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October 19, 2024 54 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 3 of 3, originally published 10/05/2023)

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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
This is Robert Lamb and this is Joe McCormick, and
it's Saturday. We're heading on down into the vault for
an older episode of the show. This is part three
of our series on necromancy called The Necromantic Urge, originally
published on October fifth, twenty twenty three.

Speaker 1 (00:23):
Enjoy but Macmore and Sodosma were necromancers who came from
the dark Isle of Nat to practice their baleful arts
in Tinniath beyond the shrunken seas. But they did not
prosper in Tinniath, for death was deemed a holy thing
by the people of that gray country, and the nothingness

(00:45):
of the tomb was not lightly to be desecrated, and
the raising up of the dead by necromancy was held
in abomination. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production
of by Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow

(01:08):
Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.

Speaker 2 (01:11):
And I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with part
three in our series on necromancy. The ancient practice of
consulting the dead or the spirits of the dead for
the purpose of divination, of accessing hidden knowledge.

Speaker 1 (01:27):
Yes, despite the fact that a lot of our modern
pop cultuy uses of necromancy tend to involve raising of
the dead. And actually that quote that I read at
the top of this episode is from the nineteen thirty
two short story The Empire of the Necromancers by Clark
Ashton Smith, and it is full of raising the dead

(01:48):
via the necromantic arts. But as we've discussed in these
episodes so far, necromancy, as we loosely categorize it, is
more situated in the realm of divination.

Speaker 2 (02:00):
Well, in the previous episodes in the series, which if
you haven't listened to yet, you should probably go check
those out first. But in these previous episodes we talked
about accounts of necromancy or pseudo necromantic legends from ancient China.
We talked about accounts of how necromancy was practiced or
may have been practiced in ancient Mesopotamia, including consulting these

(02:21):
tablets that have descriptions of the incantations to use and
the potions to prepare if you want to speak to
the dead through a prepared skull in a special ritual.
In part two, we talked about a lot of accounts
of necromancy as practiced or at least as used as
a plot device in stories from ancient Greece and Rome
and today, we wanted to come back and finish out

(02:44):
the discussion by talking about necromancy a little bit more.

Speaker 1 (02:47):
Yeah, We're going to jump around a little bit here
later on in the episode. I think we're going to
get into some medieval Christian ideas about necromancy, what it was,
and whether you should do it or not. A spoiler
in tended to say no, don't do it, but with
some caveats, so I'll get into.

Speaker 2 (03:04):
I also want to interrogate the boundaries of necromancy a
little bit and maybe pick apart the concept somewhat. But
before we do that, there's a question that's been coming
up because we've been looking at examples from the ancient
world of how this may have been practiced, or at
least was thought by some to be practiced in the
ancient world. My question would be, well, how far back

(03:26):
does it go? What's the earliest evidence we have of
people trying to communicate or consult with the dead.

Speaker 1 (03:34):
Yeah, so let's get into that a little bit again,
with the huge caveat that the term necromancy can be
applied very broadly or very specifically, and is ultimately just
a word. So with that in mind, I will refer
back briefly to the paper The Origins of Necromancy or
How We Learn to Speak to the Dead by Czech

(03:54):
academic Andres Kabcar. He argues for a connection potentially between
ancient shamanistic practices and what we might think of as necromancy,
with individual human beings often serving as psychopomps. For example,
you know, guardians guide there to guide one spirit from
this world into the next. Other functions that would put

(04:18):
a living mortal shaman in some form of communication with
the deceased are also imaginable. This in addition to just
general ancestor veneration, ancestor cults, and ancestor worshiped. So it's
not it's not inconceivable to consider all of this potential

(04:38):
hallmark of human spiritual and religious thought going back to
very early human culture as a coping method for the
emotionally and socially devastating reality of death. Right.

Speaker 2 (04:49):
We don't know, but it seems perfectly plausible that it
could be something like first people, you know, just merely
emotionally missed their dead loved ones and wanted to you know,
continue thinking about them and talking about them and so forth,
and maybe from this arose some kind of culture of
keeping their memory alive, out of which arose some kind

(05:09):
of idea that, well, maybe there are ways to still
talk to them somehow, and maybe they have something to
say to us.

Speaker 1 (05:16):
Yeah, because I mean, we undeniably have a desire to
speak to them. I mean, that's that's proven out in
so many countless examples, including our own individual experiences. I mean,
I think a lot of us have visited the grave
of a deceased loved one and spoken to them, you know,
varying degrees of understanding or expectation of them hearing us well,

(05:41):
and certainly of them speaking back to us. But to
speak to the dead, I think is not necessarily this
you know, this alien supernatural thing. I think it comes
from a very natural place in the human psyche, and I
mean probably gets back into this idea that, yeah, when
someone dies is it is emotionally and soually devastating and
we have to find ways to deal with it.

Speaker 2 (06:03):
On the other hand, while you can imagine that historical
or prehistoric development and it certainly seems plausible. It's hard
to have decisive evidence for things like that, or to
have decisive evidence of practices of communicating with and getting
knowledge from the dead from before times of say literary
writings about such.

Speaker 1 (06:23):
Right, right, because the literature gives us more insight into
what was done, why it was done, and what the
expectation was. In many instances, sometimes you know there are
still questions, certainly, but otherwise what are you left with?
You're left with human remains, and you can sort of
look at like two broad categories, situations where human remains

(06:43):
have not been manipulated by human beings and situations where
they have been manipulated by human beings and added caveat.
As we've discussed in the show before, and we've recently
had a guest in the show to discuss this, like
sometimes that's up for dispute too, with one side saying,
I don't think these bodies were manipulated by human beings.
I think they were manipulated by predatory animals, and then

(07:05):
the other side saying, no, this is evidence of humans
manipulating their dead, and intentional manipulation of the dead has
been going on for a very long time. At least
since the time of the Neanderthals. We move bodies, and
we've moved bodies for various purposes, and a rich global
heritage of funerary practices have grown out of these traditions.

(07:25):
But with the oldest burials, you look at them and yeah,
we just have very little to go on when we're
trying to decide, try and figure out what was the
intent behind this practice? It was it a practice and
what was the intent? Right?

Speaker 2 (07:38):
So, given those extreme caveats, what are some of these
pieces of ambiguous evidence people might point to to think,
I wonder if this was used for romantic purposes, for necromancy.

Speaker 1 (07:49):
Well, Kapcar highlights ancient archaeological sites linked to ancestor cults
as being some of the main candidates for some form
of ancient necromancy in the Middle East. And I should
add that he's not arguing, like one hundred percent this
is necromancy. He's just saying, like, Okay, beyond what we
can be certain about, what evidence could we make an
argument about. A specific mention is made of the plaster

(08:13):
covered heads of cattle hook dating back to seventy five
hundred to fifty seven hundred BCE. We've mentioned this place
on the show before, specifically in our invention episodes on
the coffin, the toilet, and the Mirror, as well as
our stuff to Blow your Mind episodes on brain and
head theft. Because there does seem to be some sort

(08:35):
of ritual removal of the head here.

Speaker 2 (08:38):
Well, let's zero in on the example of plastered human
skulls from the ancient Fertile Crescent to see what we
can figure out from them. A rob, I've attached a
picture for you to look at here. This is a
famous plastered skull from I think dates given or sometimes
nine thousand or nine thousand, five hundred years ago. This

(08:58):
is sometimes known as the Jerre Coast skull. It is
one of the skulls recovered from the tell or the
mound of the ancient settlement of Jericho, and this is
from the Neolithic period.

Speaker 1 (09:10):
Yeah, this is quite intriguing to look at because again
you have a human skull, but it has been covered
in plaster in a way to sort of it seems like,
to recreate the flesh of the dead. And then we
have what I believe these are shells that have been
placed in where the eyes would be.

Speaker 2 (09:28):
Yeah, exactly. So there are multiple artifacts of this type
from the ancient Levant and some from Turkey, from again
the site of Chattelhuyuk and is essentially what these are,
real human skulls, sometimes without the mandible, so without the
lower jaw, filled in with earth or plaster, and then

(09:49):
covered on the outside in plaster at least on the front,
and decorated with individual facial features. So as you said,
rob seashells for eyes, they might be clamshell or cowie shells,
some kind of shells, marine shells to simulate eyeballs, and
then plaster facial structure, so maybe even like eyelids, overlapping

(10:11):
the seashells in a way, and of course painting on
the outside, so hair and eyebrows, mustaches and so forth
would be painted on the plaster. I was actually watching
an interview with a curator at the British Museum, coincidentally
another in the series Curator's Corner, which I mentioned in
part one of this series for unrelated reasons. That was

(10:32):
just an interview with an author named Irving Finkel who
we were reading a paper from that was about ancient
Mesopotamian exorcism practices. This is an interview with a curator
from the British Museum named Alexandra Fletcher about the Jericho skull,
and she opines that the Jericho skull, the one you're
looking at here, rob is probably the oldest example of

(10:54):
portraiture in the British Museum's collection because of the assumption
that it was made to resemble a specific person, though
we don't know that. We don't know for sure, but
these skulls are usually assumed to have been made to
resemble the person the skull belonged to in life.

Speaker 1 (11:12):
Which makes sense, right. I mean, if you're gonna do
a plaster sculpture of someone and you have their skull
on hand, like there you go, that's the perfect foundation
upon which to create your art.

Speaker 2 (11:23):
And there's an interesting scientific and technological parallel to this
that comes up in a second. So Fletcher goes into
describing some work, like analysis work that has been done
on the Jericho skull. She says, as background, he was
part of a group of seven people who were buried
together uncovered in the nineteen fifties, and she talks about
research to try to analyze the human skull underneath without

(11:46):
damaging the plaster surrounding it, at least at least surrounding
the front of the skull. The back is more exposed,
and she says that the researchers used CT scanning to
create an image of the bone underneath without hurting the place,
and that revealed some interesting stuff. For example, this man's
nose was broken sometime in life, and it shows how

(12:07):
it had been broken and healed. And as a child,
this man had had his head bound to possibly to
shape the skull. As the man grew up, so there
was a sense in which the skull was sort of pinched,
and you can see a ridge in the skull where
it was pinched that way. And this as he developed,

(12:28):
he had slightly elongated skull for this reason.

Speaker 1 (12:32):
Oh yes, yes, not an uncommon practice in certain parts
of the ancient world.

Speaker 2 (12:38):
After death, the inside of the skull was stuffed with
soil and clay, and there's a hole in the back
of the skull where Fletcher says you can still see
the indentations of the fingers of the person who packed
the clay into the brain cavity.

Speaker 1 (12:53):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (12:53):
But the interesting parallel to the ancient plaster surrounding the
skull is that by analyzing the bone structure, modern scientists
were able to with a good degree of accuracy, they think,
reconstruct this man's face. The process is considered not exact,
but pretty accurate, to the extent that Fletcher claims that
if people who knew this man in life walked into

(13:17):
the room and saw the reconstruction, she says she thinks
they would instantly recognize him. So, in a way, we
have used modern technology to reconstruct this man's face around
the basis of the skull, much like ancient people used
I guess probably memory of what this man looked like
to reconstruct his face in plaster around the skull.

Speaker 1 (13:38):
Yeah. Yeah, it's fascinating, though again we can't know one
d you know why they did this, and certainly you
can make arguments for the lifelike qualities being bestowed upon
the skull in order to communicate with it. I mean,
that's that's certainly the hard nechromatic angle to take on it,

(14:00):
and others have found this interesting as well. These skulls
are brought up by Julian James in his book The
Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Biicameral Mind
as being you know, one of the many different bits
of evidence or alleged evidence from the ancient world that
he uses to back up this this hypothesis of the

(14:21):
biicameral mind.

Speaker 2 (14:22):
Yeah, he probably is leaning heavily on the interpretation that
people talk to these skulls, which again I want to
really emphasize, like, we don't know that. All we have
are the artifacts. There are not there's not literature describing
how these skulls were used in the ancient world, So
we just don't know.

Speaker 1 (14:38):
Yeah, we don't know if they spoke to the skulls.
For the most I mean, we don't know the skull
We assume the skulls did not answer, though Jane's would
argue that they possibly did. And yes, if Julian Jane's
hypothesis was correct, that would impact everything we've been discussing
about in terms of necromancy, because it would mean that, yes,
there here is a neural logical way that the dead

(15:02):
not only could speak to human beings, but spoke to
them on a regular basis. Go back and listen to
our old episodes on his hypothesis if you want to
know more about that. But yeah, at the end of
the day, like did they just simply recreate these faces
in order to honor them, to remember them, and if
they were speaking to them, like we can sort of
imagine like a broad scale a spectrum of possible necromancy,

(15:28):
you know, and there's you know, there are certainly versions
of this interpretation in which they might have been speaking
to these skulls, but we're not actually seeking knowledge from
the dead.

Speaker 2 (15:39):
That's right. So I want to get deeper into that
in a minute. But in a way, this connects to
what I thought was an interesting little side comment that
this British Museum researcher Alexander Fletcher makes in this interview
where she just kind of says that, you know, the
longer you work with work with these skulls, do research
on them, especially maybe from the you know, the reconstruction

(16:02):
of the face, the more you come to see the
skulls not just as an artifact but as a person.
And I was like, wow, maybe I am over interpreting,
but that seems perhaps revealing about the effect they might
have had on the people who originally made them as well. Yeah,

(16:26):
I want to come back to the idea of adding
some sort of complications to the idea of necromancy or
divination through the dead as a coherent and discreet practice.
So I was thinking about this, and I was thinking
about how in a lot of these early settlements where
these plaster skulls are found, you know, the settlements with

(16:48):
permanent structures like chattlehou Yuk which you mentioned in Jericho,
there are other interesting features about how the dead were
dealt with as well, not just the creation of plaster skulls,
But in these settlements, it seems sometimes the bodies of
the dead were buried inside people's houses. So maybe your grandparents'

(17:09):
bones might not be often a cemetery somewhere else that
you go and visit from time to time, but right
in the house with you, maybe buried under the floor
or under your bed. Again, we don't know for sure
why they did this. All kinds of speculation abounds. In
some cases, it looks like the bodies might have been
removed elsewhere for the flesh to rot off the bones

(17:32):
or be picked off the bones. Maybe the bones were
defleshed somewhere else and then maybe brought back inside the house,
and then they would live under the floor, under your
bed or something. But these are also places where we
encounterplastered skulls. So it just seems it seems possible to
me that if the skull had some kind of significance

(17:53):
as a conduit for communication with the dead, I wonder
if it wasn't a spec discrete, transactional event ritual like
we've been talking about in some of these Greek stories,
you know, where you like you go to the oracle
and you know what I mean, like it being a
special event. I wonder if it's more like just a

(18:14):
kind of continuous belief that, yes, Grandma is still here
with us, she's in the house, she lives with us.

Speaker 1 (18:20):
Yeah, I mean, I can easily imagine that that being
the case. Again, it's not too far away from sort
of the mild background supernatural ideas that many of us
may may dabble in, you know, like to think about
a deceased loved one being nearby, you know. I think
it is something that a lot of us probably do
to some degree without even being on the level of,

(18:42):
like I believe in ghosts, you know.

Speaker 2 (18:44):
And so if the situation were something more like that,
to the extent that you would seek advice from your
grandparent in this context, I wonder if it would give
kind of the wrong impression to call that necromancy, because
again of the all the stories we have in which
the necromancy is usually more a like I was saying,
a discrete, transactional kind of event ritual versus something that

(19:08):
is just intimate and continuous in part of life.

Speaker 1 (19:12):
Yeah, so many of these stories, ancient and modern, depict
necromancy as kind of an extreme thing. You do, you know,
when other attempts to remedy a situation have not worked,
that's when you seek out the necromantic solution.

Speaker 2 (19:29):
But then again, just to emphasize how little we know
for sure, there could be totally different explanations as well.
I mean, maybe burying the bones in the house and
putting a plaster face over your ancestor skull, maybe that
was just merely a form of honoring and remembering people,
just like you might I don't know, have a photo
of a dead relative on the wall today or something

(19:49):
buried with them. You know, we miss our ancestor who
has passed on. So maybe we keep the bones or
plaster the skull in a way under the house or
in the house in a way of remembering them.

Speaker 1 (20:02):
Yeah, and so certainly these are not neutral skulls. These
are skulls that are conceivably connected to loved ones, but
still like even like human understanding and appreciation of skulls
is kind of complex because they take on all these
symbolic meanings, but then they're also there's also this sort
of like coolness to the skull that has seem to
exist for a long time, and you know, we get

(20:24):
into this with other skull based traditions and artifacts as well.
Is discussed in their recent either recently rerun or about
to be rerun episode where I interviewed Brian Hoggart about
anti witchcraft precautions, some of which involved putting skulls, particularly
horse skulls, in the foundation of a building. Like a
lot of it's just kind of like, well, horse skulls

(20:45):
are really interesting looking. They don't look like horses, but
yet they are horses, and horses have this important place
in human lives. So yeah, there are a number of
different ways you can go in and try and figure
out like why was this important?

Speaker 2 (21:00):
Right, So there's just so much like we don't know
anybody who has too confident or too certain a theory
about what these remains meant and how they were used.
I think you should be highly skeptical of that, but
I do think one interesting piece of information that we
can use is not from the ancient world itself, but

(21:21):
just from looking at practices of ancestor veneration today by analogy,
which is a totally common practice all over the world.

Speaker 1 (21:31):
That's right, we discussed We've discussed some of these already,
at least in Passing, particularly the importance of ancestor veneration
in Chinese culture, right.

Speaker 2 (21:39):
And so I was looking for some documentation of people
today with religious practices that could be considered to include
strong elements of ancestor veneration and also something that could
be considered divination via deceased ancestors. And I think from
what I can tell, this combination of beliefs is not
especially unique or unusual. Lots of people around the world

(22:01):
practice forms of ancestor veneration that might include some way
of establishing contact with the dead or getting information or
messages from them. But I wanted to find one clear
example with documentation of specifics so we're not just dealing
with generalities. And I came across an interesting paper looking
at the Bupeti people. So this was by Maura kang

(22:22):
E k Lebaka, who is a scholar at the University
of South Africa specializing in African musical arts and ethnomusicology.
The paper was called the Art of Establishing and Maintaining
Contact with Ancestors, a study of Bapeti tradition published in
the journal HTS Theological Studies in the year twenty eighteen.

(22:43):
So the Buppetti people mostly live within northern South Africa,
and Lebaca, synthesizing the work of some previous ethnographers, describes
a common view of ancestors among the Bapeti people. Again,
same caveat with all of the examples we've talked about.
Beliefs are not usually universal within a culture. All you
can do is describe commonly found beliefs. He says, first

(23:07):
of all, in the words of a scholar named Mibiti,
there is a widespread belief in many African traditional religions
that quote, death does not annihilate life, and the departed
continue to exist in the hereafter, so the dead are
not gone, they remain spiritually alive in some sense. Also,
Lebacca says that the character of ancestors is believed to

(23:31):
remain fundamentally unchanged since they were alive dead ancestors go
on existing. They remain themselves in good and bad ways,
so they can protect and advise their descendants. But they
are also not like perfect, perfected, ethereal beings. They're like us,
and they are like they were in life, so also

(23:53):
prone to jealousy and motivations of that sort. He says,
the spirits of ancestors have the power to affect the
fates of the living, and this can be for good
or for ill. Their behavior toward the living depends largely
on if they are properly honored and venerated, and Lebaca
argues that veneration is different from worship. Veneration is more

(24:16):
like the respect that the young are expected to give
to their elders, except extended beyond the bound boundary of death,
and does have special rituals involved. He says ancestral spirits
guard and enforce morality within the family and prevent feuds
and conflicts between living members of the family. This is

(24:37):
mentioned later in the article, but it's worth noting that
ancestors are believed to be powerful and can cause supernatural
outcomes to affect people, but they're not omnipotent. They can't
do anything Lebaca says that sometimes but petty ancestors need
to be contacted, need to be communicated with, and he
says there are a couple of main ways to establish contact.

(25:00):
There are these communal music and dance ceremonies known as
the Malopo ritual, and that appeases the ancestral spirits. But
there is also a way of seeking help of traditional healers,
especially with the use of divination bones. Now, I want
to note that, as far as I could tell, these
are not the bones of ancestors. The paper doesn't address

(25:23):
this question directly, but it seemed to me, based on
a photo included in the paper and the fact that
it was not specified otherwise, that these would probably be
normal kind of bones that would be used in practices
of osteomancy.

Speaker 1 (25:35):
Yeah. I think in other instances of bones being used
as essentially, you know, dies of some sort, they've always
been animal bones. I don't remember off hand an example
of them being human bones, but it may exist elsewhere.

Speaker 2 (25:50):
I only specified that because we were just talking about
examples of bones being kept like within the houses of
the living, So I think we're not talking about ancestors
bones here.

Speaker 1 (26:00):
Yeah, I think you're right, they would assurely specified if
that was the case.

Speaker 2 (26:03):
So Lebaca in this paper includes a number of interviews
with traditional healers, one of whom describes that direct communication
between healers and their own ancestors happens through music and
through dreams, and that the purpose of the use of
music and group singing in ritual contact with ancestors is

(26:24):
quote to create harmony between the living and the ancestors.
And I thought that was interesting because it reminds me
of the way that, of course singing can be used
to create a sense of togetherness among the living alone,
you know, just like a people a group of people
singing together. I think almost everybody will know what I'm
talking about when I say the way that creates this

(26:45):
weird sense of emergent harmony and sort of group identity.
And so maybe by inviting the dead to be a
part of that as well, you're sort of bringing them
to the table in a way.

Speaker 1 (26:57):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2 (26:59):
But this paper a naturalistic approach of observing malopo rituals
and interviewing traditional healers about the function of ancestor veneration
in Bapetti society. And there's one story recounted in the
paper Told by a Healer that that goes basically as follows.
I'll do a shorter summary the healer. Before she was
a traditional healer, she had been sick and had experienced

(27:22):
trouble sleeping, and then she had a dream of a
man who gave her a plastic bag full of divination bones,
and so she went to her Christian church to find
out what to do, and they gave her some instructions
of things she could do, but she did not follow
the instructions and started having encounters with snakes, like there

(27:43):
was a snake in her pillowcase one night, and then
the encounters got worse. She and her husband encountered a
much bigger snake. So she and her husband went to
visit a traditional healer and he used divination bones to
discover that her grandfather had been a traditional healer himself,
and he wanted her to become a healer as well,

(28:04):
and the illness, the insomnia, and the snakes were signs
to push her onto this path. So in her story,
she accepted the call became a healer, and after her training,
she came home and was welcomed back with a malopo ritual,
and the snakes and the pain and the insomnia were gone.
There are also other stories included here of ill health

(28:25):
and frightening experiences brought on by ancestors to sort of
pressure the living descendants to follow their advice and Lebaca
this is not a point Lebacca raises in the paper,
but I just happened to note that in the cases
documented in this study, the communication with dead ancestors sought
with the help of healers, does not provide information about

(28:49):
like objective future outcomes, such as you know what will
happen in the future, who's going to ascend to the throne,
who's going to win the war, like we talked about
in some of these ancient examples. Rather, it seems to
be providing the ancestor's personal perspective. So in this case
of divination, it has less of a prophetic quality than

(29:10):
in some of the like, especially the fictional accounts, and
seems more to me like it's focused on seeking the
ancestors advice, like it allows the person to understand the
ways that the ancestor is influencing their life for good
or for ill, and kind of the same way a
chat with a living elder might provide both personal advice

(29:31):
of things that they think you should do with your life,
but also explanations of why and how the elder is
treating you the way they are.

Speaker 1 (29:39):
Yeah, and sort of serving to bring the current generation
in line with past generations and the will and the
expectations of ancestors. This reminds me of how, in certain
analysis I've read of traditional Chinese ancestor generation, that you
could think of it as a kind of structural completeness,

(30:02):
that the family unit is not just a thing that exists,
you know, with borders and a certain head count in
the present, but it is a thing that exists in
the present and stretching back through the past, and therefore,
like being in line with the will of ancestors is
about like keeping the structure sound and making sure that

(30:27):
everything is lined up and has this structural completeness, which
I think can be a slightly alien concept to many
of us, especially if you tend to sort of view
like the family is a thing that exists solely in
the present, maybe it sinks back a little bit in time,
but is not deeply rooted in the past.

Speaker 2 (30:48):
Well, yeah, it seems to me to highlight how culturally variable.
The idea of the family is like what constitutes the
family and as especially as like a functional unit still
having an effect on all members within. Yeah, but so anyway,
to look at a few assessments from this paper, Lebacca
says that there's a common belief among people of the

(31:10):
Bipetti society that the main thing ancestors want is to
be remembered and respected by their descendants. And if the
living faithfully remember and venerate their ancestors, they're going to
be blessed with good health, healthy livestock and crops, good weather,
and so forth. And sometimes for a healing to take place,
a healer will have to consult the spirits of ancestors

(31:32):
directly to find out what to do. Another interesting thing
he notes is that he says Bipetti often feel that
it is inappropriate to approach their supreme deity or God directly,
and instead would use their ancestral spirits as sort of
intermediaries or emissaries between themselves and God. So I thought

(31:55):
this was an interesting layer of perspective that gives us,
I think, a more nuanced view of what it means
to be in contact in communication with the dead, because
here's one case where people today certainly do use rituals
such as communal music and dance and consultation with healers
using divination bones to get in contact with the dead,

(32:17):
But it does not seem to me, at least not
in the cases documented in this study, to usually be
for the purpose of like knowing the future in advance,
but rather for the purpose of gaining perspective on the
present and the past. You establish communication with the dead
in order to receive wisdom and to receive advice, and

(32:38):
to find out what your ancestors want you to do
or expect you to do, and to find out how
the ancestors advice and desires are connected to the trials
and other things you are experiencing in your daily life.
And this really got me thinking, because it made me
think that actually, even in a lot of the cases

(33:00):
we've already been looking at from you know, accounts from
the ancient world and so forth, a lot of the
cases of divination through spirits of the dead that we
looked at did not consist of a person seeking to
know the future in the kind of you know, the
fictional sorcerer sense we think about, where like somebody wants
ultimate power, and so they want to know what happens

(33:22):
ahead of time to exploit that. Instead, it very often
seemed to involve a much more personal, intimate, interactive kind
of knowledge, like knowledge useful for the exorcism of an
unwanted ghost, or knowledge useful to get advice, or you know,
wisdom from an ancestor or other knowledge of that kind

(33:44):
of personal sort. Does that make sense?

Speaker 1 (33:46):
Yeah, yeah, I mean in a way it almost puts
things more in line with this idea that what we
think of as necromancy is maybe more in line with
various shamanistic practices going stretching back through various human cultures,
very far back in human existence. But yeah, not the
but a lot of like smaller practices aimed at sort
of realigning your life, things that almost could be thought

(34:11):
of as having a therapeutic property to them. You know,
it's like something feels out of line in my life.
I need to get right with the ancestors. I need
to touch base with the ancestors in one form or another.

Speaker 2 (34:23):
But that makes me feel like maybe we should come
back and further explore the other side of the scale
as well. If that's a view of divination seeking communication
with the dead as a kind of intimate, wholesome, integrated
thing within people's lives and culture that helps provide the
perspective of ancestors and wisdom. There are also culturally very

(34:44):
different views that would place it back in the category
of like a special extreme, transactional kind of event ritual.

Speaker 1 (34:53):
Yeah. Yeah, And in this we're gonna we've been talking
about sort of bottom up necromancy, necromancy, things like necromancy
that have emerged as part of traditional practices. Now let's
turn back to medieval Christian Europe and think about sort
of like the top down view of a Christian hierarchy

(35:14):
looking to stamp out necromatic practices and necromatic texts, because,
as we've mentioned several times already, there is this general
attitude in medieval Christian Europe, again very top down, not
talking about like traditional pre Christian beliefs that are still
resonating among the various peoples of Europe and various peoples
under the control of Christian forces, but rather this top

(35:38):
down view that first of all, the dead cannot be
communicated with, and they should not be communicated with. If
you attempt necromancy, you may well speak with something, but
it will be a demon rather than a ghost, and
so only ill can come of it. Now that being said,
necromancy and necromatic texts certainly existed and were circul related.

(36:01):
At times, they were greatly feared by the Church, as
pointed out by Richard Keikeffer in nineteen ninety sevens Forbidden Rights.
When Franciscan Friar Bernard de Lussius was accused by the
Holy Inquisition of using necromancy against the Pope in thirteen nineteen,
he was cleared of the charge, but he was still
sent to prison for merely possessing a book of alleged necromancy.

Speaker 2 (36:24):
Simon, I'd rather see you dead.

Speaker 1 (36:28):
Exactly. I mean that the movie you're referencing does does
present this various top down view of forbidden knowledge and
so forth.

Speaker 2 (36:40):
We're talking about The Devil Rides Out by the Way,
where Christopher Lee's character like, Oh, it's okay for him
to know about all of the forbidden magical rituals, but
it's not okay for his friend Simon to know about them.

Speaker 1 (36:51):
Oh yeah, I mean within one of these cultural situations,
it's always okay for someone to know about them, to
know about these things, and those are the ones who
get to tell everyone else that they're not allowed to
know about them. The witch hunters get all the cool texts. Anyway,
Fears and accusations of clergy possessing and or using necromantic
writings continued afterwards. However, Keir Keffer discusses these books as

(37:15):
concerning quote explicitly demonic magic as well, and this seems
to have been the case during the Middle Ages as well,
where sometimes something described as necromancy did involve divination via
the dead, but other times it was used interchangeably with
demonic magic. By most theological definitions. However, communication with demons

(37:36):
and demonic divination would not be the same as merely
speaking with the dead, unless you're getting into this again
this very specific Christian caveat about the distinction or the
lack of a distinction between the two key Keffer writes quote.
One possible reason for the conflation of these terms and
concepts was the widespread assumption that when one engaged in

(37:58):
necromancy in the area sense conjuring the spirits of the deceased,
the spirits which in fact appeared were demons in the
forms of the dead and the biblical example here that
is often summoned up to support this is the shade
of Samuel being conjured by the Witch of Indoor, and

(38:20):
it is said that this is not really the spirit
of Samuel, this is a demon in the guise of
his spirit.

Speaker 2 (38:27):
I don't think the Bible says that. I think in
the Bible it is pretty much understood to be Samuel.

Speaker 1 (38:33):
Yeah. Yeah, but again you get into like, what are
the official interpretations of a given religious text, right, Yeah, Still,
there was discussion of pure necromancy in various texts. A
couple of examples are brought up here. There's the Rowlinson
Necromatic Manuscript, as it's popularly known. This is a Latin
and Middle English collection of texts on magic and divination,

(38:55):
including the invocation of angels as well as the dead.
Its name for Richard Rowlinson, an eighteenth century clergy member
and collector of rare books and manuscripts. So yeah, it
contains instructions for necromantic magic, as does the so called
Munich Manual of Demonic Magic, a fifteenth century Godick grimour.

(39:15):
Instructions from the Munich Manual via Keith Kefer involve the
creation of multiple magic circles, a sword and a ring,
and you can use these rights to speak to the dead, certainly,
but also you can make a living person appear dead.
You can also make a living person fall in love
with you, and many other things. Hmm. Now. In one section,

(39:47):
ki Keffer adds some interesting ideas about the idea of
necromancy and nonsense. We often assume that everyone considering necromancy
in medieval times was either an eager believer or a
fearful inquisitor when it came to this kind of stuff,
so he writes the following quote. One might add to
this that it is not altogether anachronistic to see the

(40:10):
notion of necromancy as nonsense. As it's at its most playful,
it was a deliberate violation of sense, a fantasy of illusion,
perhaps intended more for imaginative entertainment than for actual use.
Yet the boundaries between sense and nonsense are rarely quite stable,
and themes that seem to an outsider absolutely nonsensical could

(40:33):
be taken in deadly earnest by some observers within the
culture quote and the deadly earnest observers in this particular case,
he would be referring to would be like the witch
hunters and so forth, the demonology theorists that brought about
so much actual, real misery in the world.

Speaker 2 (40:53):
Ah, So he's exploring the possibility that it was the
inquisitors and so forth who would who were taking the
concept more literally than the people who practiced it.

Speaker 1 (41:05):
Yeah, and I think maybe suggesting that there is again
kind of a it's not just necromancy and non necromancy.
You know, there's a broad spectrum of various beliefs, practices, rights,
but also stories, legends, myths that may concern speaking with
the dead that are understood to varying degrees within a
given group to not be reality, you know, to in

(41:29):
the same way that myth is somewhere between reality and fiction.
You know that some of these traditions hold that place.
But then you have someone come in with an agenda,
with a violent agenda, and they're here to stamp out
practices that are a threat to the church, to stamp
out individuals that are a threat to the church. Well,
then they can take any of these things and use

(41:51):
them to support their case. Now for a little more
detail on where the church stood on necromancy, and again
you're dealing with. We're dealing with a with centuries here,
we're dealing with all sorts of individuals coming in with
different ideas. So this is not presented to be like
the word on necromancy. But I thought it would be

(42:11):
interesting to turn to the famous writings of Thomas Aquinas,
who lived twelve twenty five through twelve seventy four. This
is from the Summa Theologica, or the Summary of Theology.
The book covers a great deal of ground, but it
does mention necromancy in a few places and gets to

(42:32):
the meat of what it was thought to be at
the time in terms of divination. So this is from
a translation of a Summa theological quote. All divinations seek
to acquire for knowledge of future events by means of
some council and help of a demon who is either
expressly called upon to give his help, or else thrust

(42:54):
himself in secretly, in order to tell certain future things
unknown to men but known to him the demon in
such manners as to have been explained in Isaiah fifty
seven to three.

Speaker 2 (43:06):
The statement almost seems like a direct argument against what
we were just talking about with respect to the subtlety
and complex range of different kinds of communication with the
dead that might take place, especially in a culture that
practices common forms of ancestor veneration.

Speaker 1 (43:24):
Yeah, I mean this is like, clearly we're dealing with
a situation where it is not thought that there is
any room for this sort of thing within within the
Christian world, and anything outside of the Christian world that
even looks like this is probably against the rules.

Speaker 2 (43:38):
It's always to know the future, and it's always a demon.

Speaker 1 (43:41):
Yes, So Aquinas continues to in states when demons are
expressly invoked, they are wont to foretell the future in
many ways. Sometimes they offer themselves to human sight and
hearing by mock apparitions in order to foretell the future,
and this species is called the digitation because man's eyes

(44:02):
are blindfolded. Sometimes they make use of dreams, and this
is called divination by dreams. Sometimes they employ apparitions or
utterances of the dead, and this species is called necromancy,
for as Isidore observes, in Greek, necron means dead and
mantilla divination, because after certain incantations and the sprinkling of blood,

(44:25):
the dead seem to come to life to divine and
to answer questions so he goes on to discuss other
forms of divination. Divination, he says, which is practiced without
express invocation of demons, occurs in two forms, one by
observing things in nature, and the other by observing things
due to human action, like rolling dice or flipping through
a book. He writes again in translation, accordingly, it is

(44:47):
clear that there are three kinds of divination. The first
is when the demons are invoked openly. This comes under
the head of necromancy. The second is merely an observation
of the disposition or movement of some other being, and
this belongs to augury, while the third consists in doing
something in order to discover the occult, and this belongs
to sordilach. Under each of these, many others are contained

(45:10):
as explained above, And he says, in all the afore said,
there is the same general, but not the same special
character of sin, For it is much more grievous to
invoke the demons than to do things that deserve the
demon's interference. So he's saying, look, if you're trying to
do let's say you're trying to speak to the spirit
of the dead, and a demon intercepts the call, as

(45:32):
they always will and then manipulates you through that communication.
That's one thing, like, that's bad, you've messed up, But
you haven't messed up as badly if you had gone
out and done a demonic ritual and said, hey, demons,
I need you to come here because we have things
to talk about now. I did find it interesting that

(45:54):
Aquinas stresses that merely speaking to a demon or inquiring
of the truth from a demon is not unlawful, in
part because Christ spoke to the demon legion. He spoke
to the demons that were in the swine or were
driven into the swine. However, it is unlawful to invoke

(46:16):
a demon. So by this classification, I would think, if
a demon comes up to you and is like, hey, suck,
you have every right to go suck back, but it
is unlawful to summon the demon and then go suck. Right.

Speaker 2 (46:31):
Yes, So if you encounter a demon, you can talk
to you, probably you can argue with it or whatever,
but you can't say like, hey, demons, if any demon
is out there, come debate me.

Speaker 1 (46:42):
Yeah. Yeah, Like if you're Martin Luther and the demons
show up, you can cuss at them and throw things
at them. And drive them away, right, that's not demonic
witchcraft or what have you. But if you summon them,
I guess even if you summon them to cuss at
them like, that's bad.

Speaker 2 (46:57):
I would assume so. But especially if you summon them
in order to gain power from them, that's bad.

Speaker 1 (47:04):
Yeah, so Aquina says, quote. Now, it is one thing
to question a demon who comes to us of his
own accord, and it is lawful to do so at
times for the good of others, especially when he can
be compelled by the power of God to tell the truth,
and another to invoke a demon in order to gain
from him knowledge of things hidden from us. Now that
I don't know, it seems to me like that opens

(47:24):
up a gray area. Are like, are you just could
you put yourself in a position where you're just in
the right place to encounter demons, so you're not quite
summoning them, but you're like, you're not baiting the demon,
but you are hanging out in a place or a
position where they might show up.

Speaker 2 (47:41):
I don't know, Like, I'm gonna just keep moving my
arms this way, and if they happen to touch a
wija board, that that's its problem, not mine.

Speaker 1 (47:49):
Yeah, I'm or yeah, I'm going to hang out in
this this this haunted crypt and we'll just see what happens. Yeah.
He also mentions that divination by the stars is fine
so long as you're not invoking a demon. So again,
this is just a snapshot at some of the top
down ideas about speaking to the dead and why you
shouldn't do it, and ultimately a little bit of demonology

(48:12):
splashed in there as well. But you know, there's so
much that would have been going on in different cultures
throughout the centuries covered by the Middle Ages here. I mean,
there are all sorts of traditions involving, you know, speaking
to the dead, conjuring the dead at crossroads and so forth,

(48:33):
and then there's so many on top of that, there's
so many different traditions, legends, ghost stories, et cetera that
deal with this sort of thing that again may not
have a like literal role within the culture saying this
is how you speak to the dead, but like here
is an idea of speaking to the dead, and it
can still have a great deal of importance within a
given culture.

Speaker 2 (48:52):
Now, seeing these different views of communicating with the dead
side by side, it really highlights how how one, I
think could easily be mistaken for the other by an
unsympathetic observer, like somebody who's got a particular theological point
of view and who looks into a culture, one of

(49:12):
the many cultures that practice's forms of ancestor veneration that
may involve some type of ritual of consulting with the
dead with the ancestors seeking their wisdom or getting information
about how they're continuing to affect your life. Like that,
an unsympathetic observer looks in on a culture and sees that,
and they say, oh, they're doing witchcraft in order to

(49:35):
get power from the dead so that they can like
no events in advance and you know, and manipulate people.
It seems very clear how that kind of mistaken impression
could be formed. And I wonder if that gives rise
to some legends of necromantic practices that probably weren't ever
actually practiced, that were just like unsympathetic observer looking in

(49:59):
on ancestor veneration of some form in another culture and
saying like, ah, they're they're consulting the dead in order
to do something malicious.

Speaker 1 (50:09):
Yeah, absolutely. And then at the same time, I mean,
you have things like the veneration of saints within uh,
you know, Catholic Christian traditions that you know, you could
make an argument for sort of you know, scratching the
same itch. So you know, a lot of this falls
you know, a lot of this depends on who's judging,

(50:29):
who's laying out the laws, and who's saying what is
acceptable and what is not acceptable. When we consider individuals
and generations that came before us.

Speaker 2 (50:38):
Do you think Aquinas was saying it's okay to talk
to a demon if you didn't summon it, because like
he did that one time, Like he's a actually that's
not a problem.

Speaker 1 (50:49):
Well, there there are so many you know, I enjoy
reading about this occasionally, like getting into exactly what was
thought of as correct concerning demons at various points in
the Middle Ages, like what could they do and what
could they not do in accordance with divine will? And
there's some of that in Aquinas's writing, for sure, and

(51:11):
you see that in the writings of other key individuals
as well, like can they like one classic example of
this we just we've discussed multiple times is can an
incubus or succubist take on a complete disguise as a
beautiful human to seduce humans, And there's the ideal, No,
that wouldn't be fair to the faithful. So there'll always

(51:32):
be some sort of a tell like duck feed or
some sort of goat feed or something just so that
you'll have so the faithful will have an out that
you know, and so there's a lot of stuff like that.
Can demons do miracles and so forth.

Speaker 2 (51:45):
Though I think as we discussed with the idea of
the duck feed, I wonder if the idea was was
really about the faithful having out or more about saying like, ah, yeah,
if you did succumb to an incubus or a succubus,
it's your fault because there was something there you should
have noticed, right. It's about saying, like, you, you know,
it wasn't unfair to you. You should have been more

(52:05):
on the lookout.

Speaker 1 (52:07):
Right, And also like what would a just god allow
under his domain? You know? And you know, there's of
course the more pressing side of that, like why do
bad things happen to good people? Why is there suffering
in the world, and so forth, And that's I guess
the larger concern. But then when you get into demonology,
like that's a whole other area. Like, Okay, well these

(52:27):
demons get to run around and just do whatever. That
doesn't seem right. They're like, well, no, no, no, they can
do certain things. And I believe Aquinas writes that, like,
they are allowed to do certain things because by allowing
the demons a certain amount of freedom, it actually has
a positive impact on the faithful, you know, because like
in having to deal with all this demonic stuff, like

(52:51):
it's going to end up bolstering your faith to some extent.

Speaker 2 (52:54):
Hmm.

Speaker 1 (52:55):
But it's complicate. It's complicated. That's why. That's why people
like Aquinas did so many words to it.

Speaker 2 (53:01):
Okay, should we wrap up necromancy there?

Speaker 1 (53:04):
I believe we will, but you know, we'd love to
hear from everyone out there. If there's an example of
outright necromancy and fiction, legend and lore, or various examples
of communication with spirits or ancestor veneration that you think
are notable and you'd like to bring up, well, write in.
We would love to hear from you. We can keep

(53:25):
discussing this topic on future editions of listener Mail. Listener
Mail publishes on Mondays and The Stuff to Blow your
Mind podcast feed We have our core episodes of the
show Stuff to Blow Your Mind on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
On Wednesdays, we generally have a short form monster fact
or Artifact episode, and then on Fridays we set aside
most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film

(53:46):
on Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 2 (53:47):
Here's 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 a, stuff blow your Mind
dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio.

(54:11):
For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
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