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