circe, and there's you know, there's
some misunderstanding, there's some transfiguration involved, there's a good bit
of seduction, and they end up staying there for like
(05:35):
a year. So they're hanging out on this island for
a fair amount of time.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
I don't know exactly how all of this gets explained
Penelope later.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
Well, you know, there's a possible answer to that here
coming up. But essentially, you know, he has time to
seek some some guidance, get some some advice from Circe,
and basically he wants to seek the advice of the
prophet Tyrisius, the blind Seer of Thebes, who in one
Greek myth is changed into a woman for several years
(06:09):
and then back into a man. But in this story,
this seer is dead, and that's a problem, and that's
why Circe sends Odysseus to the very gates of the
Land of the Dead in order to seek his advice.
So that's what the crew does. That's what the guys do.
They go to the very limits of the mortal realm,
right up to the border with the Land of the Dead,
(06:32):
and per Circe's instructions, they dig a trench, they offer libations,
they sacrifice you and a ram. These are the practices
of Nekia. So the blood of the sacrifice calls forth ghosts,
but it calls forth ghosts by the thousands, so it's
just just calls them all out. They all come swarming.
(06:53):
Key individuals that Odysseus knew in life they come forward
as well. One of them is Odysseus's own mother, an initial,
so he does not let her of her spirit approach
the blood. But finally here comes Diyrisius. He drinks the
blood and then speaks and tells Odysseus how their journey
home is likely to go, and basically he breaks it
(07:15):
to him. Look, you you know that stuff with the
Cyclops while you offended Poseidon and he's a p pretty
powerful guy. You're gonna have to make amends for that.
There he outlines some of the other hurdles that are
in their path, and then Odysseus asked, well, how can
I speak to the ghost of my mother who I
just ran into? And he is told that he must
(07:37):
let the spirit drink the blood. If the spirit doesn't
drink the blood, then they cannot speak to the living,
and so he allows his mother's spirit to do that.
He doesn't stand in her way, and he's able to
speak with his mother and learn about events at home.
There are more details when I may touch on some
more here in a minute, but that's the basics here.
Odysseus engages in a specific rite to attract the spirits
(08:01):
of the deceased, appeases them, and gives them the power
of speech and their for prophecy.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Okay, so I know this passage is of interest to
people trying to understand the culture and the ritual practices
of ancient Greece because It's often interpreted not just as
an isolated story in a fictional narrative, but a reflection
of generally how the rituals of necromancy were thought to work,
at least to some extent.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
That's right, Yeah, so yeah, we're doing with what an
eighth century BCE text that many argue as our earliest
clear look at the idea of what would come to
be known as necromancy. But at the same time, I
do have to highlight that I was looking around not
everyone is convinced that it's truly what we'd call necromancy.
We kind of get into the semantics game again. I've
seen arguments that what takes place here is essentially a
(08:49):
standard sacrifice to the spirits of the dead, only observed
on the physical threshold of death's own country. So I
don't you know, again, theerhaps the location is the key
thing here, and the right itself is not necromancy itself,
but takes on necromantic powers due to proximity to the
(09:10):
land of the dead.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
That'll come back in some stuff I want to get
into in a little bit.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
But on the other hand, plenty of commentators do equate
Nekia with necromancy. Some things to keep in mind about
what we see here in this primary example. So, first
of all, as we were discussing in the first episode,
this is one of those ancient accounts that involves speaking
to the dead. It does not involved controlling the dead.
(09:37):
I mean, aside from just giving them the power of
speech by offering them the blood.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Yeah, that's right, we talked about in the last episode.
How if you hear the word necromancer today, especially if
you play Dungeons and Dragons or you're familiar with general
fantasy horror literature, you're probably thinking of someone who commands
armies of skeletons to do their bidding. And that's not
usually what's being discussed with ancient necromancy. It's specifically a
(10:02):
divination practice. It's about communicating with the dead, usually to
get information.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
Yeah. Now, the other interesting thing about this, and something
I rather like about this example, is that Odysseus doesn't
summon one dead individual from the realm of the dead.
He summons all of them at once, like just a
mass of them. It's like it's kind of like he
replied all or you know how in different organizations, there'll
be that one email address where you can, you can
(10:27):
contact everybody in the organization. It's like, you know, all
dead at underworld dot com or something to that effect.
That's what Odysseus does here. And they're like, whoa, everybody's
in the chat now.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
And then everybody starts replying, and that's the day. You
get five hundred emails on the same thread and yeah, exactly, yeah,
and then he has to try and figure out who
he specifically wants to talk to.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
Now. Aspects of this that are reflected in later traditions
of necromancy. It does entail blood. There is blood and
blood sacrifice involved here. It intail it does entail the
ability to speak with the dead and learn from them.
And again this may work mostly due to proximity to
the Kingdom of the Dead. And you could also classify
(11:13):
this as an example of katabasis or a descent into
the underworld. I mean, even if Odysseus is only going
to the gates of Hell here, I mean he's essentially
he's essentially in the underworld, right, I mean, where do
you draw the line between actually going there and just
going to the edge of it?
Speaker 2 (11:31):
Right? Well, So you could have an example like Orpheus
that I think is more a more complete katabasis. But
this is he's at least going part of the way.
And I think it is portrayed from what I recall
in the narrative as a as a harrowing journey into
a place that, you know, where mortals do not normally
tread exactly.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
Yeah, And of course this is a major theme in literature.
We see it in Virgil Zania, we see it in
Dante's Divine Comedy, and so many other examples, you know,
pop culture and otherwise. When people travel into the realm
of the dead to get something, to find someone, to
get secret knowledge, et cetera, there are often complications. There's
(12:12):
often a fair amount of traunta.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
Now, you know what. Another thing I recall from the
narrative in the Odyssey is that it presents a vision
of the underworld and of the afterlife in which being
dead sucks. It is really bad, and it's just it's
not something you want and it's not like heaven where
everybody's a nice angel and things are great, now you
(12:35):
know it just it depicts the afterlife is a kind
of miserable only half kind of pseudo existence.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
Yeah, And it's interesting to think about that I mean,
we could have a larger discussion about various versions of
the afterlife, but certainly, very generally, there are plenty of
other examples where the afterlife is considered like the destination,
it is the thing, and suffering here in the mortal
realm is worth it for those treasures in the next realm.
And you know, at least on the surface, you seem
(13:07):
to see a reversal here in these traditions where like,
this is the life, this is the prime existence. What
happens next is just kind of a shadow. Now. CapCar
also singles out one of the other details of this encounter,
and that's and that concerns one of the other dead individuals,
the spirits of the dead that approaches Odysseus here from
(13:28):
the underworld, and that's Elpinor. This was the youngest member
of Odysseus's crew, who remember that that year that they
spent on the island of Circe. Well, during that year,
Elpinor becomes drunk and decides, you know what I'm gonna do.
I'm gonna go sleep on that roof. So he grips
and gets himself a ladder and he starts climbing up
that ladder to get on the roof so he can sleep,
(13:50):
but he falls off the ladder, he breaks his neck,
he dies. Well, you know, it's sad, but even sadder
it turns out the boys forgot to give him a
proper burier and to grieve for him. So it's kind
of embarrassing for Odysseus. He shows up here in the
underworld and here comes Elpinor, and he says, hey, you
remember me. I was the youngest member of your crew,
(14:11):
and I got drunk, I fell off that ladder, I
broke my neck. Well, you guys didn't bury me or
grieve for me. Could you do that? That would be
really swell, And so Odysseus says, yes, we'll totally do that.
Are bad, We will bury you and grief for you.
And so, I don't know, I'm looking at it with
(14:33):
a slightly humorous lens. I don't know if that was
really intended in the original work, but it is in principle.
Another example of the restless Dead, which we referred to
in the last episode, the idea that you know there
are different types of ghosts. There are different types of
spirits of the dead that might speak to you. They're
the ones who were properly buried and are remembered, and
(14:55):
everything is sort of like squared away with them. And
there are those that have some kind kind of a
grudge something, you know, keeping them here in our world,
or specifically they were not properly buried and therefore cannot
pass on. Now. Necromancy occurs elsewhere in ancient Greece. We'll
(15:22):
get into some examples of this as we proceed here,
often involving temples devoted to an oracle of the dead.
So this is the place where one could specifically go
to seek to call up a spirit of the deceased.
Various authors wrote about such places, including Plutarch and Herodotus.
You'll find details of these oracles in their writings.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
We're going to talk about some examples of those places
in a minute. But I really got to wondering, why
do people think that ghosts know anything special, you know,
other than answering questions like what's going on in the
nether world. I mean that came up in the ancient
Mesopotamian poem of Gilgah in key Do in the nether world,
(16:01):
where I remember Gilgamesh, he keeps like his stuff keeps
falling into the underworld into the house of Dust, and
he's like, I need my stuff back, and then in
key Do goes down in there to get it for him,
but in key Do screws up. He doesn't follow the rules.
He throws throwing sticks at the dead and all that,
and then he gets stuck down there, and so he's
dead now. And then he comes back up through through
(16:24):
a necromantic summoning and Gilgamesh is like, hey, tell me
what the nether world is, like, you know, what are
the fates of the dead down there? And so forth?
That that makes sense.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
Yeah, yeah, but other otherwise, I mean, there are certain
situations so takes take Odysseus speaking with his mother. If
memory serves, the whole situation is like his mother was
alive when he last saw her, and so this is
he's learning things about home that that details about home
that he's not privy too, but she experienced before her passing.
(16:55):
I think I'm remembering that ride. I could be misremembering
part of that.
Speaker 2 (16:59):
That's right, that there are some classes of information that
makes sense in a practical way like that, and I'll
get into that in a minute. But also like how
would a ghost have privileged information, so information about the future. Well,
I found an interesting article that gets into that somewhat
with respect to ancient Greek and Roman necromancy, but also
(17:19):
has a lot of other interesting general information about Greco
Roman practices of communicating with the dead. So I want
to talk about this article. It is called lay that
Ghost Necromancy in Ancient Greece and Rome by Daniel Ogden,
was originally published in Archaeology Odyssey back in two thousand
and two. I found a republication of it on the
(17:40):
magazine of a Biblical archaeology website. But Daniel Ogden is
a professor of ancient history at the University of Exeter
in England.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
Yeah, this is a great question because it instantly reminds
me of that episode of The Simpsons where Homer eats
the pepper and has kadelic dream journey Johnny Cash. He
he talks to the space coyote voiced by Johnny Cash
and he's asking some advice of it, and he's like,
I'm just an hallucination. I don't have any new information.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
But so sometimes it didn't have to be new information.
Sometimes it was like you were saying personal, practically accessible
information for the ghost One common example of this is
stories of necromancy from ancient Greece, where the ghost tells
you what you need to do to fix your relationship
(18:34):
with the ghost with themselves. So if somebody died an
untimely death and it was your fault, you could perform
necromancy to find out what was needed in order to
make amends.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
Yeah, and you can almost think of this as some
sort of I mean, hopefully you didn't just murder the
person in cold blood, but even still, I guess it's
almost like some form of therapy, Like this is weighing
heavily on your conscious Let's summon up the spirit of
the dead and see what they want in order for
things to move on.
Speaker 2 (19:06):
Sometimes it was just straight up murder. I'll mention a
couple of different examples. So the article here opens with
a retelling piece together from Plutarch, Thucydides, and a few
other sources of this story of the fifth century BCE,
Spartan General Pausanias. Now, just to note this, this story
(19:26):
is pieced together from a bunch of different accounts, and
it is not necessarily all history thought to be all
historically true. This is like the story of this guy's life.
But Pausanias was a Spartan regent and general who famously
defended Greece. He defended the Hellenic League against the Persians
at the Battle of Platia. So his original fame is
(19:48):
as a defender of Greece against Persian invasion. But then
later in life he was caught trying to betray Greece
and make a secret pact with the Persian kings or
Exees the Great. And in the middle of all this
there is a tragic story that Pausanias accidentally killed an
innocent young woman named Kleonisi in his bedchambers when he
(20:11):
was startled awake in the night. I guess he thought
there were assassins coming for him. He reaches for his
sword and he accidentally kills this woman, this young woman,
and after this he is haunted by the woman's ghost.
So he sought the help of a necromancer or I
guess maybe it's debatable whether this should be called a necromancer.
But he sought the help of a a sort of
spirit guide at an oracle of the dead on the
(20:34):
southern shore of the Black Sea. So this is a
place where you would go to conjure up a ghost,
and so he conjures the ghost of Kleonsy so he
could learn how to make it right, and according to
the legend, the ghost told him all he needed to
do to make amends and to stop the haunting would
be to return home to Sparta. But this is one
(20:56):
of those cruel tricks that ghosts sometimes play, because when
he went home to Sparta, his betrayal to the Persians
was exposed. So the Spartans found out about him. They
tried to seize him, and then he tried to seek
sanctuary in the Temple of Athena, where he thought his
pursuers would be unable to capture and execute him for
(21:17):
fear of impiety. You know, he's taking sanctuary in a temple.
But the story goes that they found a way around this.
The Spartans bricked up the entrance and sealed him inside
until he starved to death.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
Oh wow.
Speaker 2 (21:30):
After this, however, there was an all new problem. Now
the ghost of Pausanias was haunting the Temple of Athena,
so the Spartans had to ask the oracle of Delphi
what to do, and then the oracle advised them that
they needed to bring in some exorcists. These professional Ogden
calls them evocators. He says, the Greek term is sucha gogoy,
(21:53):
which means soul conductors. And they came in and they
checked the situation out and told them how to get
rid of the Gho of Pausanias, and they succeeded. They
exercised him effectively basted right. Bustin must make them feel
good because they came all the way from Italy to
Sparta to do this. And this story illustrates what Ogden
(22:16):
claims is probably the most common piece of information sought
from the dead in Greek and Roman necromancy, and that
is what does the ghost need? What will make the
ghost go away or stop haunting me, or allow the
ghost to achieve rest. And I thought this was interesting
in that it combines two different traditions that we talked
about separately in the last part in this series. So
(22:38):
one is necromancy seeking information from the dead, and the
other is exorcism, which is the removal of a ghost
or a spirit from an unwonted place or context. So,
if Ogden is correct here, the most common aim of
the former is actually the achievement of the latter. The
most common reason ancient Greek and Roman people would go
(23:00):
go to a necromancer was to figure out how to
get a ghost to stop bothering them.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
M you know this, these series of steps there were,
I mean, there's some they're echoed throughout our supernatural fiction today.
But one example that instantly comes to mind is the
accounts of at least some versions of The Ring. And
I guess I'm mainly thinking about the first American remake
(23:25):
of it, but in that film alone, you see sort
of the three step approach where they're like, Okay, there's
some sort of sort of the realization that there's a
ghost involved, some sort of a spirit. Okay, what what
does the ghost want? They try and answer that question,
They try even to get in on the whole, like let's, uh,
let's make things right with the ghosts remains. But then
(23:47):
the big reveal, of course, is that the ghost isn't
going to be satisfied with any of those things. This
is one of that that second classification of ghosts, that
all it wants is vengeance.
Speaker 2 (23:57):
Yeah, maybe less a ghost and more a demon.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
Yeah. The only thing that we'll make it right is
to just move on from VHS to some other format,
and I think that's the other way that's the issue
was ever defeated.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
So, speaking of classifications of ghosts, another interesting point that
Ogden raises in this article is the claim that in
most Greek and Roman sources there were sort of two
different modes in which ghosts could appear. And he does
not use these terms. I just made these up to
kind of help us sort through what he's saying. I'm
(24:30):
gonna call these categories the wild ghost and the dial
a ghost. So a wild ghost is off leash. It
is a dangerous, terrifying, and uncontrollable entity that cannot be
reasoned with. This is the ghost that haunts someone by
coming into their life or by haunting a place unbidden
and attacking a person repeatedly. This is a ghost you
(24:53):
cannot talk to and you can't like bargain with in
this state.
Speaker 1 (24:58):
All right, So this is very much like the wrathful
ghost Samara or Sadako from the Rain or from various
other treatments.
Speaker 2 (25:07):
Well, yeah, but I think this is also just any
loose ghost. It's a ghost that's haunting a person and
you have not initiated contact with through a necromantic ritual.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
So slimer also fits this classification.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
Yes, yeah, that's the wild ghost. Meanwhile, what I would
call the dial a ghost is a ghost called up
through the rituals of necromancy. And so this might be
somebody who's just otherwise resting comfortably in the underworld. You
call them up through necromancy to get some information from them,
or it could be one and the same as the
(25:42):
wild ghost, but when you contact them through necromancy, apparently
the interaction is of a different sort. An entity called
up through necromantic rituals is open to conversation and exchange.
And I thought that it's interesting that these ghosts that
there can be overlaps. The same exact ghost, depending on circumstances,
(26:03):
might be a wild, uncontrollable force that visits you in
the night, in your nightmares, or you know, haunts your
home or haunts a place and terrifies people and just
keeps attacking and there's nothing you can do. But you
talk to the exact same ghost, same soul through an
oracle of the dead, or by going to a tomb
and raising them up or whatever, then you can talk
to the ghost to figure out what's going on and
(26:24):
figure out what can be done to make it go away.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
Interesting. So now this makes me wonder if if if
the ring tape, uh, the VHS tape is actually could
if you could actually think of it as sort of
automated and automated necromatic rite. It is a necromatic artifact
that does all of the ritual, but in a way
that requires less effort on the part of the person
(26:50):
using it.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
Okay, I'm trying to get there with you. Is can
the can the girl in the ring ever be reasoned
with or bargained with?
Speaker 1 (26:57):
Height No? I don't think so, not any version I've
seen you can try. And in terms of what kind
of information she has to relay, I don't know. Maybe
it is relayed through the tape. You know, these these visions.
Just because a ghost is going to tell you stuff
doesn't mean it has to make sense, right, I mean
they may speak cryptically, and then of course you get
that phone call which just says that you're going to
(27:18):
die in seven days, which isn't very helpful, but is
a communication, okay.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
So often gives an example in this article of the
Roman emperor Nero's mother Agrippina. So. According to this story,
he murders his own mother. And by the way, the
stories of her murder are very elaborate and conflicting and
all that, so who knows what really happened in history there.
But this is again, this is how the story is
understood by like Roman historians writing the lives of the emperors.
(27:48):
So the ghost repeatedly starts attacking Nero in the night,
terrifying him with these visions and nightmares. So Nero sought
the help of a Persian magas to call up her
spirit so that he could make peace with it.
Speaker 1 (28:02):
Quick note on magi and vegas Is of Persia. I
was reading a little bit about this. There's an episode
from the Sasanian Empire where the first Sasanian emperor we've
discussed him before, Adashir, the first, upon ascending the throne,
(28:23):
called on all the respected magi of the empire to
gather and the total was said to be something like
eighty thousand. So I was reading more about this, And
when we talk about the magi, we're talking about the
Masidian magi, who were a priestly order of Zoroastrianism, so
they were not expressly necromancers. They were into all sorts
(28:44):
of things, you know, looking to the stars and so forth.
But apparently some of their writings covered communication with the
untethered spirits of the dead.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
Okay, but to come back to this idea of like
ghosts that haunt people and sort of can't be reasoned
with when they appe here for hauntings. But then you
can reason with them if you do a ritual with
like a megas or some other type of or an
oracle of the dead, some kind of necromantic ritual, then
you can figure out what they want. It strikes me
that this duality does still appear in some of the
(29:16):
ghost stories of today. Like you were talking about Rob,
I mean, I think more generally about you know, a
story where the ghost is just a purely bad vibe.
During the direct hauntings, it just appears to scare people,
but in the context of a seance, the same ghost
can be intelligibly conversed with.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
Yeah, I mean, in a way, it's almost like, Okay,
this individual ghost or mortal is causing problems. Let's get
serious about this. Let's have some legal proceedings, you know,
the seance, the ritual of necromancy, whatever the details are,
it is like, okay, let's bust out some rule based
discussion of what's going on here and get to a solution.
Speaker 2 (29:59):
I think that's a good way thinking about it. In
a way this, you know, these rituals might be kind
of like instituting a court proceeding in which the ghost
must appear.
Speaker 1 (30:07):
Yeah, or it's a it's like an intervention in some
respects as well, Like the ghost shows up and is like,
all right, time to like terrify some people, and then
the ghost really, oh my goodness, this is one of
those again, they're going to try and reason with me,
all right.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
So anyway, all that falls into this category of information
about what could be done to appease or send away
the ghost, a very common aim of Greek and Roman necromancy. Sometimes,
though necromancy would just as you alluded to earlier, rob
would be used to extract information from a ghost that
(30:40):
the spirit of a person could practically be expected to
know if consciousness continues after death. For example, somebody hides
some money then dies without telling you where they hit it,
you might need to call up a necromancer to get
that information. And there are stories exactly like this. Though
this one kind of puzzled me because I was thinking
with specific practical information like the location of a stash
(31:04):
of silver or something. I wonder how the necromancer dealt
with what I would assume was their general inability to
provide useful, correct answers, you know, like maybe that have
to be very vague or to be fair, when we
get to discussing what the actual rituals were in a minute,
maybe it actually wasn't on the necromancer to give the information.
Speaker 1 (31:25):
Yeah, they would have to have some sort of an
out like that, right, because again assuming that the next
going with the assumption here that the necromancer cannot actually
speak to the dead, and that in some of these
other cases is essentially providing a like a therapeutic service.
You know, that they are, you know, guiding the recipient
through some sort of a you know, essentially a religious
(31:45):
ritual to put them at ease to you know, to
to help them honor the deceased, or whatever the specifics
might be. But in this case, yeah, if there's an
expectation of hidden treasure at the end of it, you know,
the necromancer would be a fool to put themselves on
the line like that, right.
Speaker 2 (32:02):
They won't say it's under the third bush in the garden,
because then you go dig it up and then be like, well,
it's not there. Why'd you tell me that?
Speaker 1 (32:09):
Yeah, you'd have to put a spin out, like the
true hidden treasure was your friendship in life with this person,
and that's what they value and therefore they don't want
to tell you where the money is.
Speaker 2 (32:17):
But again, we'll get to something in a minute that
I think might actually shed some light on this and
show how the person who was sort of the guide
for this process would be off the hook. So but again,
what would you be looking for from speaking to a ghost?
You would get this practical information the dead person took
with them to the grave, like you know, where did
(32:38):
you hide something or anything like that. Also, if the
person was a murder victim, they might you might consult
them to find out who killed you.
Speaker 1 (32:46):
Oh, this is a classic one, and this puts a
different kind of pressure on the role of the necromancer here,
or the alleged necromancer, because of course what they say could,
depending on the society and the legal system, be in
it as proof of an individual's guilt in a murder.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
But apart from all this stuff, where again, if you
assume that consciousness actually continues after death, you could assume
the person would know all these things? What about this
other stuff like why ghosts would know the future? We've
looked at multiple examples of necromancy being used to consult
spirits on what's going to happen in the future. It
(33:25):
turns out Greek and Roman necromancers also consulted ghosts for
info about the future, for example, to predict the outcome
of wars or power struggles. A common thing people want
to know, why would the dead have the ability to
predict the future? Well, Ogden actually does answer this question.
He says, we don't know for sure, but there are
a couple of big possibilities. Ogden writes, quote. One possibility
(33:49):
is that some ancients believed the future was prepared in
the realm of the dead. When Aeneas descends into the
underworld in Virgil's Aeneid, he witnesses the marshaling of the
souls of Rome's future heroes, even though they had not
yet been born. Okay, so that's one, Ogden goes on quote.
(34:09):
Another possibility, many ancients, Plato among them, believed that a
pure soul, one separated from the dull matter of the body,
had great powers of perception and could understand the hidden
processes of the universe. Okay, so that sort of helps
answer my question if Ogden's correct about these two explanations. Here,
(34:31):
the dead know the future because one of two things.
Either the future is written in advance, so we are
faded for certain things to happen to us, and the
writing of the future takes place in the nether world,
so dead people in hades are essentially hanging out in
the writer's room for the upcoming season of the show.
(34:53):
Or the second explanation is if you subscribe to something
like platonism, soul's rule and bodies drool, and your current
knowledge of the future is limited by the extent to
which your body drools. Liberated souls, no longer attached to
to flesh, are sort of like gods in a way.
They have extra powers of knowledge and perception, and we
(35:17):
would all have these powers if we were liberated from
the confines of our bodies.
Speaker 1 (35:21):
That one's in a really interesting because it also brings
up some of the other examples of ancestor veneration and
ancestor worship, you know, where it's like, this was a
real person in a given society or a given family,
what have you? They have died, and now they are
still real, but in a different way and perhaps held
(35:42):
to a like a put on a pedestal. You know,
they're they're, they they're they're they're given over to certain
divine characteristics, even if they are not thought of expressly
as a guy.
Speaker 2 (35:59):
All right, So that's Ogden's opinion about why ghosts would
be expected to know the future and be able to
answer your questions about it. But another interesting thing brought
up in this article is he talks about location where
would Greco Roman necromancy take place? And it seems there
(36:21):
are two main answers for this. One is at the
tomb of the deceased. And now that one makes sense
if you're trying to call up a ghost of a
dead person, where better to go than to their grave
and do some kind of ritual there makes sense. But
the second, and I got really interested in this, was
that there were essentially some geographically identified special places where
(36:47):
you could communicate with the dead. These were known as
oracles of the dead. Now where would those be? Well,
Ogden says, ancient sources tell us about four of them.
There are two in modern day Greece, one in Italy,
and one in Turkey, and I did some additional digging
for background information about a couple of these. So the
first one he mentions is in northwest Greece, and this
(37:11):
is what's known as the Acharusian Lake. So this is
a lake, or perhaps I've seen in some sources mentioned
as a swamp, a lake or a series of light
lakes or swamp connected to the river Akron, which that
river itself is very important in Greek visions of the afterlife,
so there's a motif present in Greek and Roman mythology
(37:32):
that the dead have to be carried across a river
by a ghastly ferryman in order to reach Hades or
the underworld. And in some sources this river is named
as Styx, but in others it is the Akron.
Speaker 1 (37:46):
If memory serves, both names as separate rivers are used
in Dante's Inferno.
Speaker 2 (37:51):
Oh that may be right, I don't recall, but interestingly,
I wanted to note this, so Akron, the Akron is
at least one definite real river in northwest Greece, so
there's just the Akron. You can go to that river now,
whereas the sticks at Core seems to be a mythological
river in the underworld, but at some point it was
(38:13):
also associated I think with various real waterways as well,
such as like a stream in Arcadia, but the Akron
seems more concretely geographically located on this world. But anyway,
the story goes, so one of these lakes or swamps
connected to the Akron, known as Akarusia. There was a
lakeside district in which you could call up the spirits
(38:37):
of the dead, and this was possible because of the
way that the river and the lake were somehow physically
connected to Hades and Rob. I've attached a couple of
pictures I found online of the Akron River for you
to look at here. You know, it's weird. I wonder
if it's just an example of psychological priming, because I
was expecting these to be associated with the underworld. But
(38:57):
they do look kind of spooky to me.
Speaker 1 (38:59):
Yeah. Yes, I'm not sure how much of this is
just me going into it with the expectation here, but yeah,
in the first shot there's this impression of narrowing, and
I don't know, I'm kind of reminded of, you know,
the classic painting The Island of the Dead there a
little bit, but I could be reading too much into it.
I mean a river at the at the very least,
a river is This is a is a moving thing
(39:22):
that goes somewhere else. So it's easy to approach it
and think of it as this thing that connects to
some distant land, because it literally does.
Speaker 2 (39:31):
That's a good point, okay. So second place for the
Oracle of the Dead. This is way over on the
western coast of the Italian Peninsula. This is Lake of
Vernas in Campagna. So once again this is a body
of water associated with the entrance to the underworld. In
this case, I thought it was geologically interesting because a
Vernas is the flooded crater of an extinct volcano, so
(39:56):
this is in a region somewhat close to Naples. Allegedly,
the Lake of Verness emitted fumes of sulfur sometimes, which
could be why it was thought of as the entrance
to the realm of the dead. And contrary to what
you might expect. You know, you might think, okay, so
this lake is associated with the underworld, then maybe it's
just this creepy, abandoned place with nothing going on. But no, no, no.
(40:19):
The area around Averness was developed. It had temples, and
bathhouses and all sorts of stuff. In fact, in his article,
Ogden tells what I thought was a very funny story
about a British archaeologist who thought he had identified the
ruins of the Avernus oracle of the Dead in a
Roman era tunnel near the lake came up with this
(40:40):
whole scenario about how the oracle worked. Ogden writes, quote
he speculated that visitors to the oracle were led through
dark tunnels and across a hot, sulfurous spring that doubled
as the river Sticks. Priestly assistants, he suggested, used lamps
and wooden shadow puppets to project ghostly figures onto a
wall in a kind of ancient vision of a Disneyland
(41:02):
haunted house. So, okay, that sounds very interesting, but it
turns out no, this tunnel was actually a service tunnel
for a Roman bathhouse. And then there are a couple
of other sites of oracles of the dead that are
that were less well known. One is heraclea Pontica. That's
the one on the south coast of the Black Sea,
(41:25):
up on the north of what is today Turkey, or
at the time would have been Anatolia. This is the
place that Pausanias went to in that legend, and then
the other one, the fourth one is Cape Tynron, which
is down at the southern tip of the Peloponnesis, And
I'm not sure about the Black Sea location, but I
(41:46):
was looking up Cape Tynern and this one was also,
according to some ancient sources, a gateway to the underworld.
So it seems what a lot of these Oracle of
the Dead locations have in common is they are thought
to be in some sense of physical entry way into
the underworld.
Speaker 1 (42:04):
Yeah, so it's not just a matter of having the
rituals or the expertise. It's like, are you in close
enough proximity to the underworld for that signal to reach them?
Speaker 2 (42:15):
Now. In the last episode, we talked about those ancient
Mesopotamian tablets that shared specifics of their necromancy rituals, which
involved incantations, so you had special words to say and
appeals to specific gods who would sort of oversee the proceedings.
Like one of the tablets specified that you know, this
(42:35):
ritual is taking place under the auspices of the god Shamash.
And then they also had recipes for potions and concoctions
to make out of all kinds of stuff, you know,
dust from across roads, the end of a frog's intestines, crab, tallow,
hair of a dog, and a bunch of other stuff.
And in one case, I guess my favorite thing was
(42:56):
the ritual that involved a skull that you would address
as oh, sk skull of skulls, and the implication is
that the ghost would come into the skull and speak
out of it somehow. In this case, I wonder what
literally happened during these rituals, by the way, did I
think we don't really know, but I have to wonder, like,
did the skull somehow quote speak? If so, how was
(43:19):
that accomplished?
Speaker 1 (43:21):
Yeah, because on one hand, you could have a scenario
where some manner of puppetry was even utilized. But I
guess perhaps more believable, at least by modern standards, would
be just sort of a physical focus of what's happening.
So perhaps the necromancer is listening to the skull and
that becomes the object of focus during the proceedings.
Speaker 2 (43:44):
Right, So a question is do we have physical descriptions
of what would happen during these rituals during the ghost interactions?
For Greco Roman necromancy, and the answer is yes, we
do have some descriptions. One example Ogden gives that I
thought was interesting as the Greek playwright Escalus, in a
fragment of an otherwise lost work, describes a scene at
(44:07):
a lakeside oracle of the dead where blood from a
black sheep is poured into the water, and the implication
is that the ghosts would come up from the underworld
through the waters of the lake and drink the sheep's blood.
And this is interesting in that it connects to that
scene in Homer where it's implied that or not even implied,
(44:28):
it's explicitly stated that giving a ghost sheep's blood or
rams blood to drink would make it sort of temporarily
beefed up enough to party, Like now it can talk.
And I think this is really interesting, this idea that
you had to feed blood to a ghost so that
it could I don't know, become substantial or empowered enough
(44:50):
to interact with you.
Speaker 1 (44:51):
Yeah, I mean it's the dead or lacking blood, and
give them blood and they can they can do living
things again, at least for a very short period of time.
Speaker 2 (45:00):
But finally, coming back to that issue of like what
form does the delivery of information from the dead take
in these Greco Roman rituals, Like, how does the necromancer
have to deliver the information? And in that case, how
do they deal with like the information when you know,
not being specific or accurate. Well, Ogden says that the
(45:22):
contact with the ghost at an oracle of the dead
was done through dream incubation. Oh, this makes sense of things, right.
So this is similar to what was done at multiple
kinds of temples and shrines in the ancient world. One
example we've talked about on the show before was the
shrines of the healing god Asclepias, where you would want
(45:44):
to get healed from a disease or something troubling your body,
and you would to seek a cure. You might go
to a shrine of Asclepias and you would do some
kind of ritual, probably make a sacrifice or pay a
fee or something, and then you would go to sleep
and then you would have a dream there where Asclepias
would deliver to you information in the dream about what
(46:06):
you could do to cure your disease.
Speaker 1 (46:09):
Yeah, okay.
Speaker 2 (46:10):
In the case of the necromancer oracles, you would do
the prescribed rituals. You probably make some kind of sacrifice.
It seems very likely it might involve like a spilling
of some kind of animal blood to feed to the ghost,
and then you would go to sleep in the designated area,
and then the ghost would come to you in a
dream and tell you what you needed to know. And
(46:31):
this is interesting in multiple ways. Number One, it highlights
this thing in ancient Greek thinking where sleep was sort
of a state thought of as in some ways analogous
to or half way to death. So you're sort of
going out of the land of the living into this
half dead state of sleep in order to meet the ghost,
(46:54):
you know, as it comes out to deliver you information.
But then also in a practical sense, I could see
how this would mean that the priest or whatever, the
professional working at the oracle of the Dead is doing,
like they're not personally on the hook for like giving
you the information you need. And it might be in
some cases they did provide information, but it seems like
(47:14):
in a lot of cases they use dream incubation where
it's all internal to you.
Speaker 1 (47:19):
Yeah, it's like they're just helping to facilitate the conversation
and then the conversation is left to you and your
dream state, and I guess in a more like you know,
skeptical approach here. Yeah, they're simply priming your brain for
some sort of a dream that could be either in
and of itself seemingly meaningful or could be picked apart
(47:41):
in made meaningful due to the priming. So it's interesting
how we kind of end up at the end of
this episode in similar territory to our previous look at
different cultures and times in which the dream world was
given special significance. You know, I mean, I'm not sure
you could necessarily make the case here because again this
(48:03):
could be maybe thought of as you know, an important right,
but not like a prime motivator in the trajectory of
a given culture. But still, you see, like the importance
of the dream space to individuals and trying to figure
out their problems.
Speaker 2 (48:20):
Well, yeah, and it makes me see another parallel between
sleep and death here is that it seems like they
are both states in which people's capacities are to some
extent diminished but in other ways magnified. You know that,
like like during sleep you are closer to death, and
so of course you know your your consciousness is diminished
(48:44):
in a way you of course your your physical potency,
like you're not moving around while you're asleep, you're prone
and all that, so you are diminished or reduced in
one extent. But also it is the place where you
have access to wisdom beyond what's available to your mortal mind.
Speaker 1 (49:02):
Yeah, of course, I can't help but be reminded of
Freddy Krueger and all of this. It's easy to think
of Freddy Krueger as a monster, but you know, he's
a monster in the general sense of the word. But
he is a ghost. He has a vengeful ghost that
then appears in your dreams. And I guess by virtue
of having access to dreams, he has privileged information about individuals.
(49:25):
I don't know that anyone ever really asks him for
advice on anything, though, I.
Speaker 2 (49:29):
Mean it would be funny if you did. I don't
know what kind of advice he would give.
Speaker 1 (49:32):
I mean, that could be a whole sequel right there
where somebody or some group or like, look, we need
we need the help of someone with access to dreams.
I guess specifically teenager dreams. I guess maybe this would
make sense for if you were designing a product to
appeal to teenagers, they're like who knows teenagers. Freddy Krueger,
you know what's cool?
Speaker 2 (49:53):
Yeah? Yeah, Oh, to get advice on sweaters, it would
be like, Freddy Krueger, is this sweater cool? Is this
what's going to be hip this season? And he's always
just like Green and Red, that's what's going to be in.
Speaker 1 (50:05):
Now he knows it's a classic look and it'll eventually,
you know, eventually the trends will come back around to it.
Speaker 2 (50:11):
Okay, well in a cap part two right there, I believe.
Speaker 1 (50:14):
So, yeah, we'll be back for at least a third
episode on necromancy, and in the meantime, reach out to us.
We'd love to hear your thoughts on these various and
ancient accounts of necromancier things that could be described as
necromantic and scope. Also, if you have thoughts in some
of the more pop culture things that we've mentioned here,
(50:35):
if you have thoughts on Freddy Krueger, Slimer or the
Ring certainly right in. I mean, there's ultimately a lot
you could dissect in the original Ghostbusters where you have
ghosts that resemble the people as they were in life,
and then ghosts that no longer look like human beings.
You also have what ancient Mesopotamian gods entering into the
(50:57):
picture with their be like servants. So there's a lot
to unwrap there.
Speaker 2 (51:02):
Many knew what it was to roast in the belly
of a slore that day.
Speaker 1 (51:06):
Indeed, all right, a reminder that's stuff to blow your mind.
Is primarily a science podcast, though of course we get
into the culture and history as well as especially obvious
in these episodes. We do listener mail episodes on Mondays,
we do a short form monster fact or artifact episode
on Wednesdays, and on Fridays we set aside most serious
(51:27):
concerns to just talk about a weird movie on Weird
House Cinema. Oh and one more thing. If you use
any of the various social media accounts and you follow us,
you may notice that there's a little more life than those.
Recently we have some people managing those for us once again.
And you also might notice some updated photos of me
(51:48):
and Joe. Well, that's because we visited the Museum of
Illusions in Atlanta. We were there what Thursday, September twenty first,
twenty twenty three. We have some great new photos. I
recommend that place to anyone who is in Atlanta looking
to engage with some illusions. It's a very fun place.
Speaker 2 (52:05):
Huge thanks to our excellent audio producer, JJ Posway. If
you would like to get in touch with us with
feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a
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 (52:27):
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.
Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I am Joe McCormick. And today we're bringing you
another episode from the Vault. Rob and I are out
on fall Break this week. This is part two in
our series on necromancy. It's called The Necromantic Urge. This
episode originally published October third, twenty twenty three. Enjoy Ah Necromancy,
Sweet Ah Wizard air udet teach me the skill that
(00:33):
I instill. The pain surgeons assuage in vain, nor herb
of all the plane can heal.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick. And that poem I
just read was from Emily Dickinson and some of the
numbering systems. That's her poem, number one seventy seven. I
would say not one of her greatest efforts, But you know,
some of those poems in her collections seem like something
she just jotted on the back of a notepad real quick.
I think that's more one of those. But I still
(01:17):
like the forced rhyme of sweet with aeradite, and I
don't know, wizard feels more right than Wizard.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
I like the reading. Yes, and yeah, this was not
a poem of Emily Dickinson's that I was familiar with.
Sometimes just it's given the title ah Necromancy Sweet, it
is a note that like, basically I was gonna just
bust out another Clark Ashton Smith poem for this episode,
but then I was like, who else has some poems
about necromancy and necromancers? And lo and behold, Emily Dickinson
(01:48):
has not one, but two, which may surprise some of you,
may not surprise some of you who are more familiar
with her work.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
I would say I'm an Emily Dickinson fan, though I
would not have been able to tell you that she
had poems that use the word necromancy, though I know
a number of her poems are concerned with death.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
Yeah, she saw the skull beneath the skin, that's for sure.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
Oh skull of skulls. Well, anyway, we are back with
part two in our series on necromancy. Now, if you've
been listening to the podcast for a while, you probably
know that every year, for the whole month of October,
we focus our attention on topics of the beastly, ghostly,
devilish or uncanny sort. And also, as we often do,
(02:34):
we got started a little bit early this year, So
we got started last week even though it was still
technically September, with the first part in a series on necromancy,
the practice of communicating with the dead, usually for the
purpose of divination, of gaining access to hidden information or truth.
(02:54):
And in that episode we talked about accounts of necromancy
or pseudo necromatic legends from ancient China, as well as
methods of both speaking to and exercising ghosts in the
first millennium BCE in Mesopotamia. And today we are going
to continue our journey into the nether world talking about
necromancy practices and legends from ancient Greece and Rome.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
That's right, We're gonna be talking about Greek accounts of
necromancy or things like necromancy to some extent in this episode,
and who knows where we'll end up in a third
episode on necromancy. So one of the sources that I
mentioned in the last episode is a paper by Czech
academic Andrej CapCar titled the Origins of Necromancy or how
(03:40):
we learn to speak to the dead great title, and
according to CapCar, the earliest mentions of necromancy, they don't
require a lot of inference and interpretation, can be found
in ancient Greece. In this we're dealing with nekia, which
is the practice of calling forth and asking them about
(04:02):
the future, or as we'll get into, things that are
maybe not the future, but that are concerned with knowledge
beyond what an individual has at their disposal. You know,
the dead by virtue of being dead, they can tell
you things. They can tell you things from their life,
from their place of origin, and so forth. The primary
(04:24):
example that he deals with, and indeed of a primary
example you see in a lot of discussions of what
is or isn't necromancy in ancient Greek traditions, takes us
all the way back to book eleven of the Odyssey,
in which Odysseus receives instructions about how to question the
dead and then does so. Now, Joe correct me if
I'm wrong, But I think we've recounted this story before
(04:46):
on the podcast.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
Possibly, but it's been a while, so I think it's
worth refreshing on this story.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
All right, Well, I'll give everyone the basics here concerning
this episode. So basically, you know, the deal with Odysseus
is trying to get home, right, He's he's been off
to war, he's seen the Trojan Wars and so forth.
Wants to get home, wants to be reunited with his wife.
A lot of misadventures occur on the way, so he
takes the scenic route does he takes the scenic route
(05:14):
and one of the more scenic routes ends up taking
He and his crew wind up on the island of
Circe in the care you might say, or under the
dominion of the enchantress Circe, and there's you know, there's
some misunderstanding, there's some transfiguration involved, there's a good bit
of seduction, and they end up staying there for like
(05:35):
a year. So they're hanging out on this island for
a fair amount of time.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
I don't know exactly how all of this gets explained
Penelope later.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
Well, you know, there's a possible answer to that here
coming up. But essentially, you know, he has time to
seek some some guidance, get some some advice from Circe,
and basically he wants to seek the advice of the
prophet Tyrisius, the blind Seer of Thebes, who in one
Greek myth is changed into a woman for several years
(06:09):
and then back into a man. But in this story,
this seer is dead, and that's a problem, and that's
why Circe sends Odysseus to the very gates of the
Land of the Dead in order to seek his advice.
So that's what the crew does. That's what the guys do.
They go to the very limits of the mortal realm,
right up to the border with the Land of the Dead,
(06:32):
and per Circe's instructions, they dig a trench, they offer libations,
they sacrifice you and a ram. These are the practices
of Nekia. So the blood of the sacrifice calls forth ghosts,
but it calls forth ghosts by the thousands, so it's
just just calls them all out. They all come swarming.
(06:53):
Key individuals that Odysseus knew in life they come forward
as well. One of them is Odysseus's own mother, an initial,
so he does not let her of her spirit approach
the blood. But finally here comes Diyrisius. He drinks the
blood and then speaks and tells Odysseus how their journey
home is likely to go, and basically he breaks it
(07:15):
to him. Look, you you know that stuff with the
Cyclops while you offended Poseidon and he's a p pretty
powerful guy. You're gonna have to make amends for that.
There he outlines some of the other hurdles that are
in their path, and then Odysseus asked, well, how can
I speak to the ghost of my mother who I
just ran into? And he is told that he must
(07:37):
let the spirit drink the blood. If the spirit doesn't
drink the blood, then they cannot speak to the living,
and so he allows his mother's spirit to do that.
He doesn't stand in her way, and he's able to
speak with his mother and learn about events at home.
There are more details when I may touch on some
more here in a minute, but that's the basics here.
Odysseus engages in a specific rite to attract the spirits
(08:01):
of the deceased, appeases them, and gives them the power
of speech and their for prophecy.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Okay, so I know this passage is of interest to
people trying to understand the culture and the ritual practices
of ancient Greece because It's often interpreted not just as
an isolated story in a fictional narrative, but a reflection
of generally how the rituals of necromancy were thought to work,
at least to some extent.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
That's right, Yeah, so yeah, we're doing with what an
eighth century BCE text that many argue as our earliest
clear look at the idea of what would come to
be known as necromancy. But at the same time, I
do have to highlight that I was looking around not
everyone is convinced that it's truly what we'd call necromancy.
We kind of get into the semantics game again. I've
seen arguments that what takes place here is essentially a
(08:49):
standard sacrifice to the spirits of the dead, only observed
on the physical threshold of death's own country. So I
don't you know, again, theerhaps the location is the key
thing here, and the right itself is not necromancy itself,
but takes on necromantic powers due to proximity to the
(09:10):
land of the dead.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
That'll come back in some stuff I want to get
into in a little bit.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
But on the other hand, plenty of commentators do equate
Nekia with necromancy. Some things to keep in mind about
what we see here in this primary example. So, first
of all, as we were discussing in the first episode,
this is one of those ancient accounts that involves speaking
to the dead. It does not involved controlling the dead.
(09:37):
I mean, aside from just giving them the power of
speech by offering them the blood.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Yeah, that's right, we talked about in the last episode.
How if you hear the word necromancer today, especially if
you play Dungeons and Dragons or you're familiar with general
fantasy horror literature, you're probably thinking of someone who commands
armies of skeletons to do their bidding. And that's not
usually what's being discussed with ancient necromancy. It's specifically a
(10:02):
divination practice. It's about communicating with the dead, usually to
get information.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
Yeah. Now, the other interesting thing about this, and something
I rather like about this example, is that Odysseus doesn't
summon one dead individual from the realm of the dead.
He summons all of them at once, like just a
mass of them. It's like it's kind of like he
replied all or you know how in different organizations, there'll
be that one email address where you can, you can
(10:27):
contact everybody in the organization. It's like, you know, all
dead at underworld dot com or something to that effect.
That's what Odysseus does here. And they're like, whoa, everybody's
in the chat now.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
And then everybody starts replying, and that's the day. You
get five hundred emails on the same thread and yeah, exactly, yeah,
and then he has to try and figure out who
he specifically wants to talk to.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
Now. Aspects of this that are reflected in later traditions
of necromancy. It does entail blood. There is blood and
blood sacrifice involved here. It intail it does entail the
ability to speak with the dead and learn from them.
And again this may work mostly due to proximity to
the Kingdom of the Dead. And you could also classify
(11:13):
this as an example of katabasis or a descent into
the underworld. I mean, even if Odysseus is only going
to the gates of Hell here, I mean he's essentially
he's essentially in the underworld, right, I mean, where do
you draw the line between actually going there and just
going to the edge of it?
Speaker 2 (11:31):
Right? Well, So you could have an example like Orpheus
that I think is more a more complete katabasis. But
this is he's at least going part of the way.
And I think it is portrayed from what I recall
in the narrative as a as a harrowing journey into
a place that, you know, where mortals do not normally
tread exactly.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
Yeah, And of course this is a major theme in literature.
We see it in Virgil Zania, we see it in
Dante's Divine Comedy, and so many other examples, you know,
pop culture and otherwise. When people travel into the realm
of the dead to get something, to find someone, to
get secret knowledge, et cetera, there are often complications. There's
(12:12):
often a fair amount of traunta.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
Now, you know what. Another thing I recall from the
narrative in the Odyssey is that it presents a vision
of the underworld and of the afterlife in which being
dead sucks. It is really bad, and it's just it's
not something you want and it's not like heaven where
everybody's a nice angel and things are great, now you
(12:35):
know it just it depicts the afterlife is a kind
of miserable only half kind of pseudo existence.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
Yeah, And it's interesting to think about that I mean,
we could have a larger discussion about various versions of
the afterlife, but certainly, very generally, there are plenty of
other examples where the afterlife is considered like the destination,
it is the thing, and suffering here in the mortal
realm is worth it for those treasures in the next realm.
And you know, at least on the surface, you seem
(13:07):
to see a reversal here in these traditions where like,
this is the life, this is the prime existence. What
happens next is just kind of a shadow. Now. CapCar
also singles out one of the other details of this encounter,
and that's and that concerns one of the other dead individuals,
the spirits of the dead that approaches Odysseus here from
(13:28):
the underworld, and that's Elpinor. This was the youngest member
of Odysseus's crew, who remember that that year that they
spent on the island of Circe. Well, during that year,
Elpinor becomes drunk and decides, you know what I'm gonna do.
I'm gonna go sleep on that roof. So he grips
and gets himself a ladder and he starts climbing up
that ladder to get on the roof so he can sleep,
(13:50):
but he falls off the ladder, he breaks his neck,
he dies. Well, you know, it's sad, but even sadder
it turns out the boys forgot to give him a
proper burier and to grieve for him. So it's kind
of embarrassing for Odysseus. He shows up here in the
underworld and here comes Elpinor, and he says, hey, you
remember me. I was the youngest member of your crew,
(14:11):
and I got drunk, I fell off that ladder, I
broke my neck. Well, you guys didn't bury me or
grieve for me. Could you do that? That would be
really swell, And so Odysseus says, yes, we'll totally do that.
Are bad, We will bury you and grief for you.
And so, I don't know, I'm looking at it with
(14:33):
a slightly humorous lens. I don't know if that was
really intended in the original work, but it is in principle.
Another example of the restless Dead, which we referred to
in the last episode, the idea that you know there
are different types of ghosts. There are different types of
spirits of the dead that might speak to you. They're
the ones who were properly buried and are remembered, and
(14:55):
everything is sort of like squared away with them. And
there are those that have some kind kind of a
grudge something, you know, keeping them here in our world,
or specifically they were not properly buried and therefore cannot
pass on. Now. Necromancy occurs elsewhere in ancient Greece. We'll
(15:22):
get into some examples of this as we proceed here,
often involving temples devoted to an oracle of the dead.
So this is the place where one could specifically go
to seek to call up a spirit of the deceased.
Various authors wrote about such places, including Plutarch and Herodotus.
You'll find details of these oracles in their writings.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
We're going to talk about some examples of those places
in a minute. But I really got to wondering, why
do people think that ghosts know anything special, you know,
other than answering questions like what's going on in the
nether world. I mean that came up in the ancient
Mesopotamian poem of Gilgah in key Do in the nether world,
(16:01):
where I remember Gilgamesh, he keeps like his stuff keeps
falling into the underworld into the house of Dust, and
he's like, I need my stuff back, and then in
key Do goes down in there to get it for him,
but in key Do screws up. He doesn't follow the rules.
He throws throwing sticks at the dead and all that,
and then he gets stuck down there, and so he's
dead now. And then he comes back up through through
(16:24):
a necromantic summoning and Gilgamesh is like, hey, tell me
what the nether world is, like, you know, what are
the fates of the dead down there? And so forth?
That that makes sense.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
Yeah, yeah, but other otherwise, I mean, there are certain
situations so takes take Odysseus speaking with his mother. If
memory serves, the whole situation is like his mother was
alive when he last saw her, and so this is
he's learning things about home that that details about home
that he's not privy too, but she experienced before her passing.
(16:55):
I think I'm remembering that ride. I could be misremembering
part of that.
Speaker 2 (16:59):
That's right, that there are some classes of information that
makes sense in a practical way like that, and I'll
get into that in a minute. But also like how
would a ghost have privileged information, so information about the future. Well,
I found an interesting article that gets into that somewhat
with respect to ancient Greek and Roman necromancy, but also
(17:19):
has a lot of other interesting general information about Greco
Roman practices of communicating with the dead. So I want
to talk about this article. It is called lay that
Ghost Necromancy in Ancient Greece and Rome by Daniel Ogden,
was originally published in Archaeology Odyssey back in two thousand
and two. I found a republication of it on the
(17:40):
magazine of a Biblical archaeology website. But Daniel Ogden is
a professor of ancient history at the University of Exeter
in England.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
Yeah, this is a great question because it instantly reminds
me of that episode of The Simpsons where Homer eats
the pepper and has kadelic dream journey Johnny Cash. He
he talks to the space coyote voiced by Johnny Cash
and he's asking some advice of it, and he's like,
I'm just an hallucination. I don't have any new information.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
But so sometimes it didn't have to be new information.
Sometimes it was like you were saying personal, practically accessible
information for the ghost One common example of this is
stories of necromancy from ancient Greece, where the ghost tells
you what you need to do to fix your relationship
(18:34):
with the ghost with themselves. So if somebody died an
untimely death and it was your fault, you could perform
necromancy to find out what was needed in order to
make amends.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
Yeah, and you can almost think of this as some
sort of I mean, hopefully you didn't just murder the
person in cold blood, but even still, I guess it's
almost like some form of therapy, Like this is weighing
heavily on your conscious Let's summon up the spirit of
the dead and see what they want in order for
things to move on.
Speaker 2 (19:06):
Sometimes it was just straight up murder. I'll mention a
couple of different examples. So the article here opens with
a retelling piece together from Plutarch, Thucydides, and a few
other sources of this story of the fifth century BCE,
Spartan General Pausanias. Now, just to note this, this story
(19:26):
is pieced together from a bunch of different accounts, and
it is not necessarily all history thought to be all
historically true. This is like the story of this guy's life.
But Pausanias was a Spartan regent and general who famously
defended Greece. He defended the Hellenic League against the Persians
at the Battle of Platia. So his original fame is
(19:48):
as a defender of Greece against Persian invasion. But then
later in life he was caught trying to betray Greece
and make a secret pact with the Persian kings or
Exees the Great. And in the middle of all this
there is a tragic story that Pausanias accidentally killed an
innocent young woman named Kleonisi in his bedchambers when he
(20:11):
was startled awake in the night. I guess he thought
there were assassins coming for him. He reaches for his
sword and he accidentally kills this woman, this young woman,
and after this he is haunted by the woman's ghost.
So he sought the help of a necromancer or I
guess maybe it's debatable whether this should be called a necromancer.
But he sought the help of a a sort of
spirit guide at an oracle of the dead on the
(20:34):
southern shore of the Black Sea. So this is a
place where you would go to conjure up a ghost,
and so he conjures the ghost of Kleonsy so he
could learn how to make it right, and according to
the legend, the ghost told him all he needed to
do to make amends and to stop the haunting would
be to return home to Sparta. But this is one
(20:56):
of those cruel tricks that ghosts sometimes play, because when
he went home to Sparta, his betrayal to the Persians
was exposed. So the Spartans found out about him. They
tried to seize him, and then he tried to seek
sanctuary in the Temple of Athena, where he thought his
pursuers would be unable to capture and execute him for
(21:17):
fear of impiety. You know, he's taking sanctuary in a temple.
But the story goes that they found a way around this.
The Spartans bricked up the entrance and sealed him inside
until he starved to death.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
Oh wow.
Speaker 2 (21:30):
After this, however, there was an all new problem. Now
the ghost of Pausanias was haunting the Temple of Athena,
so the Spartans had to ask the oracle of Delphi
what to do, and then the oracle advised them that
they needed to bring in some exorcists. These professional Ogden
calls them evocators. He says, the Greek term is sucha gogoy,
(21:53):
which means soul conductors. And they came in and they
checked the situation out and told them how to get
rid of the Gho of Pausanias, and they succeeded. They
exercised him effectively basted right. Bustin must make them feel
good because they came all the way from Italy to
Sparta to do this. And this story illustrates what Ogden
(22:16):
claims is probably the most common piece of information sought
from the dead in Greek and Roman necromancy, and that
is what does the ghost need? What will make the
ghost go away or stop haunting me, or allow the
ghost to achieve rest. And I thought this was interesting
in that it combines two different traditions that we talked
about separately in the last part in this series. So
(22:38):
one is necromancy seeking information from the dead, and the
other is exorcism, which is the removal of a ghost
or a spirit from an unwonted place or context. So,
if Ogden is correct here, the most common aim of
the former is actually the achievement of the latter. The
most common reason ancient Greek and Roman people would go
(23:00):
go to a necromancer was to figure out how to
get a ghost to stop bothering them.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
M you know this, these series of steps there were,
I mean, there's some they're echoed throughout our supernatural fiction today.
But one example that instantly comes to mind is the
accounts of at least some versions of The Ring. And
I guess I'm mainly thinking about the first American remake
(23:25):
of it, but in that film alone, you see sort
of the three step approach where they're like, Okay, there's
some sort of sort of the realization that there's a
ghost involved, some sort of a spirit. Okay, what what
does the ghost want? They try and answer that question,
They try even to get in on the whole, like let's, uh,
let's make things right with the ghosts remains. But then
(23:47):
the big reveal, of course, is that the ghost isn't
going to be satisfied with any of those things. This
is one of that that second classification of ghosts, that
all it wants is vengeance.
Speaker 2 (23:57):
Yeah, maybe less a ghost and more a demon.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
Yeah. The only thing that we'll make it right is
to just move on from VHS to some other format,
and I think that's the other way that's the issue
was ever defeated.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
So, speaking of classifications of ghosts, another interesting point that
Ogden raises in this article is the claim that in
most Greek and Roman sources there were sort of two
different modes in which ghosts could appear. And he does
not use these terms. I just made these up to
kind of help us sort through what he's saying. I'm
(24:30):
gonna call these categories the wild ghost and the dial
a ghost. So a wild ghost is off leash. It
is a dangerous, terrifying, and uncontrollable entity that cannot be
reasoned with. This is the ghost that haunts someone by
coming into their life or by haunting a place unbidden
and attacking a person repeatedly. This is a ghost you
(24:53):
cannot talk to and you can't like bargain with in
this state.
Speaker 1 (24:58):
All right, So this is very much like the wrathful
ghost Samara or Sadako from the Rain or from various
other treatments.
Speaker 2 (25:07):
Well, yeah, but I think this is also just any
loose ghost. It's a ghost that's haunting a person and
you have not initiated contact with through a necromantic ritual.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
So slimer also fits this classification.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
Yes, yeah, that's the wild ghost. Meanwhile, what I would
call the dial a ghost is a ghost called up
through the rituals of necromancy. And so this might be
somebody who's just otherwise resting comfortably in the underworld. You
call them up through necromancy to get some information from them,
or it could be one and the same as the
(25:42):
wild ghost, but when you contact them through necromancy, apparently
the interaction is of a different sort. An entity called
up through necromantic rituals is open to conversation and exchange.
And I thought that it's interesting that these ghosts that
there can be overlaps. The same exact ghost, depending on circumstances,
(26:03):
might be a wild, uncontrollable force that visits you in
the night, in your nightmares, or you know, haunts your
home or haunts a place and terrifies people and just
keeps attacking and there's nothing you can do. But you
talk to the exact same ghost, same soul through an
oracle of the dead, or by going to a tomb
and raising them up or whatever, then you can talk
to the ghost to figure out what's going on and
(26:24):
figure out what can be done to make it go away.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
Interesting. So now this makes me wonder if if if
the ring tape, uh, the VHS tape is actually could
if you could actually think of it as sort of
automated and automated necromatic rite. It is a necromatic artifact
that does all of the ritual, but in a way
that requires less effort on the part of the person
(26:50):
using it.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
Okay, I'm trying to get there with you. Is can
the can the girl in the ring ever be reasoned
with or bargained with?
Speaker 1 (26:57):
Height No? I don't think so, not any version I've
seen you can try. And in terms of what kind
of information she has to relay, I don't know. Maybe
it is relayed through the tape. You know, these these visions.
Just because a ghost is going to tell you stuff
doesn't mean it has to make sense, right, I mean
they may speak cryptically, and then of course you get
that phone call which just says that you're going to
(27:18):
die in seven days, which isn't very helpful, but is
a communication, okay.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
So often gives an example in this article of the
Roman emperor Nero's mother Agrippina. So. According to this story,
he murders his own mother. And by the way, the
stories of her murder are very elaborate and conflicting and
all that, so who knows what really happened in history there.
But this is again, this is how the story is
understood by like Roman historians writing the lives of the emperors.
(27:48):
So the ghost repeatedly starts attacking Nero in the night,
terrifying him with these visions and nightmares. So Nero sought
the help of a Persian magas to call up her
spirit so that he could make peace with it.
Speaker 1 (28:02):
Quick note on magi and vegas Is of Persia. I
was reading a little bit about this. There's an episode
from the Sasanian Empire where the first Sasanian emperor we've
discussed him before, Adashir, the first, upon ascending the throne,
(28:23):
called on all the respected magi of the empire to
gather and the total was said to be something like
eighty thousand. So I was reading more about this, And
when we talk about the magi, we're talking about the
Masidian magi, who were a priestly order of Zoroastrianism, so
they were not expressly necromancers. They were into all sorts
(28:44):
of things, you know, looking to the stars and so forth.
But apparently some of their writings covered communication with the
untethered spirits of the dead.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
Okay, but to come back to this idea of like
ghosts that haunt people and sort of can't be reasoned
with when they appe here for hauntings. But then you
can reason with them if you do a ritual with
like a megas or some other type of or an
oracle of the dead, some kind of necromantic ritual, then
you can figure out what they want. It strikes me
that this duality does still appear in some of the
(29:16):
ghost stories of today. Like you were talking about Rob,
I mean, I think more generally about you know, a
story where the ghost is just a purely bad vibe.
During the direct hauntings, it just appears to scare people,
but in the context of a seance, the same ghost
can be intelligibly conversed with.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
Yeah, I mean, in a way, it's almost like, Okay,
this individual ghost or mortal is causing problems. Let's get
serious about this. Let's have some legal proceedings, you know,
the seance, the ritual of necromancy, whatever the details are,
it is like, okay, let's bust out some rule based
discussion of what's going on here and get to a solution.
Speaker 2 (29:59):
I think that's a good way thinking about it. In
a way this, you know, these rituals might be kind
of like instituting a court proceeding in which the ghost
must appear.
Speaker 1 (30:07):
Yeah, or it's a it's like an intervention in some
respects as well, Like the ghost shows up and is like,
all right, time to like terrify some people, and then
the ghost really, oh my goodness, this is one of
those again, they're going to try and reason with me,
all right.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
So anyway, all that falls into this category of information
about what could be done to appease or send away
the ghost, a very common aim of Greek and Roman necromancy. Sometimes,
though necromancy would just as you alluded to earlier, rob
would be used to extract information from a ghost that
(30:40):
the spirit of a person could practically be expected to
know if consciousness continues after death. For example, somebody hides
some money then dies without telling you where they hit it,
you might need to call up a necromancer to get
that information. And there are stories exactly like this. Though
this one kind of puzzled me because I was thinking
with specific practical information like the location of a stash
(31:04):
of silver or something. I wonder how the necromancer dealt
with what I would assume was their general inability to
provide useful, correct answers, you know, like maybe that have
to be very vague or to be fair, when we
get to discussing what the actual rituals were in a minute,
maybe it actually wasn't on the necromancer to give the information.
Speaker 1 (31:25):
Yeah, they would have to have some sort of an
out like that, right, because again assuming that the next
going with the assumption here that the necromancer cannot actually
speak to the dead, and that in some of these
other cases is essentially providing a like a therapeutic service.
You know, that they are, you know, guiding the recipient
through some sort of a you know, essentially a religious
(31:45):
ritual to put them at ease to you know, to
to help them honor the deceased, or whatever the specifics
might be. But in this case, yeah, if there's an
expectation of hidden treasure at the end of it, you know,
the necromancer would be a fool to put themselves on
the line like that, right.
Speaker 2 (32:02):
They won't say it's under the third bush in the garden,
because then you go dig it up and then be like, well,
it's not there. Why'd you tell me that?
Speaker 1 (32:09):
Yeah, you'd have to put a spin out, like the
true hidden treasure was your friendship in life with this person,
and that's what they value and therefore they don't want
to tell you where the money is.
Speaker 2 (32:17):
But again, we'll get to something in a minute that
I think might actually shed some light on this and
show how the person who was sort of the guide
for this process would be off the hook. So but again,
what would you be looking for from speaking to a ghost?
You would get this practical information the dead person took
with them to the grave, like you know, where did
(32:38):
you hide something or anything like that. Also, if the
person was a murder victim, they might you might consult
them to find out who killed you.
Speaker 1 (32:46):
Oh, this is a classic one, and this puts a
different kind of pressure on the role of the necromancer here,
or the alleged necromancer, because of course what they say could,
depending on the society and the legal system, be in
it as proof of an individual's guilt in a murder.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
But apart from all this stuff, where again, if you
assume that consciousness actually continues after death, you could assume
the person would know all these things? What about this
other stuff like why ghosts would know the future? We've
looked at multiple examples of necromancy being used to consult
spirits on what's going to happen in the future. It
(33:25):
turns out Greek and Roman necromancers also consulted ghosts for
info about the future, for example, to predict the outcome
of wars or power struggles. A common thing people want
to know, why would the dead have the ability to
predict the future? Well, Ogden actually does answer this question.
He says, we don't know for sure, but there are
a couple of big possibilities. Ogden writes, quote. One possibility
(33:49):
is that some ancients believed the future was prepared in
the realm of the dead. When Aeneas descends into the
underworld in Virgil's Aeneid, he witnesses the marshaling of the
souls of Rome's future heroes, even though they had not
yet been born. Okay, so that's one, Ogden goes on quote.
(34:09):
Another possibility, many ancients, Plato among them, believed that a
pure soul, one separated from the dull matter of the body,
had great powers of perception and could understand the hidden
processes of the universe. Okay, so that sort of helps
answer my question if Ogden's correct about these two explanations. Here,
(34:31):
the dead know the future because one of two things.
Either the future is written in advance, so we are
faded for certain things to happen to us, and the
writing of the future takes place in the nether world,
so dead people in hades are essentially hanging out in
the writer's room for the upcoming season of the show.
(34:53):
Or the second explanation is if you subscribe to something
like platonism, soul's rule and bodies drool, and your current
knowledge of the future is limited by the extent to
which your body drools. Liberated souls, no longer attached to
to flesh, are sort of like gods in a way.
They have extra powers of knowledge and perception, and we
(35:17):
would all have these powers if we were liberated from
the confines of our bodies.
Speaker 1 (35:21):
That one's in a really interesting because it also brings
up some of the other examples of ancestor veneration and
ancestor worship, you know, where it's like, this was a
real person in a given society or a given family,
what have you? They have died, and now they are
still real, but in a different way and perhaps held
(35:42):
to a like a put on a pedestal. You know,
they're they're, they they're they're they're given over to certain
divine characteristics, even if they are not thought of expressly
as a guy.
Speaker 2 (35:59):
All right, So that's Ogden's opinion about why ghosts would
be expected to know the future and be able to
answer your questions about it. But another interesting thing brought
up in this article is he talks about location where
would Greco Roman necromancy take place? And it seems there
(36:21):
are two main answers for this. One is at the
tomb of the deceased. And now that one makes sense
if you're trying to call up a ghost of a
dead person, where better to go than to their grave
and do some kind of ritual there makes sense. But
the second, and I got really interested in this, was
that there were essentially some geographically identified special places where
(36:47):
you could communicate with the dead. These were known as
oracles of the dead. Now where would those be? Well,
Ogden says, ancient sources tell us about four of them.
There are two in modern day Greece, one in Italy,
and one in Turkey, and I did some additional digging
for background information about a couple of these. So the
first one he mentions is in northwest Greece, and this
(37:11):
is what's known as the Acharusian Lake. So this is
a lake, or perhaps I've seen in some sources mentioned
as a swamp, a lake or a series of light
lakes or swamp connected to the river Akron, which that
river itself is very important in Greek visions of the afterlife,
so there's a motif present in Greek and Roman mythology
(37:32):
that the dead have to be carried across a river
by a ghastly ferryman in order to reach Hades or
the underworld. And in some sources this river is named
as Styx, but in others it is the Akron.
Speaker 1 (37:46):
If memory serves, both names as separate rivers are used
in Dante's Inferno.
Speaker 2 (37:51):
Oh that may be right, I don't recall, but interestingly,
I wanted to note this, so Akron, the Akron is
at least one definite real river in northwest Greece, so
there's just the Akron. You can go to that river now,
whereas the sticks at Core seems to be a mythological
river in the underworld, but at some point it was
(38:13):
also associated I think with various real waterways as well,
such as like a stream in Arcadia, but the Akron
seems more concretely geographically located on this world. But anyway,
the story goes, so one of these lakes or swamps
connected to the Akron, known as Akarusia. There was a
lakeside district in which you could call up the spirits
(38:37):
of the dead, and this was possible because of the
way that the river and the lake were somehow physically
connected to Hades and Rob. I've attached a couple of
pictures I found online of the Akron River for you
to look at here. You know, it's weird. I wonder
if it's just an example of psychological priming, because I
was expecting these to be associated with the underworld. But
(38:57):
they do look kind of spooky to me.
Speaker 1 (38:59):
Yeah. Yes, I'm not sure how much of this is
just me going into it with the expectation here, but yeah,
in the first shot there's this impression of narrowing, and
I don't know, I'm kind of reminded of, you know,
the classic painting The Island of the Dead there a
little bit, but I could be reading too much into it.
I mean a river at the at the very least,
a river is This is a is a moving thing
(39:22):
that goes somewhere else. So it's easy to approach it
and think of it as this thing that connects to
some distant land, because it literally does.
Speaker 2 (39:31):
That's a good point, okay. So second place for the
Oracle of the Dead. This is way over on the
western coast of the Italian Peninsula. This is Lake of
Vernas in Campagna. So once again this is a body
of water associated with the entrance to the underworld. In
this case, I thought it was geologically interesting because a
Vernas is the flooded crater of an extinct volcano, so
(39:56):
this is in a region somewhat close to Naples. Allegedly,
the Lake of Verness emitted fumes of sulfur sometimes, which
could be why it was thought of as the entrance
to the realm of the dead. And contrary to what
you might expect. You know, you might think, okay, so
this lake is associated with the underworld, then maybe it's
just this creepy, abandoned place with nothing going on. But no, no, no.
(40:19):
The area around Averness was developed. It had temples, and
bathhouses and all sorts of stuff. In fact, in his article,
Ogden tells what I thought was a very funny story
about a British archaeologist who thought he had identified the
ruins of the Avernus oracle of the Dead in a
Roman era tunnel near the lake came up with this
(40:40):
whole scenario about how the oracle worked. Ogden writes, quote
he speculated that visitors to the oracle were led through
dark tunnels and across a hot, sulfurous spring that doubled
as the river Sticks. Priestly assistants, he suggested, used lamps
and wooden shadow puppets to project ghostly figures onto a
wall in a kind of ancient vision of a Disneyland
(41:02):
haunted house. So, okay, that sounds very interesting, but it
turns out no, this tunnel was actually a service tunnel
for a Roman bathhouse. And then there are a couple
of other sites of oracles of the dead that are
that were less well known. One is heraclea Pontica. That's
the one on the south coast of the Black Sea,
(41:25):
up on the north of what is today Turkey, or
at the time would have been Anatolia. This is the
place that Pausanias went to in that legend, and then
the other one, the fourth one is Cape Tynron, which
is down at the southern tip of the Peloponnesis, And
I'm not sure about the Black Sea location, but I
(41:46):
was looking up Cape Tynern and this one was also,
according to some ancient sources, a gateway to the underworld.
So it seems what a lot of these Oracle of
the Dead locations have in common is they are thought
to be in some sense of physical entry way into
the underworld.
Speaker 1 (42:04):
Yeah, so it's not just a matter of having the
rituals or the expertise. It's like, are you in close
enough proximity to the underworld for that signal to reach them?
Speaker 2 (42:15):
Now. In the last episode, we talked about those ancient
Mesopotamian tablets that shared specifics of their necromancy rituals, which
involved incantations, so you had special words to say and
appeals to specific gods who would sort of oversee the proceedings.
Like one of the tablets specified that you know, this
(42:35):
ritual is taking place under the auspices of the god Shamash.
And then they also had recipes for potions and concoctions
to make out of all kinds of stuff, you know,
dust from across roads, the end of a frog's intestines, crab, tallow,
hair of a dog, and a bunch of other stuff.
And in one case, I guess my favorite thing was
(42:56):
the ritual that involved a skull that you would address
as oh, sk skull of skulls, and the implication is
that the ghost would come into the skull and speak
out of it somehow. In this case, I wonder what
literally happened during these rituals, by the way, did I
think we don't really know, but I have to wonder, like,
did the skull somehow quote speak? If so, how was
(43:19):
that accomplished?
Speaker 1 (43:21):
Yeah, because on one hand, you could have a scenario
where some manner of puppetry was even utilized. But I
guess perhaps more believable, at least by modern standards, would
be just sort of a physical focus of what's happening.
So perhaps the necromancer is listening to the skull and
that becomes the object of focus during the proceedings.
Speaker 2 (43:44):
Right, So a question is do we have physical descriptions
of what would happen during these rituals during the ghost interactions?
For Greco Roman necromancy, and the answer is yes, we
do have some descriptions. One example Ogden gives that I
thought was interesting as the Greek playwright Escalus, in a
fragment of an otherwise lost work, describes a scene at
(44:07):
a lakeside oracle of the dead where blood from a
black sheep is poured into the water, and the implication
is that the ghosts would come up from the underworld
through the waters of the lake and drink the sheep's blood.
And this is interesting in that it connects to that
scene in Homer where it's implied that or not even implied,
(44:28):
it's explicitly stated that giving a ghost sheep's blood or
rams blood to drink would make it sort of temporarily
beefed up enough to party, Like now it can talk.
And I think this is really interesting, this idea that
you had to feed blood to a ghost so that
it could I don't know, become substantial or empowered enough
(44:50):
to interact with you.
Speaker 1 (44:51):
Yeah, I mean it's the dead or lacking blood, and
give them blood and they can they can do living
things again, at least for a very short period of time.
Speaker 2 (45:00):
But finally, coming back to that issue of like what
form does the delivery of information from the dead take
in these Greco Roman rituals, Like, how does the necromancer
have to deliver the information? And in that case, how
do they deal with like the information when you know,
not being specific or accurate. Well, Ogden says that the
(45:22):
contact with the ghost at an oracle of the dead
was done through dream incubation. Oh, this makes sense of things, right.
So this is similar to what was done at multiple
kinds of temples and shrines in the ancient world. One
example we've talked about on the show before was the
shrines of the healing god Asclepias, where you would want
(45:44):
to get healed from a disease or something troubling your body,
and you would to seek a cure. You might go
to a shrine of Asclepias and you would do some
kind of ritual, probably make a sacrifice or pay a
fee or something, and then you would go to sleep
and then you would have a dream there where Asclepias
would deliver to you information in the dream about what
(46:06):
you could do to cure your disease.
Speaker 1 (46:09):
Yeah, okay.
Speaker 2 (46:10):
In the case of the necromancer oracles, you would do
the prescribed rituals. You probably make some kind of sacrifice.
It seems very likely it might involve like a spilling
of some kind of animal blood to feed to the ghost,
and then you would go to sleep in the designated area,
and then the ghost would come to you in a
dream and tell you what you needed to know. And
(46:31):
this is interesting in multiple ways. Number One, it highlights
this thing in ancient Greek thinking where sleep was sort
of a state thought of as in some ways analogous
to or half way to death. So you're sort of
going out of the land of the living into this
half dead state of sleep in order to meet the ghost,
(46:54):
you know, as it comes out to deliver you information.
But then also in a practical sense, I could see
how this would mean that the priest or whatever, the
professional working at the oracle of the Dead is doing,
like they're not personally on the hook for like giving
you the information you need. And it might be in
some cases they did provide information, but it seems like
(47:14):
in a lot of cases they use dream incubation where
it's all internal to you.
Speaker 1 (47:19):
Yeah, it's like they're just helping to facilitate the conversation
and then the conversation is left to you and your
dream state, and I guess in a more like you know,
skeptical approach here. Yeah, they're simply priming your brain for
some sort of a dream that could be either in
and of itself seemingly meaningful or could be picked apart
(47:41):
in made meaningful due to the priming. So it's interesting
how we kind of end up at the end of
this episode in similar territory to our previous look at
different cultures and times in which the dream world was
given special significance. You know, I mean, I'm not sure
you could necessarily make the case here because again this
(48:03):
could be maybe thought of as you know, an important right,
but not like a prime motivator in the trajectory of
a given culture. But still, you see, like the importance
of the dream space to individuals and trying to figure
out their problems.
Speaker 2 (48:20):
Well, yeah, and it makes me see another parallel between
sleep and death here is that it seems like they
are both states in which people's capacities are to some
extent diminished but in other ways magnified. You know that,
like like during sleep you are closer to death, and
so of course you know your your consciousness is diminished
(48:44):
in a way you of course your your physical potency,
like you're not moving around while you're asleep, you're prone
and all that, so you are diminished or reduced in
one extent. But also it is the place where you
have access to wisdom beyond what's available to your mortal mind.
Speaker 1 (49:02):
Yeah, of course, I can't help but be reminded of
Freddy Krueger and all of this. It's easy to think
of Freddy Krueger as a monster, but you know, he's
a monster in the general sense of the word. But
he is a ghost. He has a vengeful ghost that
then appears in your dreams. And I guess by virtue
of having access to dreams, he has privileged information about individuals.
(49:25):
I don't know that anyone ever really asks him for
advice on anything, though, I.
Speaker 2 (49:29):
Mean it would be funny if you did. I don't
know what kind of advice he would give.
Speaker 1 (49:32):
I mean, that could be a whole sequel right there
where somebody or some group or like, look, we need
we need the help of someone with access to dreams.
I guess specifically teenager dreams. I guess maybe this would
make sense for if you were designing a product to
appeal to teenagers, they're like who knows teenagers. Freddy Krueger,
you know what's cool?
Speaker 2 (49:53):
Yeah? Yeah, Oh, to get advice on sweaters, it would
be like, Freddy Krueger, is this sweater cool? Is this
what's going to be hip this season? And he's always
just like Green and Red, that's what's going to be in.
Speaker 1 (50:05):
Now he knows it's a classic look and it'll eventually,
you know, eventually the trends will come back around to it.
Speaker 2 (50:11):
Okay, well in a cap part two right there, I believe.
Speaker 1 (50:14):
So, yeah, we'll be back for at least a third
episode on necromancy, and in the meantime, reach out to us.
We'd love to hear your thoughts on these various and
ancient accounts of necromancier things that could be described as
necromantic and scope. Also, if you have thoughts in some
of the more pop culture things that we've mentioned here,
(50:35):
if you have thoughts on Freddy Krueger, Slimer or the
Ring certainly right in. I mean, there's ultimately a lot
you could dissect in the original Ghostbusters where you have
ghosts that resemble the people as they were in life,
and then ghosts that no longer look like human beings.
You also have what ancient Mesopotamian gods entering into the
(50:57):
picture with their be like servants. So there's a lot
to unwrap there.
Speaker 2 (51:02):
Many knew what it was to roast in the belly
of a slore that day.
Speaker 1 (51:06):
Indeed, all right, a reminder that's stuff to blow your mind.
Is primarily a science podcast, though of course we get
into the culture and history as well as especially obvious
in these episodes. We do listener mail episodes on Mondays,
we do a short form monster fact or artifact episode
on Wednesdays, and on Fridays we set aside most serious
(51:27):
concerns to just talk about a weird movie on Weird
House Cinema. Oh and one more thing. If you use
any of the various social media accounts and you follow us,
you may notice that there's a little more life than those.
Recently we have some people managing those for us once again.
And you also might notice some updated photos of me
(51:48):
and Joe. Well, that's because we visited the Museum of
Illusions in Atlanta. We were there what Thursday, September twenty first,
twenty twenty three. We have some great new photos. I
recommend that place to anyone who is in Atlanta looking
to engage with some illusions. It's a very fun place.
Speaker 2 (52:05):
Huge thanks to our excellent audio producer, JJ Posway. If
you would like to get in touch with us with
feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a
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 (52:27):
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.
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
Popular Podcasts
United States of Kennedy
United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com