October 3, 2023 • 52 mins
It’s that time of year again. Join Robert and Joe as Stuff to Blow Your Mind descends into the Halloween season. In this episode, explore the historic and psychological origins of necromancy: the ancient practice by which shamans, wizards and sorcerers sought communication with the dead.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ah necromancy Sweet, Ah Wizard air udep teach me the
skill that I instill, the pain surgeons assuage in vain,
nor herb of all the plane can heal.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
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
(00:51):
like the forced rhyme of sweet with erudite, and I
don't know, wizard feels more right than wizard.
Speaker 3 (00:59):
I like 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 has
(01:22):
not one, but two, which may surprise some of you,
may not surprise some of you who are more familiar
with her work.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
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 3 (01:42):
Yeah, she saw the skull beneath the skin, that's for sure.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
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 tension on topics of the beastly, ghostly,
devilish or uncanny sort. And also, as we often do,
(02:07):
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.
(02:28):
And in that episode we talked about accounts of necromancy
or pseudo necromantic 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 3 (02:52):
That's right, We're going to 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 Andres CapCar titled the Origins of Necromancy
(03:13):
or how 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 ghosts and asking
(03:34):
them about the future or as we'll get into things
that are maybe not the future, But are 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.
(03:57):
The primary example that he deals with, and indeed of
primary example you've seen a lot of discussions of what
is or isn't acromancy 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
(04:19):
on the podcast.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Possibly, but it's been a while, so I think it's
worth refreshing on the story.
Speaker 3 (04:26):
All right, Well, I'll give everyone the basics here concerning
this episode. So basically, you know the deal with Odysseus.
He's trying to get home, right, 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 might say
he takes the scenic route does he takes the scenic route,
(04:48):
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
(05:08):
a year, So they're hanging out on this island for
a fair amount of time.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
I don't know exactly how all of this gets explained
Penelope later.
Speaker 3 (05:21):
Well, you know, we there's a possible answer to that
here coming up. But essentially, you know, he has time
to seek 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 is changing to a woman for several
(05:43):
years 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,
(06:05):
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.
(06:26):
Key individuals that Odysseus knew in life they come forward
as well. One of them is Odysseus's own mother, and
initially he does not let her of her spirit approach
the blood, but finally here comes Tyrisius. He drinks the
blood and then speaks and tells Odysseus how their journey
home is likely to go, and basically he breaks it
(06:48):
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
(07:11):
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. I may touch on some more
here in a minute, but that's the basics here. Odysseus
(07:31):
engages in a specific right to attract the spirits of
the deceased, appeases them, and gives them the power of
speech and their for prophecy.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
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.
Speaker 3 (07:59):
Extent, 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
(08:19):
seen arguments that what takes place here is essentially a
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, like perhaps 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
(08:43):
land of the dead.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
That'll come back in some stuff I want to get
into in a little bit.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
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.
Speaker 4 (08:59):
So, first of.
Speaker 3 (08:59):
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. I mean,
aside from just giving them the power of speech by
offering them the blood.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
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 like
commands armies of skeletons to do their bidding. And that's
not usually what's being discussed with ancient necromancy. It's specifically
(09:35):
a divination practice. It's about communicating with the dead, usually
to get information.
Speaker 4 (09:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
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. 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 contact everybody
(10:02):
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 1 (10:14):
And then everybody starts replying and that's the day you
get five hundred emails on the same thread and yeah.
Speaker 3 (10:19):
Exactly, yeah, and then he has to try and figure
out who he specifically wants to talk to. Now, aspects
of this that that are reflected in later traditions of necromancy.
It does entail blood. There is blood and blood sacrifice
involved here. It entail it does entail the ability to
speak with the dead and.
Speaker 4 (10:38):
Learn from them.
Speaker 3 (10:39):
And again this may work mostly due to proximity to
the Kingdom of the Dead. And you could also classify
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
(11:03):
going to the edge of it?
Speaker 4 (11:04):
Right?
Speaker 1 (11:04):
Well, so you could have an example like Orpheus that
I think is more a more complete kind of bassis.
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 3 (11:24):
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
(11:46):
often a fair amount of traunta.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
Now, you know. 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.
Speaker 4 (12:08):
Now, you know.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
It just it depicts the afterlife is a kind of
miserable only half kind of pseudo existence.
Speaker 3 (12:19):
Yeah, and it's 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
(12:40):
to see a reversal here in these traditions where like
this is the life, this is the the prime existence.
What happens next is just kind of a shadow.
Speaker 4 (12:50):
Now.
Speaker 3 (12:51):
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 approach
Odysseus here from the underworld, and that's Elpinor. This was
the youngest member of Odysseus's crew who remember that year
that they spent on the island of Sirce. Well, during
(13:12):
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. But he falls off the ladder.
He breaks his neck.
Speaker 4 (13:27):
He dies.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
Well, you know, it's sad, but even sadder it turns
out the boys forgot to give him a proper burial
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 and I
got drunk, I fell off that ladder, I broke my neck. Well,
(13:49):
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 a slightly humorous lens.
I don't know if that was really intended in the
(14:12):
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 everything is sort of like
squared away with them. And there are those that have
(14:33):
some 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
(14:54):
in ancient Greece. We'll 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 1 (15:14):
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 Gilgamesh in key Do in the nether world,
(15:35):
where 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 a
(15:58):
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?
Speaker 3 (16:06):
That makes sense, yeah, yeah, but otherwise, I mean there
are certain situations. So 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 details about home
that he's not privy too, but she experienced before her passing.
(16:29):
I think I'm remembering that ride I could be misremembering
part of that.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
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
(16:52):
also has a lot of other interesting general information about
Greco Roman practices of communicating with the dead. So I
want to talk about this art. 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
(17:14):
magazine of a Biblical archaeology website. But Daniel Ogden is
a professor of ancient history at the University of Exeter
in England.
Speaker 3 (17:23):
Yeah, this is a great question because it instantly reminds
me of that episode of The Simpsons where Homer eats
the pepper and has the.
Speaker 4 (17:33):
Psychedelic dream journey Johnny Cash.
Speaker 3 (17:37):
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 1 (17:47):
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
(18:08):
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 3 (18:21):
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
like 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 1 (18:39):
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 Pausanius. Now, just to note this, this story
(19:00):
is pieced together from a bunch of different accounts, and
it is not necessarily all 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 as a
(19:22):
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 Kleonesi in his bedchambers when he was startled awake
(19:45):
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 sort of spirit guide at
an oracle of the dead on the southern shore of
(20:08):
the Black Sea. So this is a place where you
would go to conjure up a ghost. And so he
conjures the ghost of Kleonesy 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 of those cruel
(20:30):
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 fear of impiety. You know,
(20:52):
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 4 (21:02):
Oh wow.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
After this, however, there was a there was an all
new problem. Now the ghost of Pausanius 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
(21:24):
term is sucha go gooy, which means soul conductors. And
they came in and they checked the situation out and
told them how to get rid of the ghost of Pausanius,
and they succeeded. They exercised him effectively. Busted right, bustin
must make them feel good. Because they came all the
(21:44):
way from Italy to Sparta to do this. And this
story illustrates what Ogden 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 plunting me,
or allow the ghost to achieve rest? And I thought
this was interesting in that it combines two different traditions
(22:07):
that we talked about separately in the last part in
this series. So 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.
(22:30):
The most common reason ancient Greek and Roman people would
go to a necromancer was to figure out how to
get a ghost to stop bothering them.
Speaker 3 (22:40):
You know, 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. I guess
I'm mainly thinking about the first American remake of it.
But in that film alone, you see sort of the
(23:02):
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 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 the big reveal,
of course, is that the ghost isn't going to be
(23:23):
satisfied with any of those things. This is one of
that second classification of ghosts, that all it wants is vengeance.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
Yeah, maybe less a ghost and more a demon.
Speaker 4 (23:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (23:34):
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 only way that that's issue was
ever defeated.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
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 the terms. I just made these up to
kind of help us sort through what he's saying. I'm
(24:04):
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
(24:27):
cannot talk to and you can't like bargain with in
this state.
Speaker 3 (24:32):
All right, So this is very much like the wrathful
ghost Samara or Sadako from the Rain or from various
other treatments.
Speaker 1 (24:41):
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 an necromantic ritual.
Speaker 3 (24:50):
All right, So Swimer also fits this classification.
Speaker 1 (24:54):
Yes, yeah, that's the wild ghost. Meanwhile, what I would
call the dial a ghost is a ghost call 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
(25:15):
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, So the same exact ghost, depending
(25:35):
on circumstances, 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
(25:58):
on and figure out what can be done to to
make it go away.
Speaker 3 (26:02):
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, right, 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
(26:23):
using it.
Speaker 1 (26:24):
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 3 (26:31):
Et? No, I don't think so, not in 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
(26:52):
die in seven days, which isn't very helpful, but is
a communication, okay.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
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.
(27:21):
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 3 (27:35):
Quick note on on magi and magas is of of
of 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, called on all the respected magi of
(27:58):
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 mas Dan magi, who were a priestly
order of Zoroastrianism, so they were not expressly necromancers. They
were into all sorts of things, you know, looking to
(28:19):
the stars and so forth. But apparently some of their
writings covered communication with the untethered spirits.
Speaker 4 (28:25):
Of the dead m okay.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
But to come back to this idea of like ghosts
that haunt people and sort of can't be reasoned with
when they appear 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 ghost stories
(28:50):
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 hauntings,
it just appears to scare people, But in the context
of a seance, the same ghost can be intelligibly conversed with.
Speaker 3 (29:09):
Yeah. I mean, in a way, it's almost like, Okay,
this individual ghost or mortal is causing problems. Let's 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 4 (29:32):
I think that's a good way of thinking about it.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
In a way, this might, you know, these rituals might
be kind of like instituting a court proceeding in which
the ghost must appear.
Speaker 3 (29:40):
Yeah, or it's 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
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 1 (29:53):
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 the
(30:14):
spirit of a person could practically be expected to know
if consciousness continues after death. For example, somebody hide 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
(30:37):
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 3 (30:59):
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
(31:19):
ritual to put them at ease to you know, 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.
Speaker 4 (31:35):
Right.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
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 3 (31:42):
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 1 (31:51):
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 is 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
(32:11):
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 3 (32:20):
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 presented
as proof of an individual's guilt in a murder.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
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
(32:59):
turns out Greek 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.
(33:20):
Ogden writes, quote, One possibility 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
(33:40):
that's one. Ogden goes on quote 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
(34:03):
correct about these two explanations. Here, 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
(34:24):
the upcoming season of the show. Or the second explanation is,
if you subscribe to something like platonism, soul's rule and
body's drool, and your current knowledge of the future is
limited by the extent to which your body drools. Liberated souls,
no longer attached to flesh, are sort of like gods
(34:46):
in a way. They have extra powers of knowledge and perception,
and we would all have these powers if we were
liberated from the confines of our bodies.
Speaker 3 (34:55):
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
(35:15):
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 1 (35:36):
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
are two main answers for this. One is at at
(35:58):
the Tomb of the East. 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.
Speaker 4 (36:08):
Kind of ritual there makes sense.
Speaker 1 (36:11):
But the second, and I got really interested in this,
was that there were essentially some geographically identified special places
where 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
(36:34):
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
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
(36:58):
river itself is very important in Greek visions of the afterlife.
So there's a motif present in Greek and Roman mythology
that the dead have to be carried across a river
by a ghastly ferryman in order to reach Haiti's or
the underworld. And in some sources this river is named
as Styx, but in others it is the Akron.
Speaker 3 (37:20):
If memory serves both names, as separate rivers are used
in Dante's Inferno.
Speaker 1 (37:24):
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 Styx at core seems to be a mythological
river in the underworld, but at some point it was
(37:47):
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 at one of these lakes or
swamps connected to the Akron, known as Acarusia, there was
a lakeside district in which you could call up the
(38:10):
spirits 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,
(38:30):
but they do look kind of spooky to me.
Speaker 3 (38:32):
Yeah, yeah, same. 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. This is a moving thing that goes somewhere else,
(38:57):
so it's easy to approach it and think think of
it as this thing that connects to some distant land,
because it literally does.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
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 Avernus
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 Avernus is the
(39:26):
flooded crater of an extinct volcano, so this is in
a region somewhat close to Naples. Allegedly, Lake of Vernas
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
(39:47):
the underworld, then maybe it's just this creepy abandoned place
with nothing going on. But no, no, no, The area around
Avernus was developed. It had temples and bathhouses and all
sorts of stuff. In fact, in his article, Ogden tell
what I thought was a very funny story about a
British archaeologist who thought he had identified the ruins of
(40:07):
the Avernus Oracle of the Dead in a Roman era
tunnel near the lake. Came up with this whole scenario
about how the oracle worked. Ogden Wright's 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
(40:30):
shadow puppets to project ghostly figures onto a wall in
a kind of ancient vision of a Disneyland 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
(40:50):
oracles of the dead that were less well known. One
is heracle A Pontica. That's the one on the south
coast of the Black Sea, 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 Tynern, which is down at the southern
(41:14):
tip of the Peloponnesis. And I'm not sure about the
Black Sea location, but I 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 entryway into the underworld.
Speaker 3 (41:37):
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 4 (41:49):
Now.
Speaker 1 (41:49):
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 ritual
(42:09):
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 the ritual that involved a skull that you
(42:32):
would address as oh 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, like
did I think we don't really know, but I have
to wonder, like did the skull somehow quote speak? If so,
(42:52):
how was that accomplished?
Speaker 3 (42:55):
Yeah, because on one hand, you could have a scenario
where some manner of puppetry was even 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 you
know that becomes the object of focus during the proceedings.
Speaker 4 (43:17):
Right.
Speaker 1 (43:18):
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 is the Greek playwright Escalus, in a
fragment of an otherwise lost work, describes a scene at
(43:40):
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,
(44:01):
it's explicitly stated that giving a ghost sheep's blood or
ram's 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
(44:23):
to interact with you.
Speaker 3 (44:25):
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 1 (44:33):
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
(44:56):
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 in the show before was the
shrines of the healing god Asclepias, where you would want
(45:17):
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
(45:40):
you could.
Speaker 4 (45:40):
Do to cure your disease. Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1 (45:44):
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
(46:04):
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 halfway 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,
(46:27):
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
(46:48):
in a lot of cases they use dream incubation where
it's all internal to you.
Speaker 3 (46:53):
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
(47:15):
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
(47:36):
could be maybe thought of as 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 1 (47:54):
Well, yeah, and it makes me see another parallel between
sleep and death here is that it seems like they're
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 your consciousness is diminished in
(48:18):
a way your 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 3 (48:36):
Yeah, and now, of course I can't help but be
reminded of Freddy Krueger and all this. It's easy to
think of Freddy Krueger as a monster, but and you know,
he's a monster in the general sense of the word,
but he is a ghosts. He has a vngul ghost
that then appears in your dreams. And I guess by
virtue of having access to dreams, he has privileged information
(48:58):
about individuals. I don't know that anyone ever really ask
him for advice on anything, though, I.
Speaker 4 (49:02):
Mean it would be funny if you did.
Speaker 1 (49:04):
I don't know what kind of advice he would give.
Speaker 3 (49:06):
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?
Speaker 4 (49:25):
Freddy Krueger, you know what's cool? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (49:27):
Yeah, Oh, to get advice on sweaters, it'd 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 3 (49:39):
He knows it's a classic look and it'll eventually, you know,
eventually the trends will come back around to it.
Speaker 1 (49:44):
Okay, but in a cap part two right there.
Speaker 4 (49:47):
I believe.
Speaker 3 (49:47):
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 necromancy or things that could described as
a necromantic and scope also if you have thoughts in
some of the more pop culture things that we've mentioned here,
(50:09):
if you have thoughts on Freddy Krueger, Slimer or The Ring,
certainly write 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 picture
(50:31):
with their beast like servants. So there's a lot to
unwrap there.
Speaker 1 (50:36):
Many knew what it was to roast in the belly
of a slore that day.
Speaker 3 (50:40):
Indeed, all right, a reminder that's stuff to blow your mind.
Is primarily a science podcast, though of course we get
into into culture and history as well as especially obvious
in these episodes. We do listener mail episodes. On Mondays,
we do a short form Monster Factor or Artifact episode
on Wednesdays, and on Fridays we set aside most serious
(51:00):
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
(51:21):
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 and
I recommend that place to anyone who is in Atlanta
looking to engage with some illusions. It's a very fun place.
Speaker 1 (51:38):
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 2 (52:00):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ah necromancy Sweet, Ah Wizard air udep teach me the
skill that I instill, the pain surgeons assuage in vain,
nor herb of all the plane can heal.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
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
(00:51):
like the forced rhyme of sweet with erudite, and I
don't know, wizard feels more right than wizard.
Speaker 3 (00:59):
I like 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 has
(01:22):
not one, but two, which may surprise some of you,
may not surprise some of you who are more familiar
with her work.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
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 3 (01:42):
Yeah, she saw the skull beneath the skin, that's for sure.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
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 tension on topics of the beastly, ghostly,
devilish or uncanny sort. And also, as we often do,
(02:07):
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.
(02:28):
And in that episode we talked about accounts of necromancy
or pseudo necromantic 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 3 (02:52):
That's right, We're going to 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 Andres CapCar titled the Origins of Necromancy
(03:13):
or how 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 ghosts and asking
(03:34):
them about the future or as we'll get into things
that are maybe not the future, But are 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.
(03:57):
The primary example that he deals with, and indeed of
primary example you've seen a lot of discussions of what
is or isn't acromancy 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
(04:19):
on the podcast.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Possibly, but it's been a while, so I think it's
worth refreshing on the story.
Speaker 3 (04:26):
All right, Well, I'll give everyone the basics here concerning
this episode. So basically, you know the deal with Odysseus.
He's trying to get home, right, 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 might say
he takes the scenic route does he takes the scenic route,
(04:48):
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
(05:08):
a year, So they're hanging out on this island for
a fair amount of time.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
I don't know exactly how all of this gets explained
Penelope later.
Speaker 3 (05:21):
Well, you know, we there's a possible answer to that
here coming up. But essentially, you know, he has time
to seek 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 is changing to a woman for several
(05:43):
years 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,
(06:05):
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.
(06:26):
Key individuals that Odysseus knew in life they come forward
as well. One of them is Odysseus's own mother, and
initially he does not let her of her spirit approach
the blood, but finally here comes Tyrisius. He drinks the
blood and then speaks and tells Odysseus how their journey
home is likely to go, and basically he breaks it
(06:48):
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
(07:11):
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. I may touch on some more
here in a minute, but that's the basics here. Odysseus
(07:31):
engages in a specific right to attract the spirits of
the deceased, appeases them, and gives them the power of
speech and their for prophecy.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
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.
Speaker 3 (07:59):
Extent, 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
(08:19):
seen arguments that what takes place here is essentially a
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, like perhaps 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
(08:43):
land of the dead.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
That'll come back in some stuff I want to get
into in a little bit.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
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.
Speaker 4 (08:59):
So, first of.
Speaker 3 (08:59):
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. I mean,
aside from just giving them the power of speech by
offering them the blood.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
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 like
commands armies of skeletons to do their bidding. And that's
not usually what's being discussed with ancient necromancy. It's specifically
(09:35):
a divination practice. It's about communicating with the dead, usually
to get information.
Speaker 4 (09:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
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. 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 contact everybody
(10:02):
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 1 (10:14):
And then everybody starts replying and that's the day you
get five hundred emails on the same thread and yeah.
Speaker 3 (10:19):
Exactly, yeah, and then he has to try and figure
out who he specifically wants to talk to. Now, aspects
of this that that are reflected in later traditions of necromancy.
It does entail blood. There is blood and blood sacrifice
involved here. It entail it does entail the ability to
speak with the dead and.
Speaker 4 (10:38):
Learn from them.
Speaker 3 (10:39):
And again this may work mostly due to proximity to
the Kingdom of the Dead. And you could also classify
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
(11:03):
going to the edge of it?
Speaker 4 (11:04):
Right?
Speaker 1 (11:04):
Well, so you could have an example like Orpheus that
I think is more a more complete kind of bassis.
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 3 (11:24):
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
(11:46):
often a fair amount of traunta.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
Now, you know. 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.
Speaker 4 (12:08):
Now, you know.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
It just it depicts the afterlife is a kind of
miserable only half kind of pseudo existence.
Speaker 3 (12:19):
Yeah, and it's 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
(12:40):
to see a reversal here in these traditions where like
this is the life, this is the the prime existence.
What happens next is just kind of a shadow.
Speaker 4 (12:50):
Now.
Speaker 3 (12:51):
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 approach
Odysseus here from the underworld, and that's Elpinor. This was
the youngest member of Odysseus's crew who remember that year
that they spent on the island of Sirce. Well, during
(13:12):
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. But he falls off the ladder.
He breaks his neck.
Speaker 4 (13:27):
He dies.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
Well, you know, it's sad, but even sadder it turns
out the boys forgot to give him a proper burial
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 and I
got drunk, I fell off that ladder, I broke my neck. Well,
(13:49):
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 a slightly humorous lens.
I don't know if that was really intended in the
(14:12):
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 everything is sort of like
squared away with them. And there are those that have
(14:33):
some 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
(14:54):
in ancient Greece. We'll 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 1 (15:14):
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 Gilgamesh in key Do in the nether world,
(15:35):
where 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 a
(15:58):
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?
Speaker 3 (16:06):
That makes sense, yeah, yeah, but otherwise, I mean there
are certain situations. So 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 details about home
that he's not privy too, but she experienced before her passing.
(16:29):
I think I'm remembering that ride I could be misremembering
part of that.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
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
(16:52):
also has a lot of other interesting general information about
Greco Roman practices of communicating with the dead. So I
want to talk about this art. 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
(17:14):
magazine of a Biblical archaeology website. But Daniel Ogden is
a professor of ancient history at the University of Exeter
in England.
Speaker 3 (17:23):
Yeah, this is a great question because it instantly reminds
me of that episode of The Simpsons where Homer eats
the pepper and has the.
Speaker 4 (17:33):
Psychedelic dream journey Johnny Cash.
Speaker 3 (17:37):
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 1 (17:47):
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
(18:08):
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 3 (18:21):
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
like 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 1 (18:39):
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 Pausanius. Now, just to note this, this story
(19:00):
is pieced together from a bunch of different accounts, and
it is not necessarily all 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 as a
(19:22):
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 Kleonesi in his bedchambers when he was startled awake
(19:45):
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 sort of spirit guide at
an oracle of the dead on the southern shore of
(20:08):
the Black Sea. So this is a place where you
would go to conjure up a ghost. And so he
conjures the ghost of Kleonesy 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 of those cruel
(20:30):
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 fear of impiety. You know,
(20:52):
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 4 (21:02):
Oh wow.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
After this, however, there was a there was an all
new problem. Now the ghost of Pausanius 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
(21:24):
term is sucha go gooy, which means soul conductors. And
they came in and they checked the situation out and
told them how to get rid of the ghost of Pausanius,
and they succeeded. They exercised him effectively. Busted right, bustin
must make them feel good. Because they came all the
(21:44):
way from Italy to Sparta to do this. And this
story illustrates what Ogden 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 plunting me,
or allow the ghost to achieve rest? And I thought
this was interesting in that it combines two different traditions
(22:07):
that we talked about separately in the last part in
this series. So 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.
(22:30):
The most common reason ancient Greek and Roman people would
go to a necromancer was to figure out how to
get a ghost to stop bothering them.
Speaker 3 (22:40):
You know, 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. I guess
I'm mainly thinking about the first American remake of it.
But in that film alone, you see sort of the
(23:02):
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 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 the big reveal,
of course, is that the ghost isn't going to be
(23:23):
satisfied with any of those things. This is one of
that second classification of ghosts, that all it wants is vengeance.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
Yeah, maybe less a ghost and more a demon.
Speaker 4 (23:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (23:34):
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 only way that that's issue was
ever defeated.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
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 the terms. I just made these up to
kind of help us sort through what he's saying. I'm
(24:04):
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
(24:27):
cannot talk to and you can't like bargain with in
this state.
Speaker 3 (24:32):
All right, So this is very much like the wrathful
ghost Samara or Sadako from the Rain or from various
other treatments.
Speaker 1 (24:41):
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 an necromantic ritual.
Speaker 3 (24:50):
All right, So Swimer also fits this classification.
Speaker 1 (24:54):
Yes, yeah, that's the wild ghost. Meanwhile, what I would
call the dial a ghost is a ghost call 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
(25:15):
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, So the same exact ghost, depending
(25:35):
on circumstances, 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
(25:58):
on and figure out what can be done to to
make it go away.
Speaker 3 (26:02):
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, right, 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
(26:23):
using it.
Speaker 1 (26:24):
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 3 (26:31):
Et? No, I don't think so, not in 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
(26:52):
die in seven days, which isn't very helpful, but is
a communication, okay.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
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.
(27:21):
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 3 (27:35):
Quick note on on magi and magas is of of
of 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, called on all the respected magi of
(27:58):
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 mas Dan magi, who were a priestly
order of Zoroastrianism, so they were not expressly necromancers. They
were into all sorts of things, you know, looking to
(28:19):
the stars and so forth. But apparently some of their
writings covered communication with the untethered spirits.
Speaker 4 (28:25):
Of the dead m okay.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
But to come back to this idea of like ghosts
that haunt people and sort of can't be reasoned with
when they appear 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 ghost stories
(28:50):
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 hauntings,
it just appears to scare people, But in the context
of a seance, the same ghost can be intelligibly conversed with.
Speaker 3 (29:09):
Yeah. I mean, in a way, it's almost like, Okay,
this individual ghost or mortal is causing problems. Let's 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 4 (29:32):
I think that's a good way of thinking about it.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
In a way, this might, you know, these rituals might
be kind of like instituting a court proceeding in which
the ghost must appear.
Speaker 3 (29:40):
Yeah, or it's 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
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 1 (29:53):
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 the
(30:14):
spirit of a person could practically be expected to know
if consciousness continues after death. For example, somebody hide 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
(30:37):
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 3 (30:59):
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
(31:19):
ritual to put them at ease to you know, 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.
Speaker 4 (31:35):
Right.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
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 3 (31:42):
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 1 (31:51):
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 is 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
(32:11):
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 3 (32:20):
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 presented
as proof of an individual's guilt in a murder.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
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
(32:59):
turns out Greek 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.
(33:20):
Ogden writes, quote, One possibility 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
(33:40):
that's one. Ogden goes on quote 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
(34:03):
correct about these two explanations. Here, 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
(34:24):
the upcoming season of the show. Or the second explanation is,
if you subscribe to something like platonism, soul's rule and
body's drool, and your current knowledge of the future is
limited by the extent to which your body drools. Liberated souls,
no longer attached to flesh, are sort of like gods
(34:46):
in a way. They have extra powers of knowledge and perception,
and we would all have these powers if we were
liberated from the confines of our bodies.
Speaker 3 (34:55):
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
(35:15):
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 1 (35:36):
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
are two main answers for this. One is at at
(35:58):
the Tomb of the East. 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.
Speaker 4 (36:08):
Kind of ritual there makes sense.
Speaker 1 (36:11):
But the second, and I got really interested in this,
was that there were essentially some geographically identified special places
where 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
(36:34):
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
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
(36:58):
river itself is very important in Greek visions of the afterlife.
So there's a motif present in Greek and Roman mythology
that the dead have to be carried across a river
by a ghastly ferryman in order to reach Haiti's or
the underworld. And in some sources this river is named
as Styx, but in others it is the Akron.
Speaker 3 (37:20):
If memory serves both names, as separate rivers are used
in Dante's Inferno.
Speaker 1 (37:24):
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 Styx at core seems to be a mythological
river in the underworld, but at some point it was
(37:47):
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 at one of these lakes or
swamps connected to the Akron, known as Acarusia, there was
a lakeside district in which you could call up the
(38:10):
spirits 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,
(38:30):
but they do look kind of spooky to me.
Speaker 3 (38:32):
Yeah, yeah, same. 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. This is a moving thing that goes somewhere else,
(38:57):
so it's easy to approach it and think think of
it as this thing that connects to some distant land,
because it literally does.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
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 Avernus
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 Avernus is the
(39:26):
flooded crater of an extinct volcano, so this is in
a region somewhat close to Naples. Allegedly, Lake of Vernas
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
(39:47):
the underworld, then maybe it's just this creepy abandoned place
with nothing going on. But no, no, no, The area around
Avernus was developed. It had temples and bathhouses and all
sorts of stuff. In fact, in his article, Ogden tell
what I thought was a very funny story about a
British archaeologist who thought he had identified the ruins of
(40:07):
the Avernus Oracle of the Dead in a Roman era
tunnel near the lake. Came up with this whole scenario
about how the oracle worked. Ogden Wright's 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
(40:30):
shadow puppets to project ghostly figures onto a wall in
a kind of ancient vision of a Disneyland 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
(40:50):
oracles of the dead that were less well known. One
is heracle A Pontica. That's the one on the south
coast of the Black Sea, 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 Tynern, which is down at the southern
(41:14):
tip of the Peloponnesis. And I'm not sure about the
Black Sea location, but I 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 entryway into the underworld.
Speaker 3 (41:37):
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 4 (41:49):
Now.
Speaker 1 (41:49):
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 ritual
(42:09):
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 the ritual that involved a skull that you
(42:32):
would address as oh 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, like
did I think we don't really know, but I have
to wonder, like did the skull somehow quote speak? If so,
(42:52):
how was that accomplished?
Speaker 3 (42:55):
Yeah, because on one hand, you could have a scenario
where some manner of puppetry was even 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 you
know that becomes the object of focus during the proceedings.
Speaker 4 (43:17):
Right.
Speaker 1 (43:18):
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 is the Greek playwright Escalus, in a
fragment of an otherwise lost work, describes a scene at
(43:40):
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,
(44:01):
it's explicitly stated that giving a ghost sheep's blood or
ram's 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
(44:23):
to interact with you.
Speaker 3 (44:25):
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 1 (44:33):
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
(44:56):
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 in the show before was the
shrines of the healing god Asclepias, where you would want
(45:17):
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
(45:40):
you could.
Speaker 4 (45:40):
Do to cure your disease. Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1 (45:44):
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
(46:04):
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 halfway 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,
(46:27):
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
(46:48):
in a lot of cases they use dream incubation where
it's all internal to you.
Speaker 3 (46:53):
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
(47:15):
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
(47:36):
could be maybe thought of as 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 1 (47:54):
Well, yeah, and it makes me see another parallel between
sleep and death here is that it seems like they're
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 your consciousness is diminished in
(48:18):
a way your 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 3 (48:36):
Yeah, and now, of course I can't help but be
reminded of Freddy Krueger and all this. It's easy to
think of Freddy Krueger as a monster, but and you know,
he's a monster in the general sense of the word,
but he is a ghosts. He has a vngul ghost
that then appears in your dreams. And I guess by
virtue of having access to dreams, he has privileged information
(48:58):
about individuals. I don't know that anyone ever really ask
him for advice on anything, though, I.
Speaker 4 (49:02):
Mean it would be funny if you did.
Speaker 1 (49:04):
I don't know what kind of advice he would give.
Speaker 3 (49:06):
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?
Speaker 4 (49:25):
Freddy Krueger, you know what's cool? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (49:27):
Yeah, Oh, to get advice on sweaters, it'd 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 3 (49:39):
He knows it's a classic look and it'll eventually, you know,
eventually the trends will come back around to it.
Speaker 1 (49:44):
Okay, but in a cap part two right there.
Speaker 4 (49:47):
I believe.
Speaker 3 (49:47):
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 necromancy or things that could described as
a necromantic and scope also if you have thoughts in
some of the more pop culture things that we've mentioned here,
(50:09):
if you have thoughts on Freddy Krueger, Slimer or The Ring,
certainly write 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 picture
(50:31):
with their beast like servants. So there's a lot to
unwrap there.
Speaker 1 (50:36):
Many knew what it was to roast in the belly
of a slore that day.
Speaker 3 (50:40):
Indeed, all right, a reminder that's stuff to blow your mind.
Is primarily a science podcast, though of course we get
into into culture and history as well as especially obvious
in these episodes. We do listener mail episodes. On Mondays,
we do a short form Monster Factor or Artifact episode
on Wednesdays, and on Fridays we set aside most serious
(51:00):
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
(51:21):
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 and
I recommend that place to anyone who is in Atlanta
looking to engage with some illusions. It's a very fun place.
Speaker 1 (51:38):
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 2 (52:00):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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