Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.
And I am Joe McCormick, and hey, Rob and I are out this week for Fall Break, so we're bringing you a few episodes from the vault. This is part one of our series on necromancy, originally published September twenty eighth, twenty twenty three.
All right, let's jump right in. My heart is made a necromancer's glass, where homeless forms and exile phantoms team, Where faces of forgotten sorrows gleam and dead despairs, archaic peer and pass gray longings of some weary heart that was possessed me, and the multiple supreme, unwildered hope and star in blazoned dream of questing armies, ancient queen and lass risen vampire like from out the wormy mold, deep in the magic mirror of my heart, behold their parish beauty,
and depart and now from black Ophelia and far and cold, swimming in deathly light on charnal Sky's the enormous ghosts of bygone worlds arise.
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 to continue a stuff to blow your mind tradition, we are disregarding the traditional Gregorian calendar and we have decided that October begins in late September. It often does for us, if you don't know, we do spooky content all October, and today is the first day of that month long festival.
That's right, I mean, yeah, Halloween has already begun. There's no doubt about it. I'm going to haunt it house tomorrow night. So it's begun. It has begun. And so we kicked off this episode. This is going to be the first of I believe two episodes. We'll see how it goes. Regarding necromancy, that was a reading from the early twentieth century poem Necromancy by the weird fiction, horror and fantasy rider Clark Ashton Smith.
Now, I actually suggested this topic because I became interested in it when we were doing an episode a while back. I think it was our series on oil and Water. We were mainly focusing there on legends about how if you pour oil and water it will settle the waves, and how to some extent that is actually scientifically true. So if you haven't heard that series, go back and
listen to it. It'll be a treat. But in that series I did end up going on a large digression about necromancy in the Hebrew Bible, and it got me
thinking about the idea that necromancy. When people use that word today, they're almost always talking about a sort of Dungeon and Dragons sorcerer that raises the dead and commands them as a sort of shambling thrall of some sort, whereas in the traditional understanding, necromancy means something different, and it's usually a reference to the practice of divination with the help of the dead, consulting the dead for information.
And that sort of gap in meanings between the popular understanding and the original understanding I thought was very interesting and maybe worth plowing into the history a bit. Yeah.
Yeah, because if you're familiar with Dungeons and Dragons necromancers, you know that within Dungeons and Dragons, this is a magic practitioner who specializes in spells of the necromancy spell class, So things like animate Dead, finger of Death, chill Touch, that sort of thing. You know, lots of undead ish magical spells and abilities, and the presentation of necromancers in D and D has of course influenced tons of fantasy
and sci fi properties over the years. So there's this strong pop culture echo of the dead raising necromancer.
Now, I think, aligning with the traditional understanding of necromancy, you do have a spell in Dungeons and Dragons which is speak with Dead, which is almost always used for necromancy purposes. It's like, you need to get some information out of this corpse. And despite the evil connotations of necromancy in general, I think anybody can use this spell. Like in Balder's Gate, I have my very lawful, good wizard speaking with dead most of the time.
Yeah. I think one of the interesting things to keep in mind about necromancy we'll probably get into this some more, is that this idea of like speaking with the dead. You know, it's like the medieval Christian experience and prohibition against this sort of thing. I kind of cast a long shadow where you know, this idea that you shouldn't
attempt to speak with the dead. You don't know what we'll speak back, because speaking with the dead is not possible by the rules of laws of God, as they understood it to be, and therefore you know, it was just dangerous to even think about such a thing. So
that'll be worth keeping in mind here. But the Dungis and Dragon's idea of the necromancer, of course, you're all on various traditions as well, including the discussion of necromancers in necromancy and pre existing fantasy and weird fiction, including that of Clark Ashton Smith, whose poem started off this episode.
For instance, he had a story titled The Empire of the Necromancers from nineteen thirty two that involved a pair of kind of like rogue necromancers who get exiled from one kingdom, and so they go into this kingdom of this deceased kingdom of tombs and start raising up people to serve as their servants, and of course they end up rising against them. That sort of.
Thing is kind of a buddy comedy.
No, no, it's it's no, you're not. You don't really sympathize with these necromancers. They're awful and you're rooting for the dead to overcome them the whole time, and so it's satisfying when they do. It's also worth noting that j. R. Tolkens the Hobbit features whispers of the mysterious necromancer in Mirkwood.
I think little is made out of this in the text, but I think we're to understand that this is an incarnation of the dark Lord Saarn prior to his return to Mordor, and his final incarnation is the all Seeing Eye. As to what sort of literal necromancy he might be up to in Mirkwood, I don't know that we have a clear answer on that.
That's a good question. I don't know if Sauron would be raising the dead to obtain information or for divinatory purposes. I think he mainly does go more in the D and D direction of like he raises what are they called, you know, the ring rays. I guess those are those are undead wraiths or revenants of some sort. They are dead kings who are brought back to do his bidding.
Yeah. Yeah, so that's that's necromancy and the raising the dead sense. But in terms of the speaking with the dead, I don't know that he has much to talk about.
With him except like, yeah, do as I command, you kneel before Zod.
Yeah, so we're going to be talking about several different angles regarding necromancy here. But one article that I found pretty insightful in places was this paper by the Czech academic andre J Kapcar titled the Origins of Necromancy or how we Learned to Speak to the Dead, and I thought this was pretty insightful. He points out that the ultimate roots of necromancy can be found in the socioeconomic impact of human death on individuals and communities, especially small communities.
And this is one of those things that I think can seem like an outrageous overstatement of the obvious at first, but as social animals, a great deal depends on the social bonds created and nurtured by individuals within a group, and when an individual dies, it potentially throws all of that into disarray unless the bonds they established in life can be carried on after their death by one or
the other. So it becomes important to retain bonds of some sort with one's ancestors, which is not necessarily necromancy obviously, and even you know, to seek their guidance, which is more directly what we might think of as necromancy, but again not necessarily necromancy, which is is going to be a distinction. We'll come back to again and again.
This is interesting. It gets into something I think I'm going to talk about more in Part two than in this part, but about how some ancient descriptions of alleged necromancy practices might actually be sort of external misunderstandings of essentially ancestor cult practices, that what is actually sort of the care of one's dead ancestors as a sort of god of sorts is misinterpreted by people who don't practice the same thing with regard to their own ancestors as
an attempt to get information or power from the dead.
Yeah, I think there's a lot of that going on. We'll get into some Chinese sources here in a bit, And like, the word necromancer pops up a lot in translations of Chinese sources, and sometimes, really it seems like a lot of the time necromancer is used sort of interchangeably and elegant variation for just wizard, you know, and which can make searching for information a little bit tricky at times, because you'll see the word necromancer, but they're
not really talking about anything regarding necromancy specifically. And yeah, and again, to your point, you end up asking questions like, well, what's the difference between a spirit medium and a necromancer. What's the difference between veneration of ancestors and necromancy. You could say it's just a personal branding issue, or it
depends on which side you're standing on. If you are on the outside of that culture, particularly with a European Western European background, again kind of descended from this culture in which the idea of speaking to the dead, you know, was evil or dark in some fashion, then it's easy to level the word necromancer, which you know drips a certain amount of dread.
Yeah, I think another important thing to understand is that especially in the Christian context, but really I think any religious context that enforces a kind of priesthood based orthodoxy, there is usually going to be more restrictions on individual practice of magic, and necromancy would be one form of that.
And you know, there are other cultural contexts where it's more of a kind of magical ritual free for all, and people engage in all different kinds of practices to gain information or blessing and it's not condemned by the religious institutions.
Right right, Well, anyway, to go back to CapCar here, according to him in broad strokes, necromancy covers anything that involves divination practices that involve the spirits of the dead. And I should also stress that I think he's using the term divination here as well as its textbook definition doesn't necessarily mean knowledge about the future, but can also refer to the access of hidden knowledge, you know, the
interpretation of omens and so forth. So anytime you're trying to find something out by speaking with a spirit of a dead person, then that is broadly speaking, necromancy.
Yeah, that's my understanding too, especially how it's used in the academic literature as opposed to the popular fantasy.
Yeah. Now, of course, necromancy is just a word, and he also breaks down the origins of the word as follows. So it's a seventeenth century English derivation of the Italian word necromancia, which means black magic, which comes from the Latin word necro mantia, meaning the same thing. The Latin here borrows from the pre classical Greek word necromantia, and so we have necros meaning dead or corpse, and mantia meaning divination. So we're talking about corpse divination or divination of the dead.
And that's why you can see the same suffix mancy used in other forms of divination like silinomancy, you know, divination by looking at the moon and so forth.
Yeah, and he cites the first use of the word necromancy in this context to Oregon of Alexandria from third century CE. He is saying the following, attributing it to Simon the Magus quote, by means of ineffable a duration, I called up the soul of an immaculate boy who had been put to a violent death, and caused it to stand by me. And by its means, whatever I commanded is affected, and the soul, freed from the body, possesses the faculty of fore knowledge. Whence it is called
forth for necromancy. This particular quote, it's from the Recognitions of Clement, and it looks like it's from this is mentioned in a book that he cites from nineteen ninety five by Robertson Donaldson. Okay, but I guess it's important to drive home, like it's kind of like three different levels of talking about necromancy. It's like earliest if you're looking for like the roots of it, Like how far back can you go and find something that is described
with the word necromancy or necromancer. How far back can you go to something that is being described that matches these prerequisites for necromancy. And then ultimately, and we'll maybe get into this later, like, what are some things in the archaeological record that you can point to and say, well, that might be something like necromancy, that might be an example of some sort of practice that involved seeking guidance or wisdom from the dead. Ah.
Yes, because there are a lot of artifacts that without literary sources to really explain what was done with them, you can't be sure, but they're suggestive of possible practices having to do with consulting the dead.
Yeah.
Now, in this series, we're going to talk about examples of necromancy or alleged necromancy in different times and places throughout history. Let's see, I had some stuff today about necromancy and ancient Mesopotamia, and Rob, I know you had some stuff about in China. Do you want to do China first?
Sure? Yeah, I mean it is Auto Moon festival and everything, So maybe we'll start with a Chinese example. So I guess the first thing to point out is that we should remind ourselves of the importance of ancestor veneration and Chinese traditions. And this is by no means unique to just Chinese traditions, but it is incredibly important, And I suppose we should also remind ourselves that modern and ancient people alike are capable of having multiple, even conflicting ideas
concerning the dead and the possibility of an afterlife. So this may be important later on because again, in the same way that you can have someone who doesn't logically believe in ghest it doesn't logically believe you can contact the spirit world, but that same individual, you know, given certain emotional stresses, may seek out a medium and try and find some solace there that sort of thing, Or we can just sort of casually have multiple ideas about the afterlife.
Yeah, and well, while you're emphasizing the multiple ideas that can exist within a single person, of course, it's even more true of a populace across time. Like you know, asking like what did ancient Chinese people or what did ancient Mesopotamian people think about what happens after death? Is kind of like asking what do Americans think about what happens after death? I mean, you could represent you can explain views that are commonly found, that some views are
going to be much more frequently believed than others. But there's no single answer to that. There are a range of beliefs, and so if you talk in generalities, you can only talk based on the sources you have, and even then that's probably only going to be talking at best about like majorities of people or some commonly held ideas, not about what everyone believed all the time.
That's right. Yeah, we're dealing with a great deal of geography, culture, and time when talking about like Chinese, even ancient Chinese concepts regarding the dead. But I think it's safe to say a certain amount of guidance by and communication with is baked into the whole concept. Though the degree to which this is this angle is emphasized is going to vary.
So veneration of ancestors does not equal necromancy. But that doesn't mean there aren't some comparisons you could make, and more to the point, it doesn't mean that there are not examples of wizards in Chinese mythology and tradition who are more expressly described as experts specialists with an ability to communicate with or facilitate communication with the dead. And by that you could classify them as quote unquote necromancers.
So again, that doesn't stop so many texts from described wizards as necromancers, even though they're not necessarily doing anything that is necromantic.
Well yeah, and to people who listen to us often, this should be obvious. But maybe it's worth saying that when we use the term necromancer, we are not applying any more attaching any moral ideas to that. It just means literally somebody who's getting information from the dead, not that that's good or bad. Whatever older sources might be likely to I don't know, has some kind of stink on the idea.
Yeah, yeah, Now I want to stress that, as always, my grasp with Mandarin is very limited and depends on various references and tools, But it's my understanding that there is no one word in Mandarin that expressly denotes necromancy in the same way that our word necromancy does. But in Chinese tradition, the specialist you would seek out for any of your strong necromantic needs would be a fang shi,
which essentially translates to method master. You'll also see this translated as alchemist, wizard, or basically any specialist magic user terminology you can think of, including but not limited to necromancer. Again, this is the elegant variation in play here. Though again there are some cases where you have one of these method masters, one of these things she who is doing something that is very necromatic in nature, and so I'd
like to discuss one in particular. Okay, all right, this is going to take us through the Han dynasty, so second century BCE, this would have been the rule of Emperor Wu of Han. More than one wizard and immortalists
served this guy. He, especially later in life, had a fondness for surrounding himself with various magicians and magic users, seeking things from them like immortality, and I have also read that late in life he also became increasingly paranoid about plots against him, and I think some of these were inspired by dreams and so at the same time that he was leaning into the talents of magicians to help protect him, he also was very much supporting witchcraft
persecution of the day and harsh penalties against alleged magic users. But for instance, one of the fun she's that worked for him was Lee shao Yun, who claimed to be a seventy year old immortal and preached immortality via diet and commitment to the Kitchen God. Though he did die, so maybe there were some holes in the plan. But then there was another individual, a funk she known as Shao Wing, and this apparently can be translated as young geezer. It basically means like young old person.
Wait, does that mean he was like an old person who was young at heart or a young person who was old at heart.
That's a good question, because the other guy, Lee shau Jun, like the whole thing is like he was young, but he claimed to be seventy. He was like, look at me, Look how young I look. This is because I have secrets I can I can teach you. So I'm not sure if young geezer here was old at heart or old in body. Maybe he's young at heart and old
in body, you know. But where it gets interesting with this particular practitioner, with Shao Wing is that there are there are a lot of sources that discuss his alleged use of some sort of necromancy and potentially shadow puppetry.
Oh you mean not separately but together together.
Yes, So shadow puppetry has a very long history in China and likely originated there and or in India in the first millennium BCE. I know, there are a lot of a lot of articles out there and sources about like where shadow puppetry came from. And you have some very rich traditions of shadow puppetry and various cultures throughout Asia in the Middle East, so you know, no matter where it began, like, it has very distinct forms all
over the place. But one popular but academically controversial story holds that its roots are shamanistic and key to our discussion here necromantic.
Okay, give me that controversial story, all right.
So the story here that is often ruminated on is that Emperor Wu had a favorite consort or concubine by the name of Lady Lee. She was his absolute favorite, and she began to grow rather ill and eventually died. Towards the end of her life, she began to prohibit him from seeing her face and then ultimately from hearing her voice, and then she dies and Shao Wing offers the emperor a chance to speak with her again, to
be in her presence again. The story is that he brings the Emperor into this kind of chamber and there's this fabulous silk screen offerings or placed for the spirits. There's incense burning, you know, there's a you know, manipulation of light and shadow, and he is able to summon her spirit on the other side of the screen, and there is something shade like or shadow like in her appearance.
Ah, that's interesting because I wonder if that kind of thing should meet our definition of necromancy or not. Is just wanting to see and interact with someone again because you miss them? A form of necromancy is that getting information from them, not in the way I would normally think of.
Well, in some of these tales, apparently like first of all, he's completely won over by this. He's he's like, oh my goodness, it is her, and like he's so just overcome by the sensation that she is there again on the other side of the screen, that he composes a poem. And I believe there are other accounts that say that, like he would sit there for hours talking to her,
that sort of thing. So in those cases, you could, I guess you could make an argument, well, yeah, this is the necromancer here is allowing for some sort of communication with the dead. But not everybody is crazy about this story. And there are a lot of different interpretations and misinterpretations of this, especially apparently when you get into some like Western analysis of it, where you know, things
get crisscrossed and translation and so forth. I was looking at a book called Chinese Shadow Theater, History, Popular Religion, and Women Warriors by Fan Pin Lee Chin, and the author here points out that many critic critics find it ridiculous to believe that this court magician first of all, invented shadow puppetry and then used it to fool the emperor into thinking that this is the ghost of his favorite comic cubine Like that, that just seems like quite
a stunt to pull off, even if you're a particular daring and charismatic wizard.
I mean, on one hand, yes, but then I don't know by modern analogy. I mean, I think that there are people who claim to have spirit medium powers and stuff who perform tricks like this on people in the modern world all the time.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I think that's an important thing to keep in mind. So, yeah, first of all, we should not think it impossible that even a very powerful and a very intelligent individual could not be convinced that there's something going on here, and Chin also points out some other facts that I think helped sort of circle the
idea here. So there's the idea that, first of all, that Wu eventually finds out about the deception and has this would be necromancer quietly executed, kind of out of embarrassment, like he doesn't want to make a big deal out of it because he feels like he has been duped, but he definitely is going to have that wizard killed.
There's also this tidbit that Shall Wing had convincingly summoned another consort spirit through the use of shadows, and that shadows, screens, and incense were to some extent associated with this sort of work. So there's maybe some sort of pre existing formula or script for this, so it's not just coming
out of nowhere. There's also Lang Dynasty author that apparently submitted that Shao Wing used something other than traditional three dimensional puppets or two dimensional shadow puppets, and that quote the necromancer had a statue carved out of magic stone
in the likeness of the consort. Now I'm not arguing in favor of magic stone per se, but that makes you think of something perhaps a little bit different, maybe you know, higher production values or out of the ordinary compared with what you know, they might have been used to some sort of like pre existing shadow play shadow
puppetry performance. While the author is doubtful that any of this suggests a shamanistic or for shadow puppetry, so any idea that like shadow puppetry originates as kind of a you know, shamanistic or religious ride of some sort. Authors The author sites the importance of Han period belief that certain fung shehi could summon the souls or shadows of the deceased through special rights, which again, you know, a pre existing script, a pre existing idea that this is
the kind of thing that certain magicians can do. And the story also seems to have been somewhat corrupted in Western retellings forging a link between seance and shadow puppetry, when if I'm understanding Chen correctly on this, it's more proper to think of this as a tale of a would be necromancer using shadow effects to dupe the emperor into thinking he has been visited by the spirits of the dead. You know, this is kind of a familiar trope throughout the world, the idea of like the dangerous
position held by a king's magical advisors. You know, you have to walk that fine line because if you were, if they see true what you're doing, you're obviously not going to stick around court very long.
Yeah, And I don't know, thinking more about the idea that could could a clever magician really trick a king like this, I think maybe that also assumes that the king would be more likely suspicious or skeptical than a person might naturally be if they do desperately want to see someone again. I mean, if you if someone you love has died and you want to see them again, you might not be very you know, looking for holes to pick in the experience of seeing them once again.
You might be quite ready to believe.
Yeah. Yeah, I think that's important to keep in mind, and I think it's it's also interesting to contemplate this account, especially given that, you know, first of all, it's occurrence in a culture that is traditionally more aligned with the idea of communication with spirits of the deceased, again, as opposed to Christian European culture, in which the idea of speaking with the dead is seen as impossible and dangerous. You know, you're just going to get a demon on
the other line anyway, so don't even attempt it. And you know, perhaps it also speaks to a sort of communion with the dead that goes beyond anything achievable via veneration rights and even medium traditions. You know, the idea that it's not just about like honoring her and knowing that she's out there somewhere, but it's like here, she is almost, if not quite physically here, just on the
other side. And I think that also kind of matches up with this idea that you see in other accounts of her kind of fading away from his life towards the end, like he can't see her anymore, now he can't speak with her anymore, and now she's dead. And maybe there's some of that sprinkled in there as well. And I also kind of like this whole this idea of the screen, this kind of like thin veil that is separating him from this possibly you know, resurrected spirit.
It's such a slight barrier, right as slight as the barrier between life and death may seem at times. And there's also something fitting in that ending the tellings of the story in which he like finally can't have he can't have it. He's like, I have to pull this out of the way and see her for real. And then when he looks behind the screen.
What does he see.
He sees his court magician doing, you know, something with shadow puppetry or statues. And now the illusion is completely destroyed.
Yeah, but before the illusion is destroyed, just the idea that she is existing as a shadow on a silk screen. It suggests something very delicate and fragile in a kind of emotionally charged way about the memory of her.
Yeah. Yeah, so I feel like, you know, there's a there's a lot going on in this example, and perhaps it brings up some ideas about necromancy and what necromancy could be and what it's not that we can take with us into other examples here.
All right, Rob, are you ready to talk to some ghosts in ancient Mesopotamia?
Oh?
Yes, So we're going to look at evidence for necromancy in the ancient land between the rivers. This would be Mesopotamia refers to the civilizations based on the river system of the Tigris and Euphrates, so mostly centered in what is modern day Iraq, and these civilizations would include, but not be limited to, the Sumerians, the Assyrians, and the Babylonians.
Now the main source I was looking at here is an article from nineteen eighty three by Irving L. Finkel, called Necromancy in Ancient Mesopotamia, published in a journal called Arkiev fur orient Forschung. And this author, Irving Finkel, is a British seriologist and language scholar affiliated with the British Museum.
It seems like he specializes in Cuneiform inscriptions, but he also seems to have a range of interests, including everything from Mesopotamian ghosts and magic to ancient board games like the Royal Game of Or, which I think we I think we discussed his work in particular in our Invention series on board games.
Yes, yes, I remember that episode.
So I was looking for some general information about Finkel in his background, and I found an absolutely delightful video interview with Finkel from about five years ago that seems to be part of a series the British Museum does called Curator's Corner and this video is called Mesopotamian Ghost Busting with Irving Finkel. It's on topic and I found it very interesting, so I thought I'd go ahead and
summarize this before getting back into the paper. In this interview, Finkel talks about some of his best guesses as to what ancient Mesopotamians broadly believed about ghosts, the dead, and the undead, based on literary and archaeological evidence available to us. So, to be clear, I think this involves some speculation, but it is well informed speculation, and also our same caveat
from earlier. You know, not everybody believed the same thing in certain times and places in history, so you can only talk about what seems to be common based on the sources we have. So Finkel says, in ancient Mesopotamia there was widespread belief that when someone died, it was very important that they were given a proper burial in the earth with specified rituals to seal the grave. In Finkl's words quote, so they were jolly well locked in
and couldn't come back to cause trouble. So people who for whatever reason do not receive a proper burial and do not receive the correct rituals observed at their burial would be expected to come back from beyond the grave and haunt the living. And some examples given here would be people who die on the battlefield, or people who die out in the wilderness alone, people who just vanish
and are assumed dead. And he also mentions people who die in childbirth, which I thought was an interesting example because I'm not sure in this case what would prevent someone who dies in childbirth from receiving a proper burial, But I thought that was interesting. And this comes back to something that we've discussed a little bit on the
show before. But I am frequently struck by the belief in what seems like many ancient cultures that it is extremely important to receive a proper burial, or at least
proper funeral rights according to your local customs. And I don't know that it's always because of the kind of ghost security concerns that Finkel is going to raise with respect to ancient Mesopotamia, but it really does seem like lots of ancient peoples that we read about seem truly horrified by the idea of dying without receiving the appropriate funerary customs, or not without having their body dealt with
in the way that their culture deems is proper. It's not that I think people today just don't care at all what happens to their bodies after death. We care somewhat, but I sense way less sensitivity to this on average in American culture today than is implied in many ancient sources from different cultures around the world. And I don't know exactly what to make of that, but it seems significant to me. I feel like I would like to understand more about it.
Yeah, I mean, well, we've distanced ourselves from death and physical death so much, and you know, we have an entire industry obviously built up around it, so on one level, it's kind of like we can just leave it to the professionals. We can choose from like the menu items of what we can and can't do with or have
done with our remains. And yeah, I think for a lot of us too, like the actual form that takes is less connected to our ideas of like what happens to us or all of us beyond our body after death be the answer, you know, nothing, or a whole lot. It's I think, oftentimes thought to be rather disconnected from the physical.
There's an interesting other example of a connection between the belief in what happens to your sort of soul or spirit in the afterlife and what happens to your physical body in a text that I'm going to get into in a bit, But to come back to what Finkel talks about in this interview, he says, you know, as best we can tell from our sources, everybody we know of in ancient Mesopotamia believed in ghosts. There is no evidence of anyone saying that ghosts don't exist or you
don't have to worry about them. Seems like it was just taken for granted that ghosts existed and were part of life. However, and I thought this point was really interesting. Finkel says that it is not universal that people regarded ghosts with fear or terror. People were not always necessarily
frightened of them. Instead, he says, the more common attitude seems to be one of sympathy for ghosts, kind of like, if there is a ghost haunting you, that is a problem, but it's not something that is terrifying, at least not necessarily. It could be in some circumstances. So a ghost is somebody, usually a family member of yours, who is like now
having a hard time after death. It's almost like somebody in your family has a disease or something and because of their condition, they are unable to find rest in the underworld, that they can't settle down in another world, and they need the help of the living. So while they may not be frightening, they are in trouble and they often cause trouble, all right.
So that second part is very familiar with than it to anyone who's ever seen a TV show that has an episode about a ghost. Why do you deal with that ghost? You got to like do that thing. It makes them go away, that makes them content and lets them move on. But the first part about it, like it not being a frightful scenario but more of a sympathetic scenario. You know, it kind of makes me think again.
It's like what happens when there is no room for a particular type of supernatural belief or paranormal experience within a given like rule system or worldview. For instance, if your say religious worldview is like, hey, there are no
such thing as ghosts, those don't exist. Well, then when something makes you think about ghosts or or or or raises the specter of ghosts, or you have some sort of a hallucination experience that is interpreted as ghosts, well then that power structure cannot help you because they're like, well out of our hands, because we already told you
that stuff's not real. And then likewise, I think if with a certain you know, certain scientific positions, you could take on everything you know, it's like you don't believe in the supernatural. And if then if something like this were to present itself, then suddenly it seems may it may seem like science can't help you. I think we
would argue something different. We discussed that before. There are various thoroughly logical, rational, scientific explanations for various supernatural experiences. But I can imagine the attitude of being like, well, something has now occurred, and it is outside the framework that is supporting me. Therefore I am afraid.
Yes, I think that is very interesting, and I think that might be a good explanation for this difference, for why our primary emotional reaction to ghosts in the modern world or even in I don't know, say like medieval Christian Europe would be fear, just like it doesn't fit
as a reality within your orthodoxy. Yeah, and so anyway, in the context of ancient Mesopotamia, Finkle says, there were people we know of who specialized in magic and rituals designed to appease wandering ghosts and send them back to their rightful place among the dead, send them back to
the nether world where they belong. And I think normally in the literature, these would be referred to as exorcists, which again can be confusing because of like the Christian Catholic context of an exorcist being somebody who who casts out demons from a person who is demon possessed. In the case it's used in these academic works, it would just be referred to it's somebody whose job it is to get the ghost out of the place it's not supposed to be and help it you back to where
it is supposed to be. Yeah, And he describes one particular example based on a tablet in the British Museum's collection, and this is pretty interesting. He says. This tablet depicts a portly woman walking in profile holding a male figure by a lead which I think attaches around the male
figure's neck. And Finkel says he believes that the woman shown in this illustration is a ghost, probably the ghost of someone's great aunt, who for some reason is wandering the world of the living and causing trouble, and the exorcist, called to deal with this problem decides that what this
ghost needs is a lover. So the exorcist makes one clay model of the ghost woman another clay model that is a sexy man, a young, muscular, handsome man with a large beard, and these two clay effigies are buried together in a pit with an assortment of grave goods, and then the idea is that this burial would allow the ghosts to settle down into the underworld and stop causing distress for the living.
Hmm. That's that's interesting. It reminds me a little bit of the topic of ghost marriage and Chinese tradition that we I think Christian and I did an episode on years and years back, but you know, basically involves sort of a similar principle, like something is out of whack.
There's a structural incompleteness that is involved with the family unit, and it needs to be supernaturally and or symbolically fixed in order for these you know, now ancestors to completely pass on and sort of be properly organized in you know, the afterlife or what have you.
Right, I think that's a good comparison. But to come back to the illustration on the tablet, he says, it seems to show this ghost woman holding on to I guess her new lover by this like lead. So there's
like no chance he gets away there together forever. Now, coming back to this idea from a minute ago, that the ghosts were not necessarily thought of as frightening in ancient Mesopotamia, Finkle says that there were some ghosts who were who actually were frightening and dangerous, and he offers his opinion that these were probably understood to be the ghosts of people who were themselves frightening and dangerous when
they were alive. So, you know, regular person with a proper without proper burial means a you know, a sort of sympathetic but troublesome ghost. Somebody is a problem you need to deal with, or a ghost you need to help, not necessarily scary, whereas a wicked person without a proper burial that could be a scary ghost.
Okay, it makes sense.
And he says these malevolent ghosts were thought to slip in through a person's ear while the victim was asleep, and if the ghost gets in through your ear canal, it could bring on extreme headaches like migraines, or it could even cause madness. And Finkel describes a couple of other types of effigies that would be crafted by ancient
Mesopotamian exorcists in order to drive away malevolent ghosts. First, there's a kind of king figure who would be placed near a bed to project authority and general warding magic. And then second would be a model of a vizier figure that would be placed on top of a pole in a way that it could rotate around the pole like a kind of spin around it like a propeller, and this would, he suggests, sort of fan the air
around and drive spirits away. Okay, And finally he makes the point that these elaborate rituals with like paid exorcists were these almost certainly would have been the things that were available to the elite, to the richest people in society, and we have way less insight, maybe no insight really into how regular people dealt with ghosts if they did
it all. And then he sort of humorously suggests that regular people might not have had time to see ghosts, or if they did, perhaps they just sort of like waived at them and went about their business. But we don't really know, but I do think that's kind of funny to imagine that, Like, I don't know if this is true, but I mean I wonder if like ghosts are more likely to be a problem that you're dealing with if you have excess like time and leisure and riches and stuff.
Maybe I could see that argument. But yeah, it also seems kind of to his point as well, equally as possible that the people regular people had their own traditions and their own experts, but we just have no surviving mention of them.
Now, to come back to Finkle's nineteen eighty three paper on necromancy in Ancient Mesopotamia, all of that I was just talking about was ghostbusting or exorcism. Back to necromancy specifically, I want to note quickly that this article I'm talking about, I think it was very interesting, so I do want to talk about it, but it was not written for a popular audience. This is for Mesopotamian specialists, and several parts kind of assume familiarity with ancient languages, which I
certainly do not have. I think I was able to make sense of all the main points by doing some secondary research, but please just know I'm doing my best here, I am outside my area of expertise. So he starts off this paper by saying, you know, our sources from ancient Mesopotamia don't contain a lot of references to necromancy, but there is some evidence of its practice. And here he defines necromancy as quote, the delicate art of summoning the spirits of dead in order to learn the future
from them. So this is the definition you'll find more often in academic works, not about you know, summoning skeleton soldiers or something, but again for divination purposes. He specifically says to learn the future. But I think some of the examples he mentions are not really so much about the future. They're just more generally the getting information thing. And so Finkle writes that some of the clearest evidence
of necromancy is actually lexical, meaning related to vocabulary. There are these ancient cuneiform texts from Mesopotamia known as lexical lists,
and they go way back. There are tons of these tablets you can find in the archaeological record, you know, lots of them to translate and interpret, and they are essentially ancient glossaries that just list collections of words often with translations of the terms between different languages, and these could include lists of names, or lists of gods, or lists of different categories of natural objects like lists of plants or lists of birds, or simply lists of nouns
or words. And one of the most famous Cuneiform lexical text traditions is the professions list known as lou And so in this list it names a bunch of jobs jobs people can have there. And so there are words for professions in this list that we can tell refer to necromancers because of the way the words are constructed. And this is one of those sections where, because this is for specialists, I wasn't able to tell exactly what
the terms here cash out to in English. But I think what this means is there are sort of listed professions that are called something like dead spirit, raiser or something. And Finkel says there are male and female versions of these professional names, but unfortunately we don't have connected literary
texts that show how all these terms were used. However, Finkel says there are several passages in Mesopotamian texts that were already widely known at the time this paper was published, which do describe forms of necromancy in practice, and one of the most interesting ones is found in the Sumerian narrative known as Gilgamesh in key Do and the Nether World.
Good old Gilgamesh.
Yes, Now, this is a story of the two characters Gilgamesh and in key Do, who are the heroes of the famous Gilgamesh epic. You know they they have that. I mean, that's a buddy cop story for you. You know. They they go slay the demon Humbaba together in the Cedar forest, and they get up to all kinds of mischief, but then tragically in key Do dies, and then that
sends Gilgamesh on his quest for immortality. I think that Gilgamesh in key Do in the Nether World is, from what I understand, best thought of as a separate story that is out of continuity with the rest of the Gilgamesh epic, even though it is sometimes tacked on at the end of the larger epic as a kind of discontinuous chapter, because like in key Do dies earlier in the story, and then here he is suddenly alive again
at the beginning of this story. But here are the broad strokes of Gilgamesh in key Dou and the nether world. So Gilgamesh's stuff keeps falling into the underworld, like he has this stuff called I don't know exactly what these possessions of Gilgamesh's are supposed to be. There's one thing called an lag written in English e llag that like, oh, it fell into the underworld, you know. So his his stuff is like tumbling out of this world into the infamous house of dust where the dead go to dwell.
And so Gilgamesh's friend and or servant in Key Dou offers to go into the underworld to get his stuff back for him. Unfortunately, once he goes down there, he breaks all the rules and is thus not allowed to return to the world of the living now he is dead. And in the version that Finkel sites, there is a scene in which a demon named Nrgal conjures up the ghost of Inky do at Gilgamesh is bidding, and the ghost of Inky Doo is said to rise up through a hole or a crack in the ground like the wind.
In order to have a conversation with Gilgamesh about what the underworld is like now, I went looking for a full translation of the story so I could zero in on a few sections the One version of this text that I found online, which I should note has a few small differences from exactly what Finkel describes, was on an Oxford hosted website called the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature. So I want to look at a few
different things. First of all, the list of things that Gilgamesh tells Inkey do not to do in order to survive his trip to the nether World. There's like a oh, I don't know, like the you know, the rules in how to survive a slasher movie, and keydu gets one of those for the nether World. So he says, you're definitely not supposed to wear clean garments because if you wear clean garments, they're gonna know you're not dead, you're not one of them. That they'll they'll get really mad.
You should not anoint yourself with fine oil from a bowl because then they will surround you because they will smell that you smell nice, and you're not supposed to smell nice down there. Very sensible, exactly, Yes, he says, don't start hurling throw sticks in another world. Those struck down by the throw sticks are going to get mad at you and surround.
You okay, also sensible, he says.
Don't hold a Cornell wood stick in your hand. He says that the spirits will feel insulted by this for some reason. I don't know what that means.
But good advice. You wouldn't think of it, and therefore is even more important that you'd be willing exactly.
He says, you shouldn't put sandals on your feet, you should not shout in another world. I guess maybe in Keydu's wife had he says you should neither kiss nor hit your wife. And then in key Dou's child had died, and you said you should neither kiss nor hit your child.
Okay, So basically, like you're supposed to be like these shades of the dead. You're not showing any emotion. You're not you're not either good or bad, like you're doing nothing but just being there, hanging out like a shade. Yeah.
And I guess getting the lag and the other stuff back to bring that back. But in key Do fails. He does literally everything Gilgamesh warns him not to do in the underworld, every single one of the things, and he is seized and trapped there forever.
Oh that went south.
So in this version, I was reading Gilgamesh gets somebody. It's not the demon Naerkal in this version, he gets somebody named Utu to open a hole in the underworld to allow in key Dou to come up and share information with him. And so I want to describe this scene where in Keydu's ghost is called up. It reads this fall. They hugged and kissed, They wearied each other with questions, did you see the order of the nether world? If only you would tell me, my friend, if only
you would tell me? And then in key Do responds, if I tell you the order of the nether world, sit down and weep, and in key Dou tells him that the nether world is like a garment infested with worms, and it is like a crevice filled with dust. And then they end up talking at length about the fates of the dead. So there are all these different things that sort of reflect, I guess, ancient Mesopotamian views about
what the good life is like. It seems that in key Doo thinks the dead who have a lot of airrors are pretty happy, and the ones that have fewer airrors are unhappy. But then a bunch of other different kinds of fates people can have are described. They say, for example, did you see the spirit of him who has no funerary offerings? In Key? Who says I saw him?
Gilgamesh says, how does he fare? In Key? Who says he eats the scrap and the crumbs tossed out in the street, And again, bad things when funeral rites are not observed. But I wondered about that. Does he mean the scraps and crumbs tossed out in the street in the nether world or on Earth in the cities of the living. I took it maybe more to be the second.
Mm, yeah, I mean I could see it going either way. I mean, basically, you did not symbolically offer food to them, and so they have no sustenance in the afterlife.
But then there's one thing here that has some interesting metaphysical information. Gilgamesh says, did you see him who was set on fire? And in Kidu says, I did not see him. His spirit is not about. His smoke went up to the sky. So the person who is burned is not in the nether world at all. They go wherever their smoke goes up in the sky. What happens to them there?
It kind of sounds like they end up in the wrong place. It's like, yeah, it seems to be the message, Like you, I don't go cremating the dead, because then how are they going to get to this wonderful it's wonderful afterlife that is being presented here.
I mean to be clear, it seems okay for people who had a bunch of errors. He says, they are like gods. They sit in judgment of everyone else. But anyway, I thought this was interesting because this is depicting an example of necromancy. I think that does meet the strict definition. Like Gilgamesh is trying to get hidden information, but it's
not so much like personal future fortune telling type stuff. Instead, he is using this consultation with the dead to get information about what happens to different people after they die.
Yeah, and also sort of reconnect with an old friend, like, so, hey, where you live.
In these days? Yeah?
After life? Well what's it? What's it like? Well, it's hashy, It's like dustin a crevis, you know.
Yeah, that's what you should say next time you reconnect with an old friend. Well, you know, garment, garment eaten by worms, credits full of dust. But anyway, coming back to Finkle's paper, so he mentioned a couple of other sources pre existing at the time of this paper that mentioned necromancy, or at least potentially mention it in a
more prosaic context. One is an old Assyrian letter from Cultepe which contains the lines quote here we asked the female oracle givers, the female diviners, and the spirits colon Assur repeatedly upbraids you, and so I interpret this to be a reference to a person who consults the spirits of the dead to get information. Possibly the information they're getting is about the fact that the god a seer who is like a god of Assyria, is angry with someone.
Okay, they have inside information.
Another is also a letter, this one Neo Assyrian, which exists in damaged form and has been interpreted and translated different ways. One of those interpretations implies that necromancers have asked the spirits to predict whether a certain person will become a king, but this interpretation of the letter is
not certain, but anyway. After these examples, Finkel goes on to describe two previously unpublished Babylonian tablets from the first millennium BCE held by the British Museum that he says, deal in totally unambiguous terms with necromancy, and boy, these are a trip. Are you ready?
I'm ready.
The first one is called b M three six seven O three. It is a late Babylonian text and it includes instructions for a necromantic ritual. It says you call upon the ghost and he will answer you, and then there's an incantation where the necromancer says who are you?
Who are you? It then lists the names of known malevolent spirits and demons that we know are supposed to be evil spirits and demons because they appear in other texts about exorcism, and Finkel says that this part of the ritual seems to be a kind of safety precaution, trying to protect against the possibility that in summoning the dead for divination you accidentally summon a vicious, evil monster instead.
It's like a security step to prevent you dialing the wrong number and accidentally calling Freddy Krueger or whatever.
Oh wow. Yeah, And we'll eventually see reverberations of this on up into like medieval Christian traditions, you know again, where it's more like you will always get a wrong number because this number cannot possibly connect to who you want to reach.
Right, But that's not the context here. They think you can dial the right number. You just got to be careful. You got to do the right incantations and warding magic. Now next in this tablet, there's a part that is damaged, but it appears, based on context, to be steps for what to do if the ritual doesn't work. I do wish we could know what it's said here. Then it
goes on to the ritual itself. Here I'm gonna read from Finkel, and the context is that this is an Akkadian incantation that is addressed to the god Shamash, and it is asking for the help of the god Shamash to summon a ghost literally of the darkness. And so then reading from Finkel, now quote, this ghost, once brought up from its place of rest, is then supposed to enter into a skull placed there for that purpose. The reciter of the incantation says, quote, I call upon you,
o skull of skulls. May he who is within the skull answer me. Then there follows in line seven to ten, a magical ritual that involves an oily preparation of animal parts being mixed up and left to stand overnight. Do you want to know what is in this necromancer cocktail route? Oh, I suppose we should know, Okay. So it says you crush up a male and female partridge, dust from a crossroads, dust of a jumping cricket, of the step, and an
upturned potch from a crossroads in puru oil. Then you mix all that together, you leave it to stand overnight, and in the morning you will Then there are a number of things you can actually do. So Finkle goes on to explain that you either use this mixture to anoint the skull itself or the ghost. And I'm not sure exactly how you anoint the ghost with it, and then or the And then it's a word here that's represented as N A M, and I think the meaning
of that is ambiguous. Finkle says it might refer to it might be referring to someone called the man, but it's unclear in the context of the tablet who this would refer to, unless maybe he says it means like a figurine of the dead person who you're trying to summon, like like we saw with the other ritual that would make sense. And then to pick up again, reading from Finkle's description of the ritual, quote, at this point you
call upon him and he will answer you. In the context, the word elemou, no doubt, refers to a representation of the ghost, and the ritual would have the same effect whether applied to this representation, to the nam or to the skull itself. It's not quite certain whether all three elements were necessary. The idea, however, is quite clear. It is quite appropriately Shamash who has the power and authority to bring up a ghost from the underworld, and the
whole operation is put under his auspices. Somehow the ghost will enter into the skull and answer the questions put to him.
I love that those skull of skulls indeed.
Okay, So that's the first tablet. There's a second tablet, another previously unknown text being published, I guess at the time of this article that is known as K two seven seventy nine, which is a neo Babylonian tablet, which contains some of the same material as the previous text, but also some original stuff. And this text, interestingly also
contains what appeared to be security precautions. For example, there is a ritual and incantation that is to quote, avert the evil in the crying of the ghost or the crying of a ghost. Sorry, and Finkel notes from the contemporary texts that it was believed that personal contact with a ghost usually led to really bad consequences for a living person, often death. So if you are a necromancer,
you could be doing something really dangerous. You are attempting personal contact with a ghost in order to get privileged information, but this contact comes with a high likelihood of a death curse, so you have to employ protective magic to counteract that danger. Now, I was kind of wondering how to square this with Finkel's own characterization that was from an interview decades later of ghosts not for the most part incurring a reaction of fear in the ancient Mesopotamians,
but other of kind of like sympathy. I don't know exactly how to square that, but it makes me wonder if maybe most of the ghost encounters people thought they were having weren't actually like personal face to face contact or talking to a ghost or hearing the cry of a ghost, but more like indirect indications that a spirit is restless and wandering or seeing what appears to be evidence of a dead family member from Afar. I don't know, but I wonder.
Yeah, kind of it reminds me of some of these traditions involving.
Like the evil Eye.
You know, the idea that it is out there, it is aware, but it's not necessarily honing in on you unless you give it reason to. And so you know, similarly, you could you could live in a world of ghosts, but have you done anything personally to attract the ghost or to encourage the coast, Well, then you're probably fine.
Finkel also says it's notable that K two seven seventy nine is a is a type of text called anmberbie, the primary purpose of which is describing ways to avert evil and unexplained phenomena. So it's kind of surprising that rituals for intentionally summoning up a ghost and prying information out of it under the auspices of Shamash or whoever would be included, because the rest of the text is
basically like a ghostbusting manual. It is how to keep ghosts, demons, and any other weirdness away from you.
Yeah, it raises all sorts of questions about like what is sort of what is the day to day activity in the ghostbusting and necromancer professional world of this time period.
Okay, but I think I promised you there was another necromancer cocktail coming. This one is from Let's see well, I think this actually is derived from both both texts, and this is a concoction you would put together that is part of an incantation to enable a man to see a ghost. So the text says, you crush moldy wood, fresh leaves of euphrates poplar, in water, oil, beer, and wine.
You dry, crush and sieve snake, tallow, lion, tallow crab, tallow white honey, a frog that lives among the pebbles, hair of a dog, hair of a cat, hair of a fox, bristle of a chameleon, and bristle of a red lizard, claws of a frog, end of intestines of a frog, the left wing of a grasshopper, and marrow from the long bone of a goose.
Oh wow.
You mix all this in wine, water and milk with amhara plant, and then you recite the incantation three times, and you anoint your eyes with it, and you will see the ghost and he will speak with you. You can look at the ghost, he will talk with you. And yes, I said that twice because the text says it twice. So any mixologists out there who want to take these as an inspiration for a Halloween themed drink, I don't know how exactly you make a a safe
version of that, but take it. Take it as an inspiration. You know, it's a challenge.
Yeah, don't actually do that, but yes, I do love instructions like this for magic potions or homunculi or whatever you happen to be concocting in olden times. Though the
moldy wood gave me pause, like it makes me. It reminds me of other examples I believe from Chinese traditions, where the idea that you had, like a rotten broom handle, it might have some sort of ghostly possession about it, and there might be some even something going on with illuminated micro organisms in the soft wood, you know.
Oh yes, yeah, it might make it kind of glow in the dark. Yeah.
But I mean as for like the hair of the cat and the dog and so forth, I mean, I don't know, imagine that you're just getting into symbolic territory at that point.
Once you've used your end of intestines of a frog in this though, what do you do with the start of intestines of the frog you've got left over?
Well, you got to say that for later. That's another recipe, right, Yeah, Well, this has been fascinating snapshots into worlds where necromancy. Worlds in places, in particular places where necromancy is more common necromancy of one form of the other, and in some cases there are there are rules, there are laws in place spelling out exactly how one one professional is supposed to carry all this out.
Again, I do think it's interesting and significant that both of these instruction manuals for necromancers have have these safety precautions, like you've got to go through you've got to like put on the safety goggles and stuff in a magical metaphorical sense. And I wonder if that's always true about necromancy everywhere, or is there anywhere where it's just kind of more like loosely regulated, fly by the seat of your pants, nothing to worry about kind of stuff.
Yeah. I don't know. There are different ways to slice it, right, because on one hand, if you're looking at it like completely skeptically, you can say, well, well, of course a professional necromancer is going to outline the extreme risks that they are taking when they carry out their nechromatic acts. You don't want. It's not necromancy for the masses, it's necromancy for me, and you're going to pay me to
do it. Therefore, there need to be certain skills involved that the ordinary people are not going to attempt to do.
That's a good point. Yeah, I wonder if this is in some way justifying of economic incentives.
Yeah, But then on the other hand, I mean, just use magic systems in general, other models of the afterlife in general, you see in various cultures like it is often a realm in which there are various dangers and there are rules that need to be followed to the letter if you were to survive like the journey, or survive you know, the dipping into this world a little bit to gain knowledge and so forth.
You want to talk about necromancy some more on Tuesday.
Yeah, yeah, I think we have a lot more we can we can chat about. So join us on Tuesday as we come back for our second helping of nec manci. Not I think we'll get into Greek necromancy a little bit. I'm not sure what else we'll get into, but I'm sure it will be a good seasonal time and we'll
be we'll definitely be in October at that point. All right, We're gonna remind you once more that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science podcast, but you know, we do get into other topics like this one, especially during the month of October. Obviously we get into some some Halloween content for sure, So stay with us this entire month of October as we explore other topics of the spooky nature. Also join us for our Weird House
Cinema episodes on Fridays. Weird House Cinema is our time to set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a weird film. And you know, we're gonna be watching some horror movies this month, so you can watch along with us, or you can just tune in and listen to our discussions of these films if you're a little too creeped out to view them for yourself. And then on Mondays we do listener mail and on Wednesdays we do a short form monster fact or artifact.
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