 Welcome, everyone, to the season finale of We Are Being Transformed. Here, we explored liminal spaces and the contours of reality, the myriad of ways people interact with their world through the vehicles of ritual, cult, and lore. That's religion for those of you who are not in the know. So our guest this evening is Dr. Daniel Ogden. I'm very excited about this. I cannot stress how excited about this I am. Dr. Ogden, I'm a big fan of him, so I think you're in for a treat tonight. Dr. Ogden is a professor of classics at the University of Exeter. Daniel has authored a number of seminal texts on witchcraft, magic, and the supernatural and antiquity, including magic, witchcraft, and ghosts in the Greek and Roman worlds, the source book that basically everybody uses here, dragon myth and serpent cult in the Greek and Roman worlds and Greek and Roman necromancy, the topic of our discussion today. So Dr. Ogden, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining me. How are you? I'm fine, it's great to be here. And can I say what a splendid set of opening credits I've just witnessed there. Oh, thank you. Yes. Best of any podcast I've been on so far. Yeah, we're not doing video game music here. We are, I commissioned the song, had professional musicians do it. So yeah, I appreciate that. Thank you. It was a time well spent. So Dr. Ogden, we are discussing very fascinating subjects, something that is very alien to the modern person, shall we say, but it was a more common place in antiquity than we'd like to think, right? So of course we're discussing necromancy in the Greco-Roman antique world. It's important to define this term first, however. So I didn't know if you could define what necromantea is for the audience. I hope I'm not butchering that. And how is this term understood in antiquity? Yeah, well, necromantea, yeah. Well, it's made of two very simple elements in Greek, in Greek terms, the second element, necromantea means divination or prophecy. And we find it in a number of, maybe slightly obscure English words, like a nehromancy, divination from dreams, kleidonomancy, divination from random noises, tereomancy, divination from shaking lots. So mancy is divination, and then necrow, which can also be expressed as necro, and maybe that version of the element will be more familiar to your listeners, means dead, death or things with death or being dead. And so we find that in some familiar English words like necropolis and of course necrophilia. So necromantea or necromantea, is simply divination from dead people. And that ultimately gives us our English word, necromantea. And it's important to say here that the word necromantea in English has warped, has sort of expanded, morphed in the history of English. In the medieval period in particular, it was the first element, necrow, was confused with a Latin term meaning black, and so the word was sort of reclassified to mean black magic, okay? So it's important to note that when we talk about necromantea in the ancient world, that it means specifically divination from the dead. It doesn't mean black magic or bad magic or anything like that. Although you may well think that some of the examples of necromantea practiced in the ancient world were indeed bad magic. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for that answer. Yeah, it seems to be a fixture of antiquity as far back probably even predating Homer, right? You see Homer talking about this very elaborate dark technology, right? It booked 10 and 11 of the Odyssey. Cersei, you know, the witch is providing Odysseus the dark technology of magic, instructions on how to evoke the dead prophet Tiresias. Goes to this really elaborate ritual. Like you said in the book, patients and offerings that he's giving are virtually indistinguishable from paying tribute at the tombs and the hero cult shrines, right? But he's also doing some really strange stuff like sacrificing the black heifer and burning it whole and doing all these elaborate steps and calling upon the spirit. So what were some of the reasons for invoking the souls of the dead? Some of us are very familiar with, you know, Odysseus's reasons, but what were some other reasons practically for invoking and divining from the souls of the dead? Right, yes. Well, so just to say something about Cersei and the Odyssey first. Yeah, obviously so, I don't know what date you want to put on Homer. I mean, 700 BC would be a traditional date, but obviously it is a deeply traditional text. And as it happens, book 11, the so-called Nequeer book of the Odyssey, is regarded as having some of the oldest language in Homer, and it was in date, the language of Homer comes to metrical criteria. So yeah, so who knows how old that particular narrative of this necromantic consultation is. It can be very ancient indeed, but anyway, something that stands right at the head of the Greek literary tradition, as far as we're concerned. Now, in terms of the reasons, well, I mean, Odysseus just wants to know, he's just asking the way home, which seems a bit banal in some ways. And other requests to ghosts can be banal. One thing, for example, that they can be asked to find is lost treasure. Again, there's a sort of folk tale narrative that pops up more than once in the ancient world relating to ghosts being asked to do that. Now, it's not that the ghosts have any special knowledge of where treasure is, or can sort of look underneath the ground where they have themselves for it. As far as that tale is concerned, it's just that they happen to have buried it themselves when they were alive and died without telling anybody where it was. And so the ghosts have to be called up. So all the knowledge, all the special knowledge that the ghost is being asked for in those circumstances is just what they knew as a living person. Possibly the most common reason, it's hard to say, the most common reason for calling up a ghost and wanting to talk to it is actually to lay it. So paradoxically, you're calling up the ghost to lay it down again, to keep it quiet. That's because you've been harassed by it. You have a restless ghost. I mean, the obvious story to talk about here is the story of Pevesenius, Pevesenius the regent, the guy who drove the Persians out of Greece in 479. After he'd done that, he was leading the forward advance against the Persians at Byzantium. And he became a bit full of himself, a bit tyrannical. And he conceived a desire for a local Byzantine girl called Cleonisi. That's probably speaking, means fair victory, so probably speaking name in Pevesenius's case. He had her brought to his bed in the night, but he was asleep when she arrived unless he sort of fumbled towards his bed and knocked over a lamp stand. He thought, oh my God, assassins have come to kill me. And he lashed out with the sword he kept under his pillow and killed her. And after that, he was harassed by her ghost. And so he went to an oracle of the dead to call up the ghost to ask the ghost, what do I need to do to square this deal? What do I need to do to settle you, to get you to leave me alone? So again, it's paradoxical, the guy's having too much of the ghost. Why would he call it up? Ghosts can attack people in a way in which they can't be reasoned with. It's just a terror, an infliction of terror. If you want a rational conversation with a ghost, then you have to do it under controlled circumstances. So that seems to have been a thing. So he asked the ghost, what do I need to do to lay you, to give you rest, to give you peace? And as it happens in that particular case, just to finish the story, Claire Nicely tells Pausanias, well, just go back to Sparta, go back to your home city of Sparta. But what she knew and he didn't is that he was destined to be killed pretty much as soon as he got back home. So in fact, that was a ghost revenge. So that's, so application would be one thing. Then in literary texts, especially, we do have a notion that the ghosts, the necromancy is the ultimate form of divination, the most powerful form of divination, the surest form. So on that basis, again, the famous episode in Lukens, Farsalia, where sex is pumping, the son of the great, pumping the great, has a local facility in which, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I do have a bit of a cough at the moment. I'm just going to take a pass, I hope you don't mind. We have Lukens telling us about this, this is the salient witch who calls, who reanimates a dead body, a very interesting form of necromancy, reanimates a dead body for sex that's pumping in order to get a prediction of which way the civil war that the Pompeians were currently engaged in is going to go, who's going to win? So, and again, and Rick, though, the witch who's managing this operation for sexless pumping, makes it clear that this is the most powerful, the most secure form of divination. And otherwise, you might want to ask the dead about something that they would know in particular, the nature of the afterlife, or the nature of, sort of expanding that a bit, the nature of the universe, what's important about life and death, this sort of thing. So that's a theme that comes out, for example, although it's a satirical text in Lucian's Manipus. So, you know, eschatology, what goes on after we die, this sort of thing, and obviously the dead are going to know that. So that's a sort of tour of the, I guess, of the most prominent reasons for calling up a dead person and trying to speak to them. Yeah, it's very interesting. You point out in your book that sometimes the dead, I mean, the dead aren't even really prone to special knowledge. And there's no real kind of uniform way of calling them up, like even in getting back to Homer and the Odyssey, like certain ghosts seem to need the libations of the blood from the sacrifice, but to even, you know, have a coherent kind of conversation. But others, like Tiresias, and then other, later, one of his soldiers, like, don't, one of his fallen soldiers don't even need the blood. So it's very inconsistent. And yeah, just getting to Lucan and Arecto, the salient witch, like it's very, it gets very evil dead in a way with these reanimation of corpses. And we'll get to that later. But yeah, just fascinating all the myriad of ways to call up these spirits. You point out in your book that there were important places for these oracles of the dead. Why were liminal spaces like battlefields and tombs so important for this? Well, I think tombs are almost self-explanatory. You know, that's where the dead person is. And battlefields, because battlefields were massive repositories of restless dead. So yeah, so a thing we haven't really touched upon, well, maybe we have a little yet, is restlessness. So in general terms, one particular variety of, well, a particular category of dead person that you might want to exploit for magical purposes is the restless dead. And so these are people that, again, haven't achieved full peace yet. And so they're more available, they're more mobile. You know, they're still partly engaged in the world of the living. And it's usually said that there are four categories of these, these categories overlap. So there are people that haven't been buried, which is to say haven't received due rights of burial, not that they haven't been just searched. It could be that they've just been shoved into the ground, you know, murder victim just hidden. But that's not the due right of burial. So unburied people, people that have died before their time, people that have, so again, there's a notion that you may have to sort of live out a supposed, you know, lifespan between, as it were, between this place and the other place, whatever the other place is before you're allowed rest. Then there's people that have died by violence and people that have died unmarried. And female ghosts in particular, unmarried female ghosts in particular are supposed to be quite vigorous because apparently female, again, you know, some of the cultural expectation is that women above all wanted to be married. And the one who dies unmarried is particularly frustrated and therefore likely to be a particularly sort of angry or active, vigorous, restless ghost. And so anyway, so battlefields are particularly valuable as repositories of loads of ghosts who are dead by violence, by definition. And probably most of them effectively unburied. Again, there might have been some sort of hasty attempt to put them into a tumour list or something, but very often, you know, the dead people are just, as with the World War I battlefields, the dead people are just lying there in the ground, you know. So, and incidentally, just an aside here, the marathon battlefield was supposed to be full of particularly vigorous ghosts. And we're told that a stranger who happened to be walking past the battlefield or through the battlefield at night would hear the sounds of the battle going on. And even the sounds of the horses, which interestingly implies that there were animal ghosts. And there's more to say about that if you want it. But we're told that if you just sort of happened innocently by, the ghosts would leave you alone. But if you actually went there looking for them, then they would give you trouble. So, really, that expresses the idea that the battlefields were sort of ghost-intensive places. Yeah, absolutely. I love the examples you give of all these examples of farmers getting the brunt of these hauntings. It's very funny. It must have been terrifying for people. How much of it was literary and how much of it was truthful, we obviously can't say, but still very interesting as stories. So, in your book, you point out that, obviously, the battlefields and the tombs are important places. But there were also other oracle places, if you will, near lakesides, near tombs. And you point out four in particular. So, what are the big four, Nekuomantea? Yeah, so we've used the word Nekuomantea so far in its abstract sense. To me, Nekuomantea in general. But there's also a related term, Nekuomanteon, which means oracle of the dead. So, place of Nekuomantea. Confusingly, it's plural. Nekuomantea is the abstract term we've just been talking about. And if you look at the applications of that word and cognate, there are sort of cognate words, well, actually cognate words, words which clearly have the same meaning, same function, like sukomanteon, which is basically, you know, a prophecy place of souls, or sukomanteon, which is sending up place of souls. You can see that these words are actually all used interchangeably in the ancient texts. And if you look at their application, it becomes clear that there are basically four places to which these are applied. We can't really prove that they were applied to any places other than these four sites. And that's why I call them the big four. So, these were a site on the Akaron River in Thesprosia in northern Greece, very much the top end of Greece. And Homer's description of Odysseus' consultation, which I would say aligns in its topography with that site. I'm speaking deliberately vaguely there. You could say that Homer already knows about the oracle and is incorporating it into his epic. Or you could say that the idea of the oracle was extrapolated from Homer's epic. It's not exactly what's going on, but there's clearly an alignment there. The next most famous one is Lake Overnus, in Campania in Italy, the famous big round volcanic lake surrounded by fumaroles. So that's pretty atmospheric in every sense. And then the lesser known one's perhaps Heraclea Pontica, which is on the south coast of the Black Sea, so northern Turkey, modern Oregli. That seems to have been associated with a cave of some sort. And then the furthest point south of the Greek mainland, the Tynaron, the tip of the Marni Peninsula. And again, sources are vague and contradictory, but there is talk of a cave of some sort there. Yeah, of some sort. So those seem to be four special places where you could go, as a way to call it, because on your own terms, it seems, yeah, in tradition at any rate. Fascinating. Yeah, it's amusing to me, because going through your book, looking at the reconstruction scholars do have such places. The picture almost tends to border on a kind of parody. Like you imagine priests in this dark cave and the crevices manipulating dummies and statues, a kind of Black Barts cave, fun house. I don't know if you're familiar with Denver, Colorado at all, but there's this place called Casa Bonita that has these kind of things. It's this kind of Casa Bonita deal. But as you point out in your book, and I wanted to ask why is the reality of such places much more simple and sparse, especially based on lack of epigraphical evidence? Right. Well, these places were never, well, yes, I'm going to say never, never adopted by states and made into formal sanctuaries. The reason I hesitated is because Tynorum, the Tynorum cave, was within the hinterland, at least, of the Poseidon Temple on the cave there, and clearly didn't seem to have some sort of association with it. So again, it's hard to say what sort of association. So, yeah, these places were never adopted by states. They were never, I suppose you'd have to say, it's unlikely that they were ever formal or official in any sense. You know, so these were, and that was, it is quite striking that there's no epigraphy associated with them because as you probably know, given your interest in ancient religion, the Greeks couldn't stop putting up inscription for everything really. So it is significant that no inscriptions are associated with these places Yeah, but, I mean, I suppose not much was needed really. I mean, all you needed was a place which seemed to be in contact, somehow linked to the underworld, either through a lake or through a cave. And you needed a means of experiencing the ghost, up them, which was really important. And you needed a means of experiencing the ghost, up them, which was in the end was basically yourself. So, you know, what else was needed really? But, you know, I mean, just to flesh out some of the stuff you were saying there. I mean, I'm pretty sure you're having scrutinized all the literature evidence and that's all we have. Again, we don't really have any archaeological evidence. But, you know, the order of the dead on the river Acheron was simply a lakeside precinct. Maybe even the word precinct is too formal. The side of a lake or maybe a rock jutting out over the Acherosian lake. The Acheron river flooded out into a sort of marshy lake, which is what our sources focus on. And it's a simple start. It's a simple start. But that's not good for tourism. And I have to say, I do think that the archaeological, the Greek archaeological service is not as dissociated from the Greek tourist service as it should be, or at least their interests aren't sufficiently differentiated. And so, back from, I think, from the 50s, he started work on it. We have Ceterius da Caris excavating what is clearly basically a farmhouse with an interesting cellar or possibly a system underneath it, which is a nice sort of cave with a vault and that cave-like structure with a vault and declaring, sorry, this is a Tefira. So, you know, beside the Acheron, and you claim that this was the Acheron Necromanteon. And, you know, you can go there today and buy a booklet, you know, and look around the place and this will explain how this was the Oracle of the Dead and go a little tour around it and look at the places where you were fed drugs to help you hallucinate. Yeah, the beans, right? The hallucinogenic beans. Yeah, exactly. And they'll show you bits of a machine, which was a ghost machine, a machine for wheeling out ghosts. Actually, in fact, they're just bits of catapult on catapults because the place was destroyed in a siege by the Romans. And so, but what I mean is it's fascinating that there's this desire to understand ancient Necromanteon in terms of a sort of Disneyland experience, you know, which, you know, clearly wouldn't have made any sense at all to the ancients themselves. Yeah, I mean, you basically, you went to sleep and you saw the ghost in your sleep. It's as simple as that, really. Yeah, we're going to get to that. But it's very, yeah, it's very interesting. People nowadays tend to sensationalize it almost like it's a, like you said, a theme park experience. I find it very, you know, funny because this wasn't, they weren't like people. I think it's the romanticization people do nowadays. They tend to put these dark kind of aspects on to things like the mysteries and to dream divination and to Necromancy. I mean, obviously there were aspects that were dark about it, but like these people are asking very sometimes very basic but also very existential questions that aren't necessarily also conducive to this edgy kind of satanic theme park that people tend to think of it nowadays, you know. So you just mentioned it now, but in tying into this previous question, let's talk about the technology itself. Let's talk about a very important, perhaps the most important aspects of Necromancy besides Skull Necromancy. Could you discuss incubation? You just touched upon, you know, going to sleep and that's what basically happened. But people would go to these places, especially the tombs of the dead and they would more in a sense go to sleep, right? So what is incubation? Tell us more about it. Yeah, I mean, it should be said that the practice of incubation is broader than Necromancy specifically. In fact, it's most familiar in connection with the cult of Asclepius and similar healing gods where you would spend the night in their temple or in a special sleeping house, a Coimaterion. I think this is a word cemetery, a special sleeping house adjacent to the temple. And there the god would visit you in a dream and either cure you directly or tell you what you needed to do to be cured. So that was, I mean, that was quite a big deal and to a certain extent taken over by Christian healing shrines as well later on. But in terms of, yeah, and unfortunately, because all our evidence for Necromancy, almost all of it is, shall we say, of a sort of fantastical sort. Our stories, our narratives will say, you know, so and so went to such an oracle of the dead and they called up the ghost and they said, they had this conversation. You know, and you want to say, hey, yeah, hey, wait a minute, wait a minute. But what do you mean by calling up a ghost? I mean, how did you actually experience the ghost? And the only source to sort of take, to discuss this in any sort of realistic way is a Plutarch. It tells the story of Elysius of Turin and he doesn't actually specify which oracle of the dead he's talking about, probably it's a verness. And he says, you know, basically, the chap wanted to know why his son had died. And so he went along to the Necromancy and the oracle of the dead. He made the customary sacrifices, not explained, it's all quite brief. And then he went to sleep and then he experienced a visit from the ghost, both of his son and of his father, in fact. And so that's the only sort of text we have that attempts to describe a Necromancy experience in realistic terms. And so we have to run with that. That's the best we've got, I think. And yeah, just to finish off the story of Elysius, if you're interested, he's told that it was best for his son that he should have died when he did, which you might think is a pretty unexciting, bland answer. But I think the point being made is a bit like the story of Cleobish and Byton, if you know that, that they were killed at their best time and had they lived on, they would have disgraced themselves. So basically this lad was killed at a time before he went off the rails and went to the bath. So that's Plutarch's story. But of course incubation, or I should say sleeping more generally, is a common way of experiencing ghosts spontaneously. And that's a very common notion in ancient literature, starting again with Homer, the famous dream of Achilles. And there he is, he's sort of keeping Petroclus unburied because he wants to make the most elaborate funeral possible. But Petroclus, now dead, doesn't care about any of this sort of honour, as it were, any of the sort of honour that is important in the living world, all he cares about is being given peace. And he says, get me buried quickly, I don't care how you do it, so that I can join the ghost on the other side of the river. Again, there's a river of some sort which separates the living and the dead. And he can't rest, he can't be at peace until he can cross that river and join the other dead. So yeah, so it means a very common notion that ghosts visit people in their sleep in the ancient world. And this is just, and so consulting a ghost as an oracle of the dead is presumably just a sort of a slightly more controlled way of interacting with the ghost. You speak to the ghost on your terms rather than on their terms, I suppose. Yeah, and it's also fascinating that I made some parallels, and this is just my own speculation, I just want to make sure everybody knows that, but just reading your book and the emphasis on incubation and doing these at tombs and just the restless dead and giving things, people who died before their time or without the proper burial rites, the proper send-off, it kind of reminded me of the, maybe the early years of the Jesus movement when there's such an emphasis in the Gospels, of course we can't take those necessarily as historical documents, but there is an emphasis at least rhetorically on the tomb, right, and the proper burial of Jesus and it made me kind of think of what are these apostles doing, especially when somebody like Paul says, I saw the Lord, right, is he just essentially maybe incubating in a way or are these visions essentially maybe dreams, you know, so it just made me kind of think of that a nice little parallel, perhaps for those of you who are religious studies nerds out there, something to think about. I'm getting back to the topic. So one, actually before we move on, I felt this very fascinating, I wanted to ask you a little bit more about it. So what is skull necromancy? Because you mentioned this like, there's these, the later literary kind of depictions of reanimation of corpses seems to give a nod to skull necromancy and I found this just topic very bonkers, so I didn't know if you used to touch upon skull necromancy before we move on. Right, well, so in many ways the most exciting literary, you have to say fantastical descriptions of necromancy, focus on not merely calling for a ghost but reanimating a dead body. Again, in Lucan's episode, the witcheric foe calls up a ghost and then inserts it into the body in order to reanimate it. But so obviously this is great stuff. I mean, can you imagine, you know, this making great movies, these reanimation sequences. And again, you're saying, you know, when you read these things and you enjoy them, you say, yes, but what can this possibly have related to anything that actually happened? You know, I mean, given we assume that one, even though he's a powerful agent, which could not in fact reanimate a dead body. You know, so you ask yourself, what is going on, what is there a reality behind this fantasy? And the nearest that I can come to a reality which is relevant to that is what you've said, skill necromancy. And we know about this really from the Greek magical papyri. So there's a spell, the Greek magical papyri I should say, and they're very curious and difficult things to work with. They're late antique for the most part, fourth, fifth century AD, written in Egypt, and they're just, they're all written in Greek, they're also papyri written in Demotic Egyptian, sometimes both, and they reflect not only Greek culture and Egyptian culture, but also Jewish culture. So they're a real blend, a real mishmash, it's often very difficult to know how to relate these to, you know, earlier Greek culture. But we do have one text, it's a fourth century text, which is thought, although the copy we have is fourth century, the contents are thought to be second century AD. So we're getting a bit further back with that. And these contain a recipe for basically calling up a dead man who can either sort of act as your sort of servant, your familiar, or again, you know, tell you stuff, necromancy. And basically, so you take a skull, and you perform rites on it, and then we're told the dead man is going to appear to you in your sleep. So again, incubation, or kind of incubation is going on again there, that is how you encounter your dead person. So yes, we assume that the skull that you operate on is the skull of the person that's going to appear to you. So that is sort of, that is meaningful, as it were, just about according to our way of understanding things. You know, you can sort of just about, yeah, I could just about think, yeah, I could get a skull, I could perform those rites on the skull, and I could go to sleep and hopefully get a relevant dream out of it. So since you are actually manipulating a sort of bit of corpse, you know, to get your necromancy, that seems to be the sort of the nearest, I think, to the sort of full body reanimations that we get in the literature tradition. So I think that's probably what lies behind them. And there are sort of other intimations of necromancy involving just sort of decapitated heads. So there's this wonderful story of Cleomanes. Cleomanes is supposedly mad Cleomanes, King of Sparta. Lots of great stories about him and Herodotus. One of the things he did, apparently he had a good friend when he was still Crown Prince, called Archonides, and he promised Archonides that when he became king, he would share all his councils with him. You know, he would ask his advice on everything, I guess, always share his rule with him. When he did become king, he changed his mind. So he cut off Archonides' head and then kept it pickled in a pot of honey. But he was true to his promise and always discussed his plans with his head. I think probably lurking behind that is the notion that he was somehow getting some sort of reply back, somehow or other, from this decapitated head. And then we have this tradition, very vestigial tradition, of the head of Orpheus. Now Orpheus was torn apart by the Thracian women and his bits were thrown into the sea. But his head, we're told, washed up on Lesbos and then took up residence in a nook in a cranny, which is a curious phrase, in a cranny. And there is one brilliant, brilliant pot in a classical red figure pot, which shows a man climbing down a shaft. He's got his hand on a rope that he's climbed down. And at the bottom of this shaft, there's a little, again, there's a nook within, a further sort of niche within the floor of the shaft. And in there is sitting Orpheus' head and he's reaching out to it. So he's having a conversation with Orpheus' head. And that is exactly it, I suppose, within a nook in a cranny, in a little hole, in a bigger hole. So, yeah, so that's... Skull necromancy, decapitated head necromancy for you. Yeah, I love that. I almost imagine Orpheus' head functioning akin to the serpent Glycon and how they did that whole deal with them. Maybe they had somebody in the back, like with those... Well, it's too hard to say, because all we have is the pot and a bit of Philostratus. I think it is. I think it's about a hundred and a half, and that's it, really. So, they're very different than what was going on there. Yeah, all this stuff is so colorful. And I second your call for Hollywood to make these into feature films. I always said that Keeley Stasius' Luccape and Clytophan should be made into some kind of big-budget feature. And they should do, like, Appelaus' golden ass, for sure. Let's make the antiquity cinematic universe happen, everybody. So, it's very... We've touched upon necromancy, and since you mentioned the PGM, or Greek magical papyri, I figured I'd just touch upon this briefly before we move on to the specialists themselves. We find many necromancy rituals, as you pointed out, in the PGM. And this is something we perhaps haven't touched upon as much, but, of course, deals and kind of intersects with curse tablets and the like. Another reason for necromancy often was also to have the spirits perform binding spells and things like that, or the spells for binding, they would have the spirit carry these out. Is that correct? Right, well, yes. But again, I'd go back to my pious definition at the beginning of the show. Yeah, that is something that you could manipulate ghosts through in the ancient world, but that isn't necromancy. So, yeah, there's this tradition of binding magic, which certainly is up and running by 500 BC and really doesn't really ever finish. Maybe Peter's out a bit in very late, late antiquity. And so these are curse tablets. And there are various ways in which these work, and sometimes one is using the gods in them, or typically underworld gods. Sometimes perhaps the tablets were thought to be just powerful in themselves, but very often these tablets are invoking ghosts to do the act of binding for them. Yeah, and then they could be placed in graves, even in the right hands of corpses to enact. And yeah, so these are binding curses. They're not just general curses. They are specifically binding curses, and they tend to specialize in particular areas. So the earliest ones are actually specialized in legal curses in binding the tongues of lawyers and things like that. Then we get competition curses where you're binding rivals in sport or in core competitions. In the Roman Empire you get some great curses binding charioteers and indeed the horses in the circuses. And you also get circle erotic curses, binding erotic curses, where initially you're binding the attractiveness and restraining the attractiveness of a rival lover, actual or imaginary, in order to get the girl you want or the boy you want. The erotic curses do morph in interesting ways, actually. But yeah, so that's another major use of the dead in the ancient world. So it's only necromantic in the modern expanded sense of the word necromantic, not in terms of the ancient context. Yeah, I think my favorite of the binding spells that they talked about in general is the vociferous competition between rhetorical teachers in antiquity, absolutely accuse each other of this kind of sorcery and binding. There's times very interesting. Just getting onto the common denominator of these technologies. The common denominator, of course, is what we call the ritual specialist, right? It's a good person doing any number of things, whether in a temple or maybe freelance kind of setting. So we have, you know, stupaks, like you said, prophets, the guy on the corner, even creating the incantation bulls and cursed tablets. I think one of my favorite ritual specialists is the professional dream interpreter, the onioropolis. So his dream is about Artemodorus by Peter Thelman, and he just mentions these onioropolis are ritual specialists come with these spells, and like every other ritual specialist, particular clients, these are figures of correct romance aside from the most lowest levels that's out in the book. It's very interesting how Artemodorus looked down on necromantic, you point out in your first book on ghost magic and witchcraft in the Greek and Roman world, and I don't know if you touched on this in the necromantic book you mentioned, but even footnotes. It was essentially trading in the same spells, but it's what you call the narcissism dances, right? So yeah, it's very interesting like you have these necromancers and diviners, but they all kind of, depending on what they're doing, they kind of look down on each other as like, you know, maybe a bush bit of a little class. Tell us about these ritual specialists, the myriad of technologies they use in their trade and emphasizing perhaps more on necromancy. We explore this topic. Right, I need to tell you that you're breaking up and I didn't hear quite everything you said about it, but yeah, I understand you want to talk about ritual specialists. Yeah, in terms of competitiveness between them, I'm not sure that we can really talk about that in the context of necromancy proper. We can talk about that more in the context of, well we could talk about that more in the context of medicine, maybe, where different kinds of medical specialists we're trying to shout each other down in the marketplace all the time and possibly also in the context of philosophy as well. But in terms of necromancy, well the necromancy is associated with all types really. You know, your standard witches and wizards get the necromancy associations, but perhaps the one specialist that's worth singing out in particular is the Sukhagogos. I mean, his soul trade, as it were, was necromancy. Sukhagogos means soul drawer, soul caller, I suppose. And again, shadowy, dark, to use your word, figures. Perhaps our best glimpse of them is an effragment of ischolus. And this is where ischolus is retelling the story of the deceased consultation of the dead. And in this tragedy, the chorus was made up of Sukhagogoi, these spirit drawers, these callers up of ghosts. And one of the fragments has them advising the deceased on how to talk to the dead. And he says, stand by this dirty murky lake. And here's my evidence for the acro-necromancy, this sort of configuration. Cut your sacrifice's throat, pour the blood into the water, and the ghosts, the night-wandering ghosts will rise up out of the water to speak to you. It's only a short fragment, but very atmospheric, very compelling. And Sukhagogoi seemed like very intriguing and mysterious people on that basis. There they're associated with a seemingly with an Oracle of the Dead site. At other times they seem to be more mobile. So for example, when the Spartans were having trouble, when they were being harried by the ghosts of Cassaniasta, the guy I mentioned before, the regent, because after the Spartan killed him, then his ghost in turn became angry and started harassing the Spartans. And they had to call in Sukhagogoi, again these ghost-manipulating specialists, in order to lay his ghost and get some peace there. And I think we sort of get a parody of Sukhagogos and Aristophanes' Birds, where we have Socrates calling up the ghost of Chariform. And part of that is a complicated joke, which we can't really go into fully, I think, here. But part of the joke there is that Socrates, as a sort of self-denying, otherworldly figure, looks a sort of ghostly in corpse-like, as the ghost he himself is calling up. So it's probably better in the original, funnier in the original than the way I tell it. So Sukhagogoi, I think, would be the... I mean, they're evanescent, they're really hard to get a hold of. But I'd say they are the specialists, off-specialists, when necromancy is concerned. Yeah, I was going to say, one of the reasons it's hard to get a hold of them is because they are sort of confined to these... confined to the order of the literary source, although there is actually a tablet from Dodona, the Oracle's use there, which was quite close to the Akron necromancy, which famously says, shall we employ Dorios the Sukhagogos? So they clearly did exist in the real world, they were pure fantasy. And there was somebody actively contemplating using them. Now, whether Dorios the Sukhagogos was based at the other local Oracle, who knows? He may have been. Wonderful. Yeah, I'd like to hope that they existed in real life, just how colorful those characters would be. So we've touched upon it, the whole show. And I wanted to kind of just ask this question to kind of hone in on it, because am I breaking up? I just wanted to make sure. You'll find out. You'll find out. Okay, perfect. So I wanted to touch upon the stereotypes of the Sukhagogos. We see a couple of stereotypes in particular. I wanted to touch upon the orientalizing, for lack of a better term, stereotypes that Greek and Roman antiquity had about these people. And also, something that's not just in regard to Sukhagogos, but also witchcraft in general, with the salient witches and people like this. They always seem to be from this area of towns, an area of the world. So I didn't know if you could touch upon that. Well, yeah. Well, as you say, this isn't specific to Necromancy. This is just sort of ancient magic in general. Well, yeah. I didn't know where to begin. Not many people would agree with me, but the way I see the story going is this. The ancients, way back in the archaic period and long before that, had a very clear idea of magic. They weren't using the word magic, but they had a very clear idea of something that we can call magic, witchcraft. And this was basically one grounded in folklore. And folklore in general, international folklore in general, is full of witches, which is especially also wizards for some extent. And there's, you know, every reason to suppose that the roots of international folklore are much older than classical antiquity. We've talked about the Odyssey as one of, you know, the early sort of second earliest text, and the ancient world grieves to us. And there we have a fully blown, a full blown, fully grown witch in Cersei, doing a whole range of, displaying a whole range of powers, which actually align very closely with the range of powers that the, that in the, from the beginning of the fifth century BC onwards, the Greeks are going to associate with people that they started to call Magoi or Magus, mage, magus, mage. Now that word, magos is derived from Persian. Magus. And they can't have, the Greeks can't have been using it much before about 500 BC, they wouldn't have been sufficiently in contact with the Persians. You know, for more than half a century before that. Now what is a magus, as far as the Persians were concerned, well it seems that, as you'll be familiar with the Persians and the Medes. The Medes were in fact, you know, originally a separate race, a separate people, and it does seem that the Magus was actually a priest in the Median religion. So, as far as the Persians were concerned, already a magus was a sort of, was okay religious but weird. Sort of religious but sort of weird, you know, and possibly that idea is then brought in and bought into by the Greeks that there is this male practitioner, who does things just like witches do, our ancient folkloric concept of the witch. So it's a bit like religion, but it's also weird. And that's the important, this book, Persian word. So, I think what's, what's significant of this sort of 500 BC or thereabouts point is that the Greeks are now deciding that men should be associated with this concept as well as women. So, I think that's the, that's the story of the origin of the word. Magus in Greek, Mage. Yeah, I mean one could come out with all the common places about the other, you know, about magic not being quite right and therefore something you associate with people other than Greeks. Well, maybe I tend to think that all the other ism is a bit tautological really. So, it gets associated with Persians, it gets associated with Chaldeans, who are well in the Greek imagination, a sort of special tribe that lives around Babylon. It gets associated with Egyptians as well. Actually, this the association of Egyptians with magic or witchcraft may be very ancient again for the Greeks, because already in the other sea that to go back to that text once more. We have Helen in book four, bringing back from bringing back with her from Egypt two sets of drugs. One which is harmful and one which one which is healing. These look very much like magical drugs. And she was given them by the wife of the pharaoh Phonis. So again, we're still in the female realm at that point. But already then already at that point. We're looking to the to the Near East for for for a meaningful association as it were. That's fascinating. I think my final question is going to touch upon just how ubiquitous or maybe not. Manipus was an antiquity. So the attitude of Greeks and Romans and antiquity towards necromancy is to say the least ambiguous. Yeah, it reaches its culmination culmination and the one of my favorites, Lucian and his writings about Manipus. And then you obviously you have figures like Meroe and Appelaeus Erecto like you've touched upon quite a bit during this show. And I remember even earlier. It was a fixture of tragedy you touched upon Escalus and things like the Persians but also interestingly. It was it was parody quite a bit and you just touched on Aristophanes birds. I find this fascinating because people like Lucian and Aristophanes. And the rhythm is like the South Park of their day that they're very very much in touch with the social currents, I would say. So what was it about necromancy that made it so susceptible to parody? Was it that widespread and antiquity? Well, it's very we have no data of the right of the sort to to tell us how widespread it was. We can say that the you know because of its huge impact is it's made for made on the classical literature that survives. We can say that the the idea of necromancy was pervasive. So, but in terms of in terms of actual practice, you know, there's no there's no way to make that that that that jump, you know, there's nothing that can give us statistics, you know. Why? Why was it so parodied? Well, I don't think it just seems to be. Well, the potential is just there, isn't it? It's hard. It's hard to say that there was, you know, one can't really say that there was one moral judgment about necromancy in the ancient world. You know, good guys. Like, it is used to bad guys. Well, I'm not sure if there is a bad guy really in contact with a Rick, you know, ostensibly bad guys like a Rick, they do it. Really, I think it seems to be as good or bad as the person practicing it very often. The one thing that people tend to have in common when they're doing it. They're desperate. So I suppose that sort of gives you an opportunity for the humor. Doesn't it? But again, I'm just trying to think about our own world. I mean, I suppose the nearest equivalent to a super go-gos in our own world would be the medium, you know, the Victorian style medium, you know, getting around the table and holding hands and saying, are you there, whatever. Well, if I think of that cultural trope, I think I think I know that more from parody than from actuality. Again, you know, there is just something in here funny about it, isn't that? Absolutely. And well said. So Dr. Ogden, before we go, did you have any final thoughts about this subject? I don't think so. I think we've talked about everything I hope you would talk about. And since you mentioned Lucian, how much do you like Lucian, can I just commend Lucian to your listeners? I think the most interesting thing about Lucian is the manipus is the text in which manipus is taken down into the underworld to consult the ghost of Tiresias, just as Odysseus had done before him. And that's a very interesting, amusing text for all sorts of reasons. Actually, one of the interesting things about that is that he goes down at Babylon, again, we talk about Chaldeans. He goes down at Babylon, taken down by these exotic wizard Mithrabazines. He spends one day in the underworld, one day traveling through the underworld, talks to Tiresias and then comes out again through the whole of Crophonius in Lebedire and Biosia in Central Greece. You know, we talk about three months traveling time between Babylon and Biosia, but it takes him just one day in the underworld. So what's been on there? How does underworld time, space relate to surface world time, space? And also on Lucian, let me also commend my favourite Lucian text of all, which is not actually the Alexander with Glyconian, which you did refer to as well, but the Philip Thuddees or the Love of Larn, which is a collection of ten amazing, wonderful, both thrilling and funny stories about, mainly about wizards of various kinds. And it's actually, that's actually the home of the story of the Sorcerer's Apprentice. It didn't begin with Disney, it didn't begin with Goethe. It began with Lucian. And that's a really, that's a, if your listeners are looking for sort of ancient texts to sort of help them get into the world of ancient magic, no better starting place than Lucian's Philip Thuddees. Yeah, many people are excited about all these reboots about, you know, the Hunger Games or Evil Dead. And I'm like, I want my Lucian cinematic universe. I want my, I want my Evil Dead style adaptation of Appalachus' Golden Ass. I want, I want somebody to make a parody film about, you know, Appalachus' Apologia. There's so much great stuff from antiquity that, you know, they could just be using and mining and they don't. They just, for lack. But yeah, Lucian is always amazing. I'm still trying to find a scholar to bring on to just discuss my boy. But someday it will happen, maybe in season two. Dr. Ogden, I cannot stress enough how much of an honor and how awesome this has been. Thank you so much. I want all the listeners to know Dr. Ogden is actually the first scholar to agree to speak to me and it's very fitting. And I can think of nobody else who would be the main event for the season finale than you. So Daniel, thank you so much. Feel free to use this time to plug any books you have anything going on. And then we'll wrap this up. Well, well, there's nothing, there's nothing that's terribly fresh. I mean, the last books I published were in 2021. And at that point I was talking about werewolves and yet again about dragons. That's another, I mean, dragons actually rather more than magic these days are my big thing. Amazing. Yeah, so check out his Amazon page. I look forward to all the wonderful subjects that you have to explore in the future. I hope to have you on again someday to perhaps discuss these dragons and werewolves because they're fascinating subjects. And people need to realize that these are not things that are from the modern or even early modern world. These are subjects that have been around for a very long time. Yes, I often say that almost every sort of stereotype you have about the witch, with the exception of the broomstick and the pointed hat, almost every conception you have about the witch is already there in the ancient world. Almost every conception you have about the dragon is already there in the ancient world and almost every conception you have about the werewolf, including the full moon, etc. is already there in the ancient world. Yeah, everything starts in the ancient world. Absolutely. So thank you so much, Daniel, Dr. Ogden. Thank you, everyone of you for watching, tuning in to the season finale. We will see you again in June to have more discussions with fantastic scholars such as Vulture Honegraf, Dylan Burns, Matthew David Lutwa, Justin Sledge, Celine Lilly, Matthew Goff, and others among them. So until then, thank you for tuning in. Thank you all for your support and take care. Bye.