Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
This is Robert Lamb and this is Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. We're heading on down into the vault for an older episode of the show. This is part three of our series on necromancy called The Necromantic Urge, originally published on October fifth, twenty twenty three.
Enjoy but Macmore and Sodosma were necromancers who came from the dark Isle of Nat to practice their baleful arts in Tinniath beyond the shrunken seas. But they did not prosper in Tinniath, for death was deemed a holy thing by the people of that gray country, and the nothingness of the tomb was not lightly to be desecrated, and the raising up of the dead by necromancy was held in abomination. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of by Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow
Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.
And I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with part three in our series on necromancy. The ancient practice of consulting the dead or the spirits of the dead for the purpose of divination, of accessing hidden knowledge.
Yes, despite the fact that a lot of our modern pop cultuy uses of necromancy tend to involve raising of the dead. And actually that quote that I read at the top of this episode is from the nineteen thirty two short story The Empire of the Necromancers by Clark Ashton Smith, and it is full of raising the dead via the necromantic arts. But as we've discussed in these episodes so far, necromancy, as we loosely categorize it, is more situated in the realm of divination.
Well, in the previous episodes in the series, which if you haven't listened to yet, you should probably go check those out first. But in these previous episodes we talked about accounts of necromancy or pseudo necromantic legends from ancient China.
We talked about accounts of how necromancy was practiced or may have been practiced in ancient Mesopotamia, including consulting these tablets that have descriptions of the incantations to use and the potions to prepare if you want to speak to the dead through a prepared skull in a special ritual.
In part two, we talked about a lot of accounts of necromancy as practiced or at least as used as a plot device in stories from ancient Greece and Rome and today, we wanted to come back and finish out the discussion by talking about necromancy a little bit more.
Yeah, We're going to jump around a little bit here later on in the episode. I think we're going to get into some medieval Christian ideas about necromancy, what it was, and whether you should do it or not. A spoiler in tended to say no, don't do it, but with some caveats, so I'll get into.
I also want to interrogate the boundaries of necromancy a little bit and maybe pick apart the concept somewhat. But before we do that, there's a question that's been coming up because we've been looking at examples from the ancient world of how this may have been practiced, or at least was thought by some to be practiced in the ancient world. My question would be, well, how far back does it go? What's the earliest evidence we have of people trying to communicate or consult with the dead.
Yeah, so let's get into that a little bit again, with the huge caveat that the term necromancy can be applied very broadly or very specifically, and is ultimately just a word. So with that in mind, I will refer back briefly to the paper The Origins of Necromancy or How We Learn to Speak to the Dead by Czech academic Andres Kabcar. He argues for a connection potentially between ancient shamanistic practices and what we might think of as necromancy,
with individual human beings often serving as psychopomps. For example, you know, guardians guide there to guide one spirit from this world into the next. Other functions that would put a living mortal shaman in some form of communication with the deceased are also imaginable. This in addition to just
general ancestor veneration, ancestor cults, and ancestor worshiped. So it's not it's not inconceivable to consider all of this potential hallmark of human spiritual and religious thought going back to very early human culture as a coping method for the emotionally and socially devastating reality of death. Right.
We don't know, but it seems perfectly plausible that it could be something like first people, you know, just merely emotionally missed their dead loved ones and wanted to you know, continue thinking about them and talking about them and so forth, and maybe from this arose some kind of culture of keeping their memory alive, out of which arose some kind of idea that, well, maybe there are ways to still talk to them somehow, and maybe they have something to say to us.
Yeah, because I mean, we undeniably have a desire to speak to them. I mean, that's that's proven out in so many countless examples, including our own individual experiences. I mean, I think a lot of us have visited the grave of a deceased loved one and spoken to them, you know, varying degrees of understanding or expectation of them hearing us well, and certainly of them speaking back to us. But to speak to the dead, I think is not necessarily this
you know, this alien supernatural thing. I think it comes from a very natural place in the human psyche, and I mean probably gets back into this idea that, yeah, when someone dies is it is emotionally and soually devastating and we have to find ways to deal with it.
On the other hand, while you can imagine that historical or prehistoric development and it certainly seems plausible. It's hard to have decisive evidence for things like that, or to have decisive evidence of practices of communicating with and getting knowledge from the dead from before times of say literary writings about such.
Right, right, because the literature gives us more insight into what was done, why it was done, and what the expectation was. In many instances, sometimes you know there are still questions, certainly, but otherwise what are you left with? You're left with human remains, and you can sort of look at like two broad categories, situations where human remains have not been manipulated by human beings and situations where they have been manipulated by human beings and added caveat.
As we've discussed in the show before, and we've recently had a guest in the show to discuss this, like sometimes that's up for dispute too, with one side saying, I don't think these bodies were manipulated by human beings. I think they were manipulated by predatory animals, and then the other side saying, no, this is evidence of humans manipulating their dead, and intentional manipulation of the dead has been going on for a very long time. At least
since the time of the Neanderthals. We move bodies, and we've moved bodies for various purposes, and a rich global heritage of funerary practices have grown out of these traditions. But with the oldest burials, you look at them and yeah, we just have very little to go on when we're trying to decide, try and figure out what was the intent behind this practice? It was it a practice and what was the intent? Right?
So, given those extreme caveats, what are some of these pieces of ambiguous evidence people might point to to think, I wonder if this was used for romantic purposes, for necromancy.
Well, Kapcar highlights ancient archaeological sites linked to ancestor cults as being some of the main candidates for some form of ancient necromancy in the Middle East. And I should add that he's not arguing, like one hundred percent this is necromancy. He's just saying, like, Okay, beyond what we can be certain about, what evidence could we make an argument about. A specific mention is made of the plaster covered heads of cattle hook dating back to seventy five
hundred to fifty seven hundred BCE. We've mentioned this place on the show before, specifically in our invention episodes on the coffin, the toilet, and the Mirror, as well as our stuff to Blow your Mind episodes on brain and head theft. Because there does seem to be some sort of ritual removal of the head here.
Well, let's zero in on the example of plastered human skulls from the ancient Fertile Crescent to see what we can figure out from them. A rob, I've attached a picture for you to look at here. This is a famous plastered skull from I think dates given or sometimes nine thousand or nine thousand, five hundred years ago. This
is sometimes known as the Jerre Coast skull. It is one of the skulls recovered from the tell or the mound of the ancient settlement of Jericho, and this is from the Neolithic period.
Yeah, this is quite intriguing to look at because again you have a human skull, but it has been covered in plaster in a way to sort of it seems like, to recreate the flesh of the dead. And then we have what I believe these are shells that have been placed in where the eyes would be.
Yeah, exactly. So there are multiple artifacts of this type from the ancient Levant and some from Turkey, from again the site of Chattelhuyuk and is essentially what these are, real human skulls, sometimes without the mandible, so without the lower jaw, filled in with earth or plaster, and then covered on the outside in plaster at least on the front,
and decorated with individual facial features. So as you said, rob seashells for eyes, they might be clamshell or cowie shells, some kind of shells, marine shells to simulate eyeballs, and then plaster facial structure, so maybe even like eyelids, overlapping the seashells in a way, and of course painting on the outside, so hair and eyebrows, mustaches and so forth
would be painted on the plaster. I was actually watching an interview with a curator at the British Museum, coincidentally another in the series Curator's Corner, which I mentioned in part one of this series for unrelated reasons. That was just an interview with an author named Irving Finkel who we were reading a paper from that was about ancient
Mesopotamian exorcism practices. This is an interview with a curator from the British Museum named Alexandra Fletcher about the Jericho skull, and she opines that the Jericho skull, the one you're looking at here, rob is probably the oldest example of portraiture in the British Museum's collection because of the assumption that it was made to resemble a specific person, though
we don't know that. We don't know for sure, but these skulls are usually assumed to have been made to resemble the person the skull belonged to in life.
Which makes sense, right. I mean, if you're gonna do a plaster sculpture of someone and you have their skull on hand, like there you go, that's the perfect foundation upon which to create your art.
And there's an interesting scientific and technological parallel to this that comes up in a second. So Fletcher goes into describing some work, like analysis work that has been done on the Jericho skull. She says, as background, he was part of a group of seven people who were buried together uncovered in the nineteen fifties, and she talks about research to try to analyze the human skull underneath without damaging the plaster surrounding it, at least at least surrounding
the front of the skull. The back is more exposed, and she says that the researchers used CT scanning to create an image of the bone underneath without hurting the place, and that revealed some interesting stuff. For example, this man's nose was broken sometime in life, and it shows how it had been broken and healed. And as a child, this man had had his head bound to possibly to
shape the skull. As the man grew up, so there was a sense in which the skull was sort of pinched, and you can see a ridge in the skull where it was pinched that way. And this as he developed, he had slightly elongated skull for this reason.
Oh yes, yes, not an uncommon practice in certain parts of the ancient world.
After death, the inside of the skull was stuffed with soil and clay, and there's a hole in the back of the skull where Fletcher says you can still see the indentations of the fingers of the person who packed the clay into the brain cavity.
Wow.
But the interesting parallel to the ancient plaster surrounding the skull is that by analyzing the bone structure, modern scientists were able to with a good degree of accuracy, they think, reconstruct this man's face. The process is considered not exact, but pretty accurate, to the extent that Fletcher claims that if people who knew this man in life walked into the room and saw the reconstruction, she says she thinks
they would instantly recognize him. So, in a way, we have used modern technology to reconstruct this man's face around the basis of the skull, much like ancient people used I guess probably memory of what this man looked like to reconstruct his face in plaster around the skull.
Yeah. Yeah, it's fascinating, though again we can't know one d you know why they did this, and certainly you can make arguments for the lifelike qualities being bestowed upon the skull in order to communicate with it. I mean, that's that's certainly the hard nechromatic angle to take on it,
and others have found this interesting as well. These skulls are brought up by Julian James in his book The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Biicameral Mind as being you know, one of the many different bits of evidence or alleged evidence from the ancient world that he uses to back up this this hypothesis of the biicameral mind.
Yeah, he probably is leaning heavily on the interpretation that people talk to these skulls, which again I want to really emphasize, like, we don't know that. All we have are the artifacts. There are not there's not literature describing how these skulls were used in the ancient world, So we just don't know.
Yeah, we don't know if they spoke to the skulls. For the most I mean, we don't know the skull We assume the skulls did not answer, though Jane's would argue that they possibly did. And yes, if Julian Jane's hypothesis was correct, that would impact everything we've been discussing about in terms of necromancy, because it would mean that, yes, there here is a neural logical way that the dead not only could speak to human beings, but spoke to
them on a regular basis. Go back and listen to our old episodes on his hypothesis if you want to
know more about that. But yeah, at the end of the day, like did they just simply recreate these faces in order to honor them, to remember them, and if they were speaking to them, like we can sort of imagine like a broad scale a spectrum of possible necromancy, you know, and there's you know, there are certainly versions of this interpretation in which they might have been speaking to these skulls, but we're not actually seeking knowledge from the dead.
That's right. So I want to get deeper into that in a minute. But in a way, this connects to what I thought was an interesting little side comment that this British Museum researcher Alexander Fletcher makes in this interview where she just kind of says that, you know, the longer you work with work with these skulls, do research on them, especially maybe from the you know, the reconstruction of the face, the more you come to see the skulls not just as an artifact but as a person.
And I was like, wow, maybe I am over interpreting, but that seems perhaps revealing about the effect they might have had on the people who originally made them as well. Yeah, I want to come back to the idea of adding some sort of complications to the idea of necromancy or divination through the dead as a coherent and discreet practice.
So I was thinking about this, and I was thinking about how in a lot of these early settlements where these plaster skulls are found, you know, the settlements with permanent structures like chattlehou Yuk which you mentioned in Jericho, there are other interesting features about how the dead were dealt with as well, not just the creation of plaster skulls, But in these settlements, it seems sometimes the bodies of
the dead were buried inside people's houses. So maybe your grandparents' bones might not be often a cemetery somewhere else that you go and visit from time to time, but right in the house with you, maybe buried under the floor or under your bed. Again, we don't know for sure why they did this. All kinds of speculation abounds. In some cases, it looks like the bodies might have been removed elsewhere for the flesh to rot off the bones
or be picked off the bones. Maybe the bones were defleshed somewhere else and then maybe brought back inside the house, and then they would live under the floor, under your bed or something. But these are also places where we
encounterplastered skulls. So it just seems it seems possible to me that if the skull had some kind of significance as a conduit for communication with the dead, I wonder if it wasn't a spec discrete, transactional event ritual like we've been talking about in some of these Greek stories, you know, where you like you go to the oracle and you know what I mean, like it being a
special event. I wonder if it's more like just a kind of continuous belief that, yes, Grandma is still here with us, she's in the house, she lives with us.
Yeah, I mean, I can easily imagine that that being the case. Again, it's not too far away from sort of the mild background supernatural ideas that many of us may may dabble in, you know, like to think about a deceased loved one being nearby, you know. I think it is something that a lot of us probably do to some degree without even being on the level of, like I believe in ghosts, you know.
And so if the situation were something more like that, to the extent that you would seek advice from your grandparent in this context, I wonder if it would give kind of the wrong impression to call that necromancy, because again of the all the stories we have in which the necromancy is usually more a like I was saying, a discrete, transactional kind of event ritual versus something that is just intimate and continuous in part of life.
Yeah, so many of these stories, ancient and modern, depict necromancy as kind of an extreme thing. You do, you know, when other attempts to remedy a situation have not worked, that's when you seek out the necromantic solution.
But then again, just to emphasize how little we know for sure, there could be totally different explanations as well. I mean, maybe burying the bones in the house and putting a plaster face over your ancestor skull, maybe that was just merely a form of honoring and remembering people, just like you might I don't know, have a photo of a dead relative on the wall today or something buried with them. You know, we miss our ancestor who
has passed on. So maybe we keep the bones or plaster the skull in a way under the house or in the house in a way of remembering them.
Yeah, and so certainly these are not neutral skulls. These are skulls that are conceivably connected to loved ones, but still like even like human understanding and appreciation of skulls is kind of complex because they take on all these symbolic meanings, but then they're also there's also this sort of like coolness to the skull that has seem to exist for a long time, and you know, we get into this with other skull based traditions and artifacts as well.
Is discussed in their recent either recently rerun or about to be rerun episode where I interviewed Brian Hoggart about anti witchcraft precautions, some of which involved putting skulls, particularly horse skulls, in the foundation of a building. Like a lot of it's just kind of like, well, horse skulls are really interesting looking. They don't look like horses, but yet they are horses, and horses have this important place
in human lives. So yeah, there are a number of different ways you can go in and try and figure out like why was this important?
Right, So there's just so much like we don't know anybody who has too confident or too certain a theory about what these remains meant and how they were used. I think you should be highly skeptical of that, but I do think one interesting piece of information that we can use is not from the ancient world itself, but just from looking at practices of ancestor veneration today by analogy, which is a totally common practice all over the world.
That's right, we discussed We've discussed some of these already, at least in Passing, particularly the importance of ancestor veneration in Chinese culture, right.
And so I was looking for some documentation of people today with religious practices that could be considered to include strong elements of ancestor veneration and also something that could be considered divination via deceased ancestors. And I think from what I can tell, this combination of beliefs is not especially unique or unusual. Lots of people around the world practice forms of ancestor veneration that might include some way of establishing contact with the dead or getting information or
messages from them. But I wanted to find one clear example with documentation of specifics so we're not just dealing with generalities. And I came across an interesting paper looking at the Bupeti people. So this was by Maura kang E k Lebaka, who is a scholar at the University of South Africa specializing in African musical arts and ethnomusicology.
The paper was called the Art of Establishing and Maintaining Contact with Ancestors, a study of Bapeti tradition published in the journal HTS Theological Studies in the year twenty eighteen. So the Buppetti people mostly live within northern South Africa, and Lebaca, synthesizing the work of some previous ethnographers, describes a common view of ancestors among the Bapeti people. Again, same caveat with all of the examples we've talked about.
Beliefs are not usually universal within a culture. All you can do is describe commonly found beliefs. He says, first of all, in the words of a scholar named Mibiti, there is a widespread belief in many African traditional religions that quote, death does not annihilate life, and the departed continue to exist in the hereafter, so the dead are
not gone, they remain spiritually alive in some sense. Also, Lebacca says that the character of ancestors is believed to remain fundamentally unchanged since they were alive dead ancestors go on existing. They remain themselves in good and bad ways, so they can protect and advise their descendants. But they are also not like perfect, perfected, ethereal beings. They're like us, and they are like they were in life, so also
prone to jealousy and motivations of that sort. He says, the spirits of ancestors have the power to affect the fates of the living, and this can be for good or for ill. Their behavior toward the living depends largely on if they are properly honored and venerated, and Lebaca argues that veneration is different from worship. Veneration is more like the respect that the young are expected to give to their elders, except extended beyond the bound boundary of death,
and does have special rituals involved. He says ancestral spirits guard and enforce morality within the family and prevent feuds and conflicts between living members of the family. This is mentioned later in the article, but it's worth noting that ancestors are believed to be powerful and can cause supernatural
outcomes to affect people, but they're not omnipotent. They can't do anything Lebaca says that sometimes but petty ancestors need to be contacted, need to be communicated with, and he says there are a couple of main ways to establish contact. There are these communal music and dance ceremonies known as the Malopo ritual, and that appeases the ancestral spirits. But there is also a way of seeking help of traditional healers,
especially with the use of divination bones. Now, I want to note that, as far as I could tell, these are not the bones of ancestors. The paper doesn't address this question directly, but it seemed to me, based on a photo included in the paper and the fact that it was not specified otherwise, that these would probably be normal kind of bones that would be used in practices of osteomancy.
Yeah. I think in other instances of bones being used as essentially, you know, dies of some sort, they've always been animal bones. I don't remember off hand an example of them being human bones, but it may exist elsewhere.
I only specified that because we were just talking about examples of bones being kept like within the houses of the living, So I think we're not talking about ancestors bones here.
Yeah, I think you're right, they would assurely specified if that was the case.
So Lebaca in this paper includes a number of interviews with traditional healers, one of whom describes that direct communication between healers and their own ancestors happens through music and through dreams, and that the purpose of the use of music and group singing in ritual contact with ancestors is quote to create harmony between the living and the ancestors.
And I thought that was interesting because it reminds me of the way that, of course singing can be used to create a sense of togetherness among the living alone, you know, just like a people a group of people singing together. I think almost everybody will know what I'm talking about when I say the way that creates this weird sense of emergent harmony and sort of group identity. And so maybe by inviting the dead to be a part of that as well, you're sort of bringing them to the table in a way.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
But this paper a naturalistic approach of observing malopo rituals and interviewing traditional healers about the function of ancestor veneration in Bapetti society. And there's one story recounted in the paper Told by a Healer that that goes basically as follows.
I'll do a shorter summary the healer. Before she was a traditional healer, she had been sick and had experienced trouble sleeping, and then she had a dream of a man who gave her a plastic bag full of divination bones, and so she went to her Christian church to find out what to do, and they gave her some instructions of things she could do, but she did not follow the instructions and started having encounters with snakes, like there was a snake in her pillowcase one night, and then
the encounters got worse. She and her husband encountered a much bigger snake. So she and her husband went to visit a traditional healer and he used divination bones to discover that her grandfather had been a traditional healer himself, and he wanted her to become a healer as well, and the illness, the insomnia, and the snakes were signs
to push her onto this path. So in her story, she accepted the call became a healer, and after her training, she came home and was welcomed back with a malopo ritual, and the snakes and the pain and the insomnia were gone.
There are also other stories included here of ill health and frightening experiences brought on by ancestors to sort of pressure the living descendants to follow their advice and Lebaca this is not a point Lebacca raises in the paper, but I just happened to note that in the cases documented in this study, the communication with dead ancestors sought with the help of healers, does not provide information about like objective future outcomes, such as you know what will
happen in the future, who's going to ascend to the throne, who's going to win the war, like we talked about in some of these ancient examples. Rather, it seems to
be providing the ancestor's personal perspective. So in this case of divination, it has less of a prophetic quality than in some of the like, especially the fictional accounts, and seems more to me like it's focused on seeking the ancestors advice, like it allows the person to understand the ways that the ancestor is influencing their life for good or for ill, and kind of the same way a chat with a living elder might provide both personal advice
of things that they think you should do with your life, but also explanations of why and how the elder is treating you the way they are.
Yeah, and sort of serving to bring the current generation in line with past generations and the will and the
expectations of ancestors. This reminds me of how, in certain analysis I've read of traditional Chinese ancestor generation, that you could think of it as a kind of structural completeness, that the family unit is not just a thing that exists, you know, with borders and a certain head count in the present, but it is a thing that exists in the present and stretching back through the past, and therefore, like being in line with the will of ancestors is
about like keeping the structure sound and making sure that everything is lined up and has this structural completeness, which I think can be a slightly alien concept to many of us, especially if you tend to sort of view like the family is a thing that exists solely in the present, maybe it sinks back a little bit in time, but is not deeply rooted in the past.
Well, yeah, it seems to me to highlight how culturally variable. The idea of the family is like what constitutes the family and as especially as like a functional unit still having an effect on all members within. Yeah, but so anyway, to look at a few assessments from this paper, Lebacca says that there's a common belief among people of the Bipetti society that the main thing ancestors want is to
be remembered and respected by their descendants. And if the living faithfully remember and venerate their ancestors, they're going to be blessed with good health, healthy livestock and crops, good weather, and so forth. And sometimes for a healing to take place, a healer will have to consult the spirits of ancestors
directly to find out what to do. Another interesting thing he notes is that he says Bipetti often feel that it is inappropriate to approach their supreme deity or God directly, and instead would use their ancestral spirits as sort of
intermediaries or emissaries between themselves and God. So I thought this was an interesting layer of perspective that gives us, I think, a more nuanced view of what it means to be in contact in communication with the dead, because here's one case where people today certainly do use rituals such as communal music and dance and consultation with healers using divination bones to get in contact with the dead, But it does not seem to me, at least not
in the cases documented in this study, to usually be for the purpose of like knowing the future in advance, but rather for the purpose of gaining perspective on the present and the past. You establish communication with the dead in order to receive wisdom and to receive advice, and to find out what your ancestors want you to do or expect you to do, and to find out how the ancestors advice and desires are connected to the trials and other things you are experiencing in your daily life.
And this really got me thinking, because it made me think that actually, even in a lot of the cases we've already been looking at from you know, accounts from the ancient world and so forth, a lot of the cases of divination through spirits of the dead that we looked at did not consist of a person seeking to know the future in the kind of you know, the fictional sorcerer sense we think about, where like somebody wants ultimate power, and so they want to know what happens
ahead of time to exploit that. Instead, it very often seemed to involve a much more personal, intimate, interactive kind of knowledge, like knowledge useful for the exorcism of an unwanted ghost, or knowledge useful to get advice, or you know, wisdom from an ancestor or other knowledge of that kind of personal sort. Does that make sense?
Yeah, yeah, I mean in a way it almost puts things more in line with this idea that what we think of as necromancy is maybe more in line with various shamanistic practices going stretching back through various human cultures, very far back in human existence. But yeah, not the but a lot of like smaller practices aimed at sort of realigning your life, things that almost could be thought of as having a therapeutic property to them. You know, it's like something feels out of line in my life.
I need to get right with the ancestors. I need to touch base with the ancestors in one form or another.
But that makes me feel like maybe we should come back and further explore the other side of the scale as well. If that's a view of divination seeking communication with the dead as a kind of intimate, wholesome, integrated thing within people's lives and culture that helps provide the perspective of ancestors and wisdom. There are also culturally very different views that would place it back in the category of like a special extreme, transactional kind of event ritual.
Yeah. Yeah, And in this we're gonna we've been talking about sort of bottom up necromancy, necromancy, things like necromancy
that have emerged as part of traditional practices. Now let's turn back to medieval Christian Europe and think about sort of like the top down view of a Christian hierarchy looking to stamp out necromatic practices and necromatic texts, because, as we've mentioned several times already, there is this general attitude in medieval Christian Europe, again very top down, not talking about like traditional pre Christian beliefs that are still
resonating among the various peoples of Europe and various peoples under the control of Christian forces, but rather this top down view that first of all, the dead cannot be communicated with, and they should not be communicated with. If you attempt necromancy, you may well speak with something, but it will be a demon rather than a ghost, and so only ill can come of it. Now that being said, necromancy and necromatic texts certainly existed and were circul related.
At times, they were greatly feared by the Church, as pointed out by Richard Keikeffer in nineteen ninety sevens Forbidden Rights. When Franciscan Friar Bernard de Lussius was accused by the Holy Inquisition of using necromancy against the Pope in thirteen nineteen, he was cleared of the charge, but he was still sent to prison for merely possessing a book of alleged necromancy.
Simon, I'd rather see you dead.
Exactly. I mean that the movie you're referencing does does present this various top down view of forbidden knowledge and so forth.
We're talking about The Devil Rides Out by the Way, where Christopher Lee's character like, Oh, it's okay for him to know about all of the forbidden magical rituals, but it's not okay for his friend Simon to know about them.
Oh yeah, I mean within one of these cultural situations, it's always okay for someone to know about them, to know about these things, and those are the ones who get to tell everyone else that they're not allowed to know about them. The witch hunters get all the cool texts. Anyway, Fears and accusations of clergy possessing and or using necromantic
writings continued afterwards. However, Keir Keffer discusses these books as concerning quote explicitly demonic magic as well, and this seems to have been the case during the Middle Ages as well, where sometimes something described as necromancy did involve divination via the dead, but other times it was used interchangeably with
demonic magic. By most theological definitions. However, communication with demons and demonic divination would not be the same as merely speaking with the dead, unless you're getting into this again this very specific Christian caveat about the distinction or the lack of a distinction between the two key Keffer writes quote.
One possible reason for the conflation of these terms and concepts was the widespread assumption that when one engaged in necromancy in the area sense conjuring the spirits of the deceased, the spirits which in fact appeared were demons in the forms of the dead and the biblical example here that is often summoned up to support this is the shade of Samuel being conjured by the Witch of Indoor, and it is said that this is not really the spirit of Samuel, this is a demon in the guise of his spirit.
I don't think the Bible says that. I think in the Bible it is pretty much understood to be Samuel.
Yeah. Yeah, but again you get into like, what are the official interpretations of a given religious text, right, Yeah, Still, there was discussion of pure necromancy in various texts. A couple of examples are brought up here. There's the Rowlinson Necromatic Manuscript, as it's popularly known. This is a Latin and Middle English collection of texts on magic and divination, including the invocation of angels as well as the dead. Its name for Richard Rowlinson, an eighteenth century clergy member
and collector of rare books and manuscripts. So yeah, it contains instructions for necromantic magic, as does the so called Munich Manual of Demonic Magic, a fifteenth century Godick grimour. Instructions from the Munich Manual via Keith Kefer involve the creation of multiple magic circles, a sword and a ring, and you can use these rights to speak to the dead, certainly, but also you can make a living person appear dead. You can also make a living person fall in love
with you, and many other things. Hmm. Now. In one section, ki Keffer adds some interesting ideas about the idea of necromancy and nonsense. We often assume that everyone considering necromancy in medieval times was either an eager believer or a fearful inquisitor when it came to this kind of stuff, so he writes the following quote. One might add to this that it is not altogether anachronistic to see the
notion of necromancy as nonsense. As it's at its most playful, it was a deliberate violation of sense, a fantasy of illusion, perhaps intended more for imaginative entertainment than for actual use.
Yet the boundaries between sense and nonsense are rarely quite stable, and themes that seem to an outsider absolutely nonsensical could be taken in deadly earnest by some observers within the culture quote and the deadly earnest observers in this particular case, he would be referring to would be like the witch hunters and so forth, the demonology theorists that brought about so much actual, real misery in the world.
Ah, So he's exploring the possibility that it was the inquisitors and so forth who would who were taking the concept more literally than the people who practiced it.
Yeah, and I think maybe suggesting that there is again kind of a it's not just necromancy and non necromancy. You know, there's a broad spectrum of various beliefs, practices, rights, but also stories, legends, myths that may concern speaking with the dead that are understood to varying degrees within a given group to not be reality, you know, to in the same way that myth is somewhere between reality and fiction. You know that some of these traditions hold that place.
But then you have someone come in with an agenda, with a violent agenda, and they're here to stamp out practices that are a threat to the church, to stamp out individuals that are a threat to the church. Well, then they can take any of these things and use them to support their case. Now for a little more detail on where the church stood on necromancy, and again you're dealing with. We're dealing with a with centuries here, we're dealing with all sorts of individuals coming in with
different ideas. So this is not presented to be like the word on necromancy. But I thought it would be interesting to turn to the famous writings of Thomas Aquinas, who lived twelve twenty five through twelve seventy four. This is from the Summa Theologica, or the Summary of Theology. The book covers a great deal of ground, but it does mention necromancy in a few places and gets to the meat of what it was thought to be at the time in terms of divination. So this is from
a translation of a Summa theological quote. All divinations seek to acquire for knowledge of future events by means of some council and help of a demon who is either expressly called upon to give his help, or else thrust himself in secretly, in order to tell certain future things unknown to men but known to him the demon in such manners as to have been explained in Isaiah fifty seven to three.
The statement almost seems like a direct argument against what we were just talking about with respect to the subtlety and complex range of different kinds of communication with the dead that might take place, especially in a culture that practices common forms of ancestor veneration.
Yeah, I mean this is like, clearly we're dealing with a situation where it is not thought that there is any room for this sort of thing within within the Christian world, and anything outside of the Christian world that even looks like this is probably against the rules.
It's always to know the future, and it's always a demon.
Yes, So Aquinas continues to in states when demons are expressly invoked, they are wont to foretell the future in many ways. Sometimes they offer themselves to human sight and hearing by mock apparitions in order to foretell the future, and this species is called the digitation because man's eyes are blindfolded. Sometimes they make use of dreams, and this
is called divination by dreams. Sometimes they employ apparitions or utterances of the dead, and this species is called necromancy, for as Isidore observes, in Greek, necron means dead and mantilla divination, because after certain incantations and the sprinkling of blood, the dead seem to come to life to divine and to answer questions so he goes on to discuss other
forms of divination. Divination, he says, which is practiced without express invocation of demons, occurs in two forms, one by observing things in nature, and the other by observing things due to human action, like rolling dice or flipping through a book. He writes again in translation, accordingly, it is clear that there are three kinds of divination. The first is when the demons are invoked openly. This comes under
the head of necromancy. The second is merely an observation of the disposition or movement of some other being, and this belongs to augury, while the third consists in doing something in order to discover the occult, and this belongs
to sordilach. Under each of these, many others are contained as explained above, And he says, in all the afore said, there is the same general, but not the same special character of sin, For it is much more grievous to invoke the demons than to do things that deserve the
demon's interference. So he's saying, look, if you're trying to do let's say you're trying to speak to the spirit of the dead, and a demon intercepts the call, as they always will and then manipulates you through that communication. That's one thing, like, that's bad, you've messed up, But you haven't messed up as badly if you had gone out and done a demonic ritual and said, hey, demons, I need you to come here because we have things
to talk about now. I did find it interesting that Aquinas stresses that merely speaking to a demon or inquiring of the truth from a demon is not unlawful, in part because Christ spoke to the demon legion. He spoke to the demons that were in the swine or were driven into the swine. However, it is unlawful to invoke a demon. So by this classification, I would think, if a demon comes up to you and is like, hey, suck, you have every right to go suck back, but it
is unlawful to summon the demon and then go suck. Right.
Yes, So if you encounter a demon, you can talk to you, probably you can argue with it or whatever, but you can't say like, hey, demons, if any demon is out there, come debate me.
Yeah. Yeah, Like if you're Martin Luther and the demons show up, you can cuss at them and throw things at them. And drive them away, right, that's not demonic witchcraft or what have you. But if you summon them, I guess even if you summon them to cuss at them like, that's bad.
I would assume so. But especially if you summon them in order to gain power from them, that's bad.
Yeah, so Aquina says, quote. Now, it is one thing to question a demon who comes to us of his own accord, and it is lawful to do so at times for the good of others, especially when he can be compelled by the power of God to tell the truth, and another to invoke a demon in order to gain from him knowledge of things hidden from us. Now that I don't know, it seems to me like that opens
up a gray area. Are like, are you just could you put yourself in a position where you're just in the right place to encounter demons, so you're not quite summoning them, but you're like, you're not baiting the demon, but you are hanging out in a place or a position where they might show up.
I don't know, Like, I'm gonna just keep moving my arms this way, and if they happen to touch a wija board, that that's its problem, not mine.
Yeah, I'm or yeah, I'm going to hang out in this this this haunted crypt and we'll just see what happens. Yeah. He also mentions that divination by the stars is fine so long as you're not invoking a demon. So again, this is just a snapshot at some of the top down ideas about speaking to the dead and why you shouldn't do it, and ultimately a little bit of demonology splashed in there as well. But you know, there's so much that would have been going on in different cultures
throughout the centuries covered by the Middle Ages here. I mean, there are all sorts of traditions involving, you know, speaking to the dead, conjuring the dead at crossroads and so forth, and then there's so many on top of that, there's so many different traditions, legends, ghost stories, et cetera that deal with this sort of thing that again may not have a like literal role within the culture saying this is how you speak to the dead, but like here is an idea of speaking to the dead, and it
can still have a great deal of importance within a given culture.
Now, seeing these different views of communicating with the dead side by side, it really highlights how how one, I think could easily be mistaken for the other by an unsympathetic observer, like somebody who's got a particular theological point of view and who looks into a culture, one of the many cultures that practice's forms of ancestor veneration that may involve some type of ritual of consulting with the dead with the ancestors seeking their wisdom or getting information
about how they're continuing to affect your life. Like that, an unsympathetic observer looks in on a culture and sees that, and they say, oh, they're doing witchcraft in order to get power from the dead so that they can like no events in advance and you know, and manipulate people. It seems very clear how that kind of mistaken impression
could be formed. And I wonder if that gives rise to some legends of necromantic practices that probably weren't ever actually practiced, that were just like unsympathetic observer looking in on ancestor veneration of some form in another culture and saying like, ah, they're they're consulting the dead in order to do something malicious.
Yeah, absolutely. And then at the same time, I mean, you have things like the veneration of saints within uh, you know, Catholic Christian traditions that you know, you could make an argument for sort of you know, scratching the same itch. So you know, a lot of this falls you know, a lot of this depends on who's judging, who's laying out the laws, and who's saying what is acceptable and what is not acceptable. When we consider individuals and generations that came before us.
Do you think Aquinas was saying it's okay to talk to a demon if you didn't summon it, because like he did that one time, Like he's a actually that's not a problem.
Well, there there are so many you know, I enjoy reading about this occasionally, like getting into exactly what was thought of as correct concerning demons at various points in the Middle Ages, like what could they do and what
could they not do in accordance with divine will? And there's some of that in Aquinas's writing, for sure, and you see that in the writings of other key individuals as well, like can they like one classic example of this we just we've discussed multiple times is can an incubus or succubist take on a complete disguise as a beautiful human to seduce humans, And there's the ideal, No,
that wouldn't be fair to the faithful. So there'll always be some sort of a tell like duck feed or some sort of goat feed or something just so that you'll have so the faithful will have an out that you know, and so there's a lot of stuff like that. Can demons do miracles and so forth.
Though I think as we discussed with the idea of the duck feed, I wonder if the idea was was really about the faithful having out or more about saying like, ah, yeah, if you did succumb to an incubus or a succubus, it's your fault because there was something there you should have noticed, right. It's about saying, like, you, you know, it wasn't unfair to you. You should have been more on the lookout.
Right, And also like what would a just god allow under his domain? You know? And you know, there's of course the more pressing side of that, like why do bad things happen to good people? Why is there suffering in the world, and so forth, And that's I guess the larger concern. But then when you get into demonology, like that's a whole other area. Like, Okay, well these demons get to run around and just do whatever. That doesn't seem right. They're like, well, no, no, no, they can
do certain things. And I believe Aquinas writes that, like, they are allowed to do certain things because by allowing the demons a certain amount of freedom, it actually has a positive impact on the faithful, you know, because like in having to deal with all this demonic stuff, like it's going to end up bolstering your faith to some extent.
Hmm.
But it's complicate. It's complicated. That's why. That's why people like Aquinas did so many words to it.
Okay, should we wrap up necromancy there?
I believe we will, but you know, we'd love to hear from everyone out there. If there's an example of outright necromancy and fiction, legend and lore, or various examples of communication with spirits or ancestor veneration that you think are notable and you'd like to bring up, well, write in. We would love to hear from you. We can keep
discussing this topic on future editions of listener Mail. Listener Mail publishes on Mondays and The Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed We have our core episodes of the show Stuff to Blow Your Mind on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Wednesdays, we generally have a short form monster fact or Artifact episode, and then on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
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