The other head of divination is called goeteia, or manganeia; it has very many modes.
The chief mode is the one which some, wrongly following Iamblichus, dare to call theurgy, covering a very shameful thing with the cloak of an honorable name, as Peter Le Loyer has accurately taught. Others call it more correctly psychomancy, psychagogy, or psychopompia. Apuleius calls it a sepulchral song; in common usage, by a Greek name, we call it necromancy.
[margin: Leviticus 20; Deuteronomy 18; 1 Samuel 28; Peter Le Loyer, On Specters, book 4, chapter 4; Augustine, City of God, book 10, chapter 9; Claudian; Apuleius on sepulchral song]
The Gentiles practiced this art in certain places which they thought to be mouths of hell, as on the western shore of Gaul, among the Thesprotians, at Tarentum, at Avernus, among the Cimmerians, and at Heraclea. They used certain rites by which they thought they summoned the Manes. Our poets describe these rites accurately. Horace writes in Satire 8:
By incantations and poisons they disturb human minds. I cannot destroy or restrain these women by any means as soon as the wandering moon has lifted her lovely face; they gather bones and harmful herbs. I myself saw Canidia, clothed in a black cloak, walking barefoot, with hair spread loose, and howling with the elder Sagana. Pallor made both horrible to look upon. They began to scrape the earth with their nails and tear a black lamb to pieces with their teeth. Blood was poured into the trench, so that from it they might summon the Manes, souls that would give responses. There was a woolen image, and another of wax. The woolen one was larger, that it might restrain the lesser with punishments. The waxen one stood like a suppliant, in the manner of a slave already about to perish. One calls on Hecate, the other on savage Tisiphone, etc.
[margin: Horace, Satires 1.8; marginal note on women of Melos tearing apart a lamb in a ritual of sworn compact; Del Rio’s numbered notes on the ritual elements]
Seneca, in the Oedipus, sings that Tiresias carried out this magic art in a grove darkened by the dense shade of trees, so that he might summon Laius:
When the aged priest brought his step here, the place did not delay: night stood ready. Then the earth is dug in a trench, and fires snatched from funeral pyres are thrown above it. The prophet himself covers his body in a deathly garment, shakes his brow, and a mournful robe covers his feet. The old man, sad in filthy dress, enters. A death-bearing yew binds his white hair. Two-year-old sheep with black fleece, and black cattle, are dragged backward. The flame seizes the feast; wine quivers with deathly fire; the victim shudders. Then he calls the Manes, and you who rule the Manes, and the one who keeps closed the barriers of the deathly lake. He rolls out a magical song, and, threatening with swift recitation, chants whatever either placates the light shades or compels them. Blood waters the ditches, whole cattle burn, and he saturates the cavern with much blood. Above this he pours the snowy liquid of milk, and with the left hand pours wine. Again and again he chants, and, looking at the ground, with heavier voice and in awe calls up the Manes.
I have added numerical notes so that you may understand that just as many ritual elements are expressed, with the utmost accuracy, in these verses, as that poet is accustomed to do. Anyone who wants more about them may consult our Adversaria and Commentaries, already published in past years.
[margin: Seneca, Oedipus, with Del Rio’s numbered notes on necromantic ritual elements]
Statius, however, added the number of the altars and victims, and certain other details, when he described this same summoning by Tiresias very copiously, though not very clearly. I shall add some light by writing down what belonged to the duty of those who promised commentaries. First, therefore, he indicates that Tiresias was accustomed to devote himself only to this kind of divination, neglecting the others:
He consults the gods, not with the abundant slaughter of bullocks, not with eager wing, or with entrails breathing truth, not with the entangled tripod or with numbers pursuing the stars, nor with incense-smoke hovering above the altars.
He then adds that Tiresias was accustomed only to call forth the Manes, and that he was going to do this then. First he had purified and fortified the Theban king who had consulted him, so that no harm would be inflicted on him by the Manes. Yet the first little verse is corrupt, and perhaps some preceding line has fallen out:
As deeply as the hard boundary of death lay open when the Manes had been called forth, he reports…
Soon afterward:
Beforehand he prepares the leader, and with the torn entrails of two-year-old sheep around him, and with the breath of odorous sulphur, and with fresh grasses and long murmuring, he purifies him.
Then, after describing an ancient, shadowy, and horrible grove, sacred to Hecate and infested with specters, he writes:
Here the aged prophet, because the earth is suitable for Stygian rites and the lonely places please him, rich with much gore, orders sheep and herds of dark fleece to stand black. Then he himself, handling the beasts by hand, wreathes their savage horns with iron-colored garlands at the threshold of the noted wood. First, in the earth hollowed out, he pours down nine times the streams of Bacchus, then the gifts of spring milk and Actaean showers, sweetened with blood. The more dry earth drinks, the more is heaped upon the Manes. Then he rolls up trunks of trees; and the sad priest orders three hearths for Hecate, as many for the Fates, and as many for accursed Acheron. For you, ruler of Avernus, although sunk in the ground, a pine altar nevertheless rises in the air above the mound; beside this, lower by its heap, an altar is raised for Persephone. The cypress covers the sides with leaves and all her mourned-for growth. Now the tall heads, marked by iron and by the pure libation of grain, fell into the wound. Then the newly married Manto, catching the blood in bowls, first offers it, and all the pyres, thrice encircled after the custom of her sacred parent, receive the severed fibers and the entrails still breathing. Nor does Tiresias delay the swift torches placed beneath the black leaves, and he himself felt the branches sounding in the flames and the sad heaps crackling.
[margin: Statius, Thebaid, with marginal glosses on iron-colored wreaths, altars for Hecate, the Fates, Acheron, Pluto, and Persephone, cypress in funeral use, and the first and second libations of blood]
Next follows his first magical song, for Papinius puts down two of them, by which he invokes Tartarus or the lower world, Pluto, Persephone, Hecate, Tisiphone, and orders the Manes of the Cadmean race to be allowed to go out freely, while the others remain:
Tartarean seats, and fearful realm of insatiable Death, and you, most savage of brothers, to whom the Manes are given to serve, and the eternal punishments of the guilty, and the lowest palace of the world: open the mute places to the one who knocks. Stern Persephone, bring forth the crowd hidden under hollow night, and let the porter return in his boat full of Styx. Bring your steps together; let there not be one simple rule for the shades when they return into the light. You, clouded Arcadian, separate the Elysian souls with your powerful wand. But those who died through crimes, many of them from Erebus and many from the race of Cadmus, let Tisiphone, shaking out her snake and going before with flaming yew, open day to them. Let not Cerberus, at his meeting, twist back the shades who lack the light.
At last the second and threatening incantation follows, since the prophet could not endure the delay:
And here Tiresias, when the shades were not yet coming, said: I call to witness the gods to whom we have consecrated these fires, and the bowls, and the earth torn up and given over. I can no longer bear the delay. Am I heard as an empty priest? Or must a Thessalian woman command you with raging song? Will you go whenever a Colchian woman, armed with Scythian poisons, drives you and Tartarus grows pale with trembling motion? Why is less care given to us? If it pleases me not to raise bodies from their tombs, not to empty urns full of ancient bones, not to dishonor the gods of the upper world and Erebus together, not to cut bloodless mouths with iron or pluck the sickly fibers of the dead, do not despise my slender years and this cloud on my darkened brow. I warn you: we too have the power to favor. For we know whatever you fear to have spoken or done, and how to trouble Hecate, and, unless you fear Thymbraeus, etc.; and the highest power of the threefold world, whom it is forbidden to know: him, but I am silent; tranquil old age forbids it. Now I shall eagerly…
[margin: Statius, Thebaid, second incantation and threat against the powers below]
From these verses of Papinius I have noted more than twenty ritual elements besides. To prove each one would be the task of an entire book. I add only this: from here two modes of necromancy are evident. One works through sacrifice and incantation alone, the mode Tiresias used. The other is the Thessalian mode, with more deadly rites added: bones and fibers of the dead, and other things plainly funereal. Lucan describes this in book 6, when he treats Erichtho raising the soul of a dead Roman soldier.
First, therefore, among the corpses, wavering in mind over which one she should take,
at last she chooses a body pierced through the throat, and with a hook inserted into the deadly knots the corpse that is to live is dragged over rocks and stones, and is placed under the high cliff of the hollow mountain, which sad Erichtho had condemned to her rites.
When she had the corpse there in her cave, which a shadowy grove made still darker, where no light ever came from the sun, she took on the clothing fitting the precepts of her art:
With discolored and variegated dress, the Fury clothes herself; her face is covered with loosened hair, and her terrible hair is bound with viperous wreaths.
Then she begins the work and applies the usual instruments, by which the body seems to be brought back to life:
First she fills the breast with hot blood, newly loosened from wounds, and washes the marrow with gore, and abundantly administers lunar poison. Whatever nature brought forth by an ill birth is mixed here: not the foam of dogs, to which water is a terror; not the entrails of a lynx; not the grim knot of a hyena; not the marrow of a stag fed on serpents; not the echeneis holding back a ship while the East wind stretches its cables in the midst of the waters; not the eyes of dragons; not the stones that sound when warmed under a pregnant bird; not the flying serpent of the Arabs, nor the viper born in the Red Sea, guardian of the precious shell; not the membrane of a Libyan cerastes still alive; not the ash of the phoenix placed on an eastern altar. After she had brought together those vile things, the pests that have names, she added leaves saturated with an unspeakable charm, herbs on which her dreadful mouth had spat as they were born, and whatever poison she herself had given to the world.
[margin: Lucan, Pharsalia 6, on Erichtho’s corpse, magical dress, poisons, the echeneis, dragon-stones, flying serpents, cerastes, phoenix ash, and cursed herbs]
After the herbs there follows a double incantation: first with howling, like Horace’s Sagana, and with the rough sound of wild beasts; then with a conceived and solemn song. Even today they put muttering before the words:
Then a voice, more powerful than Lethean herbs, compels the gods. First she poured out discordant murmurs, much unlike human speech. That voice has the barking of dogs and the groans of wolves, what the trembling owl complains, what the night-hag shrieks, what the wild beast hisses and the snake whistles. It expresses the crashing of waves against rocks, the sound of woods, and the thunder of broken cloud. The voice of so many things was one. Soon she explains the rest in Thessalian song, and with her tongue penetrates Tartarus.
[margin: Lucan, Pharsalia 6, on Erichtho’s animal-voice incantation and Thessalian song]
Two songs are then added, the first, like those earlier ones of Tiresias, a supplication, the second a threat. In the supplication she calls on the Eumenides, Styx, Chaos, Pluto, Death, the Elysian fields, Persephone, Hecate, Cerberus, the Fates, and Charon. She adds an entreaty in which she recalls her own merits and her constant worship of them, the murder of infants, and anthropophagy:
Hear my prayers, if I call you with a mouth sufficiently impious and polluted; if I have never sung these songs while fasting from human entrails; if I have often given full breasts and washed entrails with warm brain; if any infant, whose head and inner parts I placed on your platters, was going to live: obey the one who prays.
At last, when the shade, already appearing, was afraid to enter its own corpse and refused to do what she had commanded:
Erichtho marvels that such delays have been allowed by fate, and, angered at Death, beats the unmoved corpse with a living serpent. Through the hollows of the earth, in the clefts which her song had opened, she barks at the Manes and breaks the silences of the kingdom.
She does this with those threats of the old magi which Porphyry mocked and remembered. I find them expressed nowhere else so clearly. They are these:
Tisiphone and Megaera, safe from my voice, do you not drive the unhappy soul through the empty places of Erebus with savage lashes? Now I shall call you out by your true name, and leave the Stygian hounds in the upper light. I shall follow you through pyres, through funerals, drive you from all tombs, and expel you from every urn. And you, Hecate, who are accustomed to go before the gods with another borrowed face, I shall show in your pale, wasted form, and I shall forbid you to change the face of Erebus. I shall reveal beneath what immense weight of earth the feasts of Enna hold you; by what covenant you love the sad king of night; and by what defilement Ceres suffered you and refused to call you back. On you, worst ruler of the world, I shall send Titan through the ruptured caverns, and have you struck suddenly by day. Do you obey? Or must that one be compelled, whose name, when called, never fails to shake the trembling earth, who sees the Gorgon unveiled, who with his lashes chastises the terrified Erinys, who looks upon Tartarus though hidden from you, for whom you are the gods above, who swears falsely by the Stygian waves?
[margin: Porphyry on magicians’ threats against demons; Lucan’s threats by true names; Claudian’s imitation of the threatening conjuration]
Nor did she only do this. After she had driven the shade into its body, she also drove it to speak its fates, and promised it immunity from magical songs thereafter:
Tell me, says the Thessalian woman, what I command, for a great reward. For if you speak the truth, we shall guarantee you immune from Thessalian arts for the whole age of the world. With such a tomb, with such woods and Stygian song, I shall burn your limbs that your shade, though sung over, will hear no magi. Let it be worth so much to have lived again. Neither words nor herbs shall dare to loosen from you the long sleep of Lethe once death has given it.
She also added a song by which the shade was given knowledge of whatever she consulted. Finally, when the corpse had answered, the shade could not depart without Erichtho’s permission. She therefore grants it the power of returning:
Thus, after it had completed its fates, it stands sad with silent face and asks for death again. Magical songs and herbs are needed so that the corpse may fall, and fate cannot give the soul back to itself. Once the liver is consumed, she builds a great pyre with much wood. The dead man goes to the fires. Erichtho leaves the young man laid upon the kindled flame, at last allowed to die.
[margin: Lucan, Pharsalia 6, on Erichtho restoring the corpse, promising release from magical songs, and returning the shade to death]
That is, if a dead man could die, or be raised again by magical art. But the poet has spoken metaphorically of life and death with respect to the shade, as if it were the soul. In these verses there are thirty-two magical observances marked in this kind of divination.
To this second species, insofar as its practitioners commit outrages against the dead, the penalty of deportation, or death for low-status persons, was appointed; and by later law the death penalty was decreed by Constantine against summoners in either species. Tertullian uncovers the secret when he teaches that not the shades of the dead, but demons in their place, appear; that demons operate under the guise of souls; and that every appearance of an incorporeal thing in bodily form is a deception. Crespet gives new and old examples of demons who appeared and lied that they were the souls of the dead in his book On the Hatred of Satan, discourse 12, near the end.
[margin: Roman and imperial laws on sepulchral violation, magic, and summoners; Constantine’s law against summoners; Tertullian, On the Soul; Crespet, On the Hatred of Satan]
The earlier mode of Tiresias, in which the bare image or idol of the soul was displayed and was accomplished by invocation alone, was properly called sciomancy. The later mode, in which the Devil often simulated the figure of the whole human composite even when no corpse was present, for example when someone wanted to see the dress and bodily stature of Achilles, was ordinarily never obtained without the shedding of blood. For that reason Apollonius of Tyana, to show himself more skilled than others, denied that he had poured out blood. Strictly it was called necyomancy or necromancy. Glycas, discussing the verb kledonizesthai, writes that some take that word for the observation of all things, while others take it for evocation. For kledon, he says, is called the attraction of Genii by certain incantations and their bringing down from on high, the word being derived from kalo, “I call” or “I summon.”
Elsewhere the same writer put before us no obscure example in that Santabarenus, the pseudo-monk. He is said to have shown to the emperor Basil his dead son as if he were still alive. For he caused Constantine, by an imaginary appearance, to meet his father as a horseman in a certain wood. When the emperor thought he had seen him, embraced him, and kissed him, he soon lost him from his eyes as he vanished. He deceived the emperor, but not Leo the Philosopher, the younger son of Basil, who always regarded Santabarenus not as a saint but as a poisoner, as he truly was.
[margin: Philostratus, book 4, on Apollonius; Glycas, Annals, part 2, on kledonizesthai; Santabarenus, part 4, folio 45, and Basil]
The Sacred Scriptures seem to call this divination “divination by Python,” obviously using Python for a demon coming and answering from a deep cave of the earth. It is a thing full of danger, both to the magician himself, whom the Devil sometimes carries off and removes from the sight and society of life, as Franciscus Picus narrates of a certain man; and also to those who consult curiously, since some are driven from their minds and perish badly, as a certain king did in our own times. Who does not know the unhappy end of Heliogabalus, most devoted to this superstition? Under the old law the penalty of death was inflicted on both: on the consultant and on the one consulted. Nor are there lacking those who understand the saying of the royal psalmist about these practices: “They ate the sacrifices of the dead,” and that saying of Isaiah, “Should one seek from the dead on behalf of the living?”
Let this suffice concerning necromancy. On it there exists an ingenious work by Stephen Forcadel, jurist, in which he introduces the legal authorities Papinian, Africanus, Paul, and others, explaining their own answers.
[margin: 1 Kings/1 Samuel 28:7-8; Franciscus Picus, On Foreknowledge, book 4, chapter 9; Psellus, On Demons, book 2, chapter 3; Xiphilinus in the Life of Heliogabalus; Deuteronomy 18:11 joined with Leviticus 20:6 and 20:27; Psalm 105:28; Isaiah 8:19; Stephen Forcadel’s work on necromancy and legal authorities]