52 



DISCOVERY 



of the dead, which was located beneath the terrestrial 

 world. Certain apparenth' bottomless chasms, a 

 natural phenomenon not infrequent in a volcanic 

 limestone country, were thought to be gateways of 

 this underworld. At several of such places oracles 

 of the dead were established. The most famous was 

 that of the river Acheron in Thesprotis ; others are 

 mentioned at Taenarum in Greece, Heraclea in Asia 

 Minor, and Avernus in Italy. The inquirer, like 

 Odysseus, journeyed to the gate of the next world : 

 here individual ghosts were evoked for his benefit, 

 and, unlike the Homeric ghosts of ordinary mortals, 

 they possessed supernatural knowledge. The Thes- 

 protian oracle is mentioned by Herodotus in a story 

 about Periander, the great tyrant of Corinth in the 

 seventh century B.C. Periander sent to ask the spirit 

 of his wife Melissa about the whereabouts of some 

 property which had been entrusted to his care, but 

 had been mislaid. The spirit of Melissa appeared, 

 hut refused to give her answer until she had been pro- 

 vided with suitable apparel, explaining that none had 

 been burned with her corpse and that she was conse- 

 quentlv cold in the next world. As a guarantee of 

 authenticitv she sent a riddling message about a 

 matter known only to herself and Periander. Upon 

 receipt of the reply Periander stripped the ladies of 

 Corinth of their fmery, dug a trench, a regular feature 

 of sacrifice to the dead, and burned the clothes in it. 

 Melissa then gave a second embassy the required 

 information. Plutarch tells the story of a wealthy 

 Italian named Elysius, whose son and heir had died 

 suddenly. Elysius suspected that he had been 

 poisoned, and repaired to the oracle of the dead to 

 discover the truth. The ghost of his father appeared 

 to him with the " genius " or spiritual double of his 

 son. The latter handed him a book in which were 

 verses explaining that the death was due to the wise 

 dispensation of Fate. Pausanias, the victor of Plata;a 

 in 479 B.C., afterwards in Byzantium murdered 

 Cleonice, a free-born maiden who had been the victim 

 of his tvrannical lust. The ghost of the murdered 

 girl haunted him until he visited the oracle of the 

 dead at Heraclea and interviewed her spirit. The 

 same Pausanias afterwards haunted the temple in 

 which the Spartans had sacrilegiously done him to 

 death, and it became necessary to send for professional 

 exorcisers to lav the ghost. 



Oracles of the Dead 



The consultation of these oracles of the dead was 

 the most reputable form of communication with the 

 dead which throughout antiquity fell in the domain 

 of magic and superstition rather than that of religion. 

 Professional magicians called Psychagogoi, who claimed 

 the power of evoking or laying ghosts, were common 



already in the fifth century B.C. They gave their 

 name to one of the lost plays of .-Eschylus, and the 

 plot of the Persians by the same dramatist turns upon 

 the evocation from his tomb of the spirit of Darius, 

 the Persian king. Like other practitioners of magic, 

 these Psychagogoi were usually drawn from foreign 

 and mysterious races — Egyptians, Etruscans, Thessa- 

 lians, or Persian Magi. It was the latter whom the 

 matricide emperor Nero employed to evoke and 

 appease the ghost of his mother Agrippina. Long, 

 unintelligible incantations in a barbarian tongue were 

 characteristic of their procedure. They often claimed 

 the power of summoning ghosts not only from a tomb, 

 but direct from the nether world. Sometimes a 

 suitable spot had to be found for this operation bv 

 observing the behaviour of the black sheep employed 

 in the preliminary sacrifice, but at least in the later 

 classical period magicians of the highest pretensions, 

 like Apollonius of Tyana, claimed the power to raise 

 the dead bv spells without an\' limitation of place or 

 necessity of sacrifice. 



The "Medium" of Antiquity 



The nearest analogy in antiquity to the modern 

 "medium" is perhaps presented by a somewhat 

 despised type of diviner who was supposed to be the 

 instrument through which a familiar spirit or spirits 

 communicated. They uttered their prophecies in 

 tones unlike their natural voice, and were often called 

 ventriloquists [lyyacrTpiixvOM) , though they had several 

 other names, such as Pythones or Sons of Eurycles, 

 after a famous traditional member of the profession. 

 They are referred to by Aristophanes in the fifth 

 century B.C. ; St. Paul exorcised a divining spirit of 

 this kind from a female practitioner at Philippi ; at 

 the close of paganism the Christian Father Clement 

 denounces them. The Septuagint uses the word 

 lyyaa-Tpifj.v6o% to express a Hebrew phrase, which 

 means " diviner by spirits of the dead." I do not 

 suppose that popular doctrine was rigidly exact, and 

 I suspect that the familiar spirits of the ventriloquists 

 were often, but not exclusively, defined as spirits of 

 the dead. 



Necromancy and Black Magic 



The uses of the spirits of the dead in magic were 

 naturally many and various, particularly at the close 

 of the second century a.d., when necromancy and 

 witchcraft became both prevalent and persecuted. 

 The practice of attaching spells to the walls of tombs, 

 which, beginning in the fourth century B.C., became 

 common throughout later classical antiquity, I have 

 noticed in a previous papcr.i In some of these spells 

 tjie spirit of the dead man to whom the tomb belongs 



1 Horse Racing and Magic under the Roman Empire, Dis- 

 covery, vol iii, No. 28. p. 99. 



