The Witches' Book of the Dead (16 page)

Roman Necromancy

The Romans considered the dead to be dangerous and had a more negative view of necromancy than the Greeks. For many Romans, the dead were useful for binding curses against the living, but if they escaped the grave those same dead were likely to terrorize the living in monstrous forms. During the days of the Roman Republic, necromancy would have fallen under the proscriptions against the practice of magic and sorcery in general. Roman accounts of necromancy were gruesome, lacking even the macabre grace of Greek accounts. The Romans believed necromancy to be the domain of horrid Witches who were virtually bestial in their depraved rites.

Erichtho

A chilling description of necromancy performed by the Thessalian Witch Erichtho is offered by the poet Lucan in
Pharsalia
.
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The necromancy of
Erichtho is not a vision in a dream or a mirror, but a reanimation of a fresh corpse, and her story influences many of the terrifying images found in the ideas of necromancy today.

Corpse reanimation was held to be one of the most powerful forms of necromancy. To be successful, the corpse was fed blood and propped upright on its feet to symbolize its impending resurrection. Herbs were placed on the chest and head to magically restart breathing. The corpse could also be anointed with the necromancer's own blood. The necromancer then uttered powerful incantations to command the ghost of the dead person to reenter its body. If the ghost failed to respond, the necromancer threatened it with untold tortures in the underworld.

The poet Lucan, who lived from 39 to 65 CE, wrote a long account of the Roman civil war that erupted during the time of Julius Caesar, nearly a century before. One of his chapters tells about the necromantic undertakings of Roman General Sextus Pompey, son of General Pompey the Great, who was fighting the forces of Julius Caesar in a civil war. Lucan described Sextus Pompey as an unworthy man with a shameful past. Fearful of a violent fate in an upcoming battle at Pharsalus, he sought the magic most forbidden, believed by the Romans to be hated by the gods: necromancy. And Thessaly, long known for its Witches, was a mysterious and perilous land “full of violence to the gods.”
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Erichtho was the fiercest of her race, a grisly, unkempt hag with skin as pale as bone, who knew the veiled secrets of the river Styx, dwelled in deserted tombs, and dragged the dead forth from the shadowy underworld. Her very breath poisoned the air. She savagely mauled corpses, gathering their dripping slime and gore; dug through the gruesome cavities of bodies, plucking out eyes; and wildly tore cadavers apart limb by limb. Even vultures and wolves fled from her. If her rites called for the blood of the living, she did not hesitate to murder, carving fetuses out of women and stabbing even dear friends. She would then proceed to sever a head, forcing its lips apart that they may speak with the voice of the grave, and begin her conversation with the Stygian shades. It is hard to imagine a more horrific being.

However, no matter how terrible the Witch is portrayed in these gruesome tales, there's always someone willing to go there. When Sextus Pompey, camping with his troops in Thessaly, heard about Erichtho, he thought she was just the girl he needed to tell him about the future. He snuck out at night and tracked her down in the midst of broken tombs. She agreed to help him by reanimating a corpse.

Erictho wandered a desolate battlefield in search of the ideal fresh corpse that had no wounds to the lungs that might impair proper speech. She carefully selected a corpse with its throat cut and dragged it to a cave. She donned her ritual clothing and tied her stringy hair back with writhing vipers. Then she forcefully pried open the chest of the corpse and let it fill with its own blood. She rinsed the cavity with moon juice, a foam left on plants by the full moon believed to have magical properties. She poured in a mixture of foul ingredients that included the frothy saliva of rabid dogs, lynx guts, hyena hump, the bone marrow of a deer fed on serpents, pearl oyster, various snakes, stones incubated by an eagle, and the ashes of a phoenix. Then she shrieked her incantations, working herself into such a frenzy that she literally foamed at the mouth. Erictho uttered a horrible incantation sounding like the howling of wolves, the hissing of snakes, the barking of dogs, and the screeching of owls. It penetrated into the very depths of Tartarus. She invoked Pluto and Proserpine (the Roman names of Hades and Persephone), Chaos, Hecate, and the ferryman of the Styx, bidding them to send her the shade of the dead soldier. The ghost appeared but was loathe to reenter its corpse. You can't blame the poor soul, given that worse company probably couldn't be found; but it mattered little, for Erictho whipped the body and screamed at the gods until the ghost obeyed. This is an excerpt of Ogden's translation of when the Thessalian Erictho reanimates a dead soldier for Sextus Pompey (65 CE, Lucan Pharsalia 6.588-830. Translated from Latin):

At once the congealed gore warmed up, soothed the black wounds and ran into the veins and the extremities of the
limbs. As the blood struck them the organs beneath the chill breast quivered, and life, creeping anew into the innards that had forgotten it, mingled itself with the death. Then all the dead man's limbs shook, and his sinews flexed. The corpse did not raise itself from the ground gradually, one limb at a time. Rather, it shot up from the earth and was upright in an instant. The eyes were laid bare, the mouth an open grimace. His appearance was of one not yet fully alive, but of a man still in the phase of dying. He was still pallid and stiff, and in consternation at being brought back into the world.
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The reanimated corpse begrudgingly answered the questions put to him and forecast Sextus Pompey's defeat, finishing: “Europe and Asia and Libya's plains, which saw your conquests, now shall hold alike your burial-place—nor has the Earth for you a happier land than this.”
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When it was done, the corpse looked dejected, begging for death again. Even the underworld had to be preferable to this. Erichtho performed a magical spell to make the corpse fall. Sextus Pompey returned to his men as the Witch burned the corpse in the fire. At least she had the courtesy to grant the poor soldier an eternal peace from ever being defiled in this way again.

Sextus Pompey lost the battle at Pharsalus, and was forced to flee for his life. In 35 BCE, he was captured by his enemies in Miletus, Anatolia (now Turkey), and was executed without trial.

During the Roman Empire, necromancy fell even further into the realm of undesirable activities, becoming associated with imperial insanities and vanities, and paranoia that enemies would call up the dead to find out the death dates of emperors and use the ghosts to conspire against them. Necromancers were rumored to sacrifice young boys in order to conjure their ghosts for prophecy, spells, and curses. Given the imperial intrigues, assassinations, and murders, not only of rivals but family members and spouses,
it is no wonder the dead evoked terror, but in these tales, we also see the old pattern of sorcerers and Witches being forbidden for what they might do to those in power.

Canidia

Even more loathsome than Erichtho are the Thessalian Witches Canidia and her cohorts, portrayed by the poet Horace in
Epodes
(“Incantations”) and
Satires
. Both works were completed around 30 BCE, during the reign of Emperor Caesar Augustus. Modern scholars have speculated that Augustus, who was planning to execute severe laws against Witchcraft, enlisted the aid of the two reigning poets of the day, Horace and Virgil, to portray Witches and Witchcraft in a disgusting light as part of a propaganda campaign. Though little is known of the laws against magic, they were influential for a couple of centuries in the prosecution of sorcery and Witchcraft, proving that Witch persecutions existed long before Christianity came into power.
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Horace's Witches appear more like denizens of the underworld than anyone you would meet on Earth. They are dressed in tattered black clothing and have wild, unkempt hair; Canidia's hair is entwined with small vipers, and Sagana wears a wig that bristles like a sea urchin or a boar. They are extremely pale, their teeth are blue, and their nails are worn and ragged from digging in the Earth. Canidia, however, keeps a thumbnail long, presumably to act as a spade. The Witch Folia howls the moon down from the sky and enchants the stars.

Epodes
5 tells how these three Witches, along with a fourth, Veia, kidnapped a young boy from a wealthy family and sacrificed him in order to procure body parts for a love potion to lure Canidia's estranged lover back to her. They buried the boy up to his chin and callously placed food in front of him several times a day. As he wasted away, his longing for the food was transferred via sympathetic magic to his liver and bone marrow, which the Witches intended to harvest for their wicked potion. Sagan sprinkled about foul waters from Avernus, the toxic necromantic lake in Campagnia.

The boy begged for his life, but when he realized that the Witches would show no mercy, he angrily spat a curse at the haggard crones, declaring that his ghost, accompanied by the Furies, would attack them at night with curved fingernails and sit upon their chests, depriving them of sleep and filling them with terror. He proclaimed that the Witches would be stoned to death by an angry mob, and wolves and birds would scatter their unburied bones. Despite the seriousness of a curse laid by the dying, the Witches carried out their evil deed.

The stories of Erichtho and Canidia, while fictional, show how far the authorities would go to paint those who communicated with the dead in a negative light. What were once the sacred rites of the noble shamans of old now became the grisly rituals of evil hags, bent on defiling both the dead and the living.

Emperors and Necromancy

Nero, who ruled from 54 to 68 CE, epitomized everything negative perceived about ghosts and necromancy. He had his mother Agrippina murdered in 59 CE for her intrigues against him, and gave her a minimal burial. He was soon pestered relentlessly in dreams by her ghost and also the Furies, who whipped him for his crimes. He dreamed of wails issuing from her burial place, and of a mausoleum opening its doors to him and bidding him to enter. Plagued by these horrific visions, Nero consulted Persian necromancers to summon forth his mother's ghost and beg for her mercy. According to Ogden, Pliny described Nero as having no respect for the dead. “With all too much cruelty did he fill our city with ghosts,” said Pliny.
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Other Roman emperors, both Christian and non-Christian alike, were said to practice necromancy, and never for good purposes. Some, like Nero, were terrified by the shrieking ghosts of their murder victims. Hadrian (r. 117-38) lost his favorite youth, Antinous, to drowning in the Nile, but it was rumored that he had instead sacrificed him for the purpose of necromancy.
Hadrian did construct a
psuchomanteion
at his villa, perhaps to commune with the ghost of Antinous.

By the fourth century, Rome had strict laws that banned all forms of divination, and especially forbade necromancy for the purpose of harming one's enemies—probably an attempt to protect the emperors from their conspiring rivals. In doing so, they set the stage for how the later Church of Rome would deal with those who dared consult with the dead.

As an aside, history often repeats itself. Author Peter Levenda points out that during the rise of the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler (himself an occultist) instituted laws against astrologers, occult lodges, Freemasons, and other magical practitioners. However, when these individuals were rounded up, some were forced into service for the Reich. By now, you should have question as to why. Those in authority have always feared the magical arts, for these powers are real and they put strength and knowledge into the hands of individuals.
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Early Christians and Necromancy

The early Christians in the Roman Empire had divided views on necromancy. On one hand, Justin Martyr, a Father of the Church, thought that it proved the immortality of the soul. Others, such as Saint Basil, denounced it. The debate would go on for centuries, with all forms of magic and divination eventually earning official condemnation.

In the first centuries after Christ, wonder working and miracles, including communing with the dead, were performed by Christians and non-Christians alike, in keeping with the model set by the Acts of the Apostles. Some of the wonder workers competed with Christianity. One was Apollonius of Tyana, a neo-Pythagorean philosopher whose reputed necromancy eschewed the blood and horror of earlier practices for the more genteel method of prayer. This hearkened back to the more peaceful, shamanic practices of tribal societies.

Apollonius of Tyana

Apollonius was a neo-Pythagorean and reputed magical adept of the first century CE. He was said to have acquired many of his supernatural abilities during a sojourn in India. The miracles attributed to Apollonius paralleled those of Jesus and the apostles in many ways, and it is possible that some of those stories were retrofitted onto him. As a neo-Pythagorean, Apollonius condemned blood sacrifice, and so would not have used blood in a necromantic ritual.

In Philostratus's account,
Life of Apollonius of Tyana
, as referenced by Ogden, Apollonius desired to speak to the ghost of Achilles to ask him questions about the Trojan War. He traveled with his companions to Ilium, and wandered about the tombs, making speeches and offering “bloodless and pure sacrifices.” Reaching the mound of the warrior Achilles, he told his companions to return to their ship, for he wished to spend the night alone on top of it, perhaps implying that he may have intended to discover the spirit of the warrior in dreams. Later, in telling his companions what transpired, he said, “It was not by digging a pit as Odysseus did, or by evocating ghosts with the blood of sheep, that I managed to speak with Achilles, but by using the prayers that the Indians claim to use for their heroes.”
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