Restless Dead

by Sarah Iles Johnston

  If tragedy and contemporary sources portrayed a reciprocity between the living and the dead, in which each depended upon the other, they also showed a heightened interest in the way that the world of the dead worked in itself. We hear far more than we did before about punish ments and rewards, although there is no certainty as to whether it is virtue or merely initiation into mysteries that guarantees a happy afterlife. Both the rewards and the punishments-but especially the punishments-are described with relish.82 We also hear about how the dead treat one another: according to some remarks, they were both socially stratified and ethically judgmental of one another.83 And we hear more about how one got into the Underworld in the first place; psychopompic figures, including Charon, Hermes, and Hades himself, are mentioned several times, as is Cerberus.84 Underworld geography is described in detail.85 None of these features are completely new, but there is a greater fascination with them in tragedy than in previous literature.

  CONCLUSIONS AND SOME METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES

  Some conclusions can be reached, but to support them we must revisit the Homeric poems in order to ask some methodological questions that could not be raised until all of our materials had been laid forth. I shall apply Ockham's razor, seeking explanations that require the fewest or least complex suppositions. First, the proposed conclusions:

  Like many peoples, the Greeks believed from a very early time that some special dead, such as the unburied and those who had died young, were angry with the living and had some means of harming them. In our earliest narrative sources, the dead do so only through the agency of divine entities such as the Erinyes. Correlative to this is the fact that from very early times, the Greeks, like many other peoples, believed that the dead benefited from-indeed demanded-attention from the living. Most of the dead, however, are presented in these earliest sources as being weak, unable to affect the living and, as Anticleia told Odysseus when he visited the Underworld, separated from the living by an uncrossable river.

  In narrative sources from the early classical period, we begin to see evidence for two new beliefs. First, the dead themselves can be a threat; they need not always work through agents such as the Erinyes, although they still do this as well.

  Second, the dead can be called back into action by the living in a variety of ways, including some that we might label "magical." They can be used by the living both as sources of help, as the Persian queen uses Darius, for example, or as means of harming others.

  In sources from the early classical period, particularly but not only tragedy, we generally see a great deal of interest in a variety of subjects connected with the dead, and especially in the possibility that the boundary between the Underworld and the upper world could be transgressed (in either direction). This may reflect, in part, tragedy's connection to Dionysus, but it also seems to reflect the fact that these topics were the object of significant interest and reflection at the time.

  In general, all of these observations suggest a hypothesis: Greek beliefs evolved from a system in which the dead were relatively weak and unlikely to affect the world of the living, except under very special circumstances and then of their own volition, into a system in which the dead were an active force in the world of the living and could be called into action when the living chose.

  It might be objected, of course, that our narrative sources may be defective informants, and that we are therefore constructing a faulty chronology and seeing "development" where none existed. Perhaps a belief in the active dead, and in the power of the individuals to put them to work, existed at the time when the Homeric poems reached their current form, but the poems' composer(s) either had no reason to mention them or did not wish to mention them. I grant that this is possible, but I find it unlikely for several reasons.

  Let us take up the question of opportunity first. As we shall see in the next chapter, one of the contexts in which the dead are most frequently called into use by the living is the agonistic context. That is, the dead are used in situations in which two or more people are competing and only one can win, such as a chariot race, a court case or a love affair. This is precisely the sort of situation that occurs frequently in the Iliad and occasionally in the Odyssey, and yet there is no mention, ever, of using the dead to gain a competitive edge. There are other incidents, too, where we might expect to hear about the active dead if a belief in them existed, such as the story of Althaea's cursing of Meleager after the death of her brother. But rather than calling on the ghost of her brother himself to avenge his murder (as a ghost might do in later sources) Althaea calls on the gods of the Underworld and they send up an Erinys, a divine agent, to work her curse. Similarly, Homer shows us an Oedipus who is haunted not by the ghost of his mother herself but by an Erinys to whom the ghost has delegated the task. To take another instance, the grieving Achilles makes no attempt to call up the ghost of Patroclus, as Gilgamesh calls up the ghost of Enkidu in another heroic epic. The ghost appears, but only of its own volition and precisely because it falls into the exceptional category of the unburied dead .16

  Which brings us to a second possible objection. Perhaps we do not see evidence for belief in a more active dead, and especially for belief in the possibility of the living invoking the dead, in these and other episodes where we might expect to find it because the poet thought it was inappropriate for his characters to hold such beliefs. This is one manifestation of a broader view that used to be fairly popular, namely that the "heroic" ethos of the Homeric poems, and particularly of the Iliad, rejects any taint of the supernatural because admirable men such as Achilles or Hector would have had no truck with it. Even E. R. Dodds, one of the first and most sensitive scholars of Greek beliefs in "irrational" phenomena such as ghosts, assumed that the "seemliness and epic dignity" of Homer's world would have been impaired if the poet had admitted such things. Under this approach, incidents such as Achilles' talking horse, the appearance of Patroclus's ghost to Achilles or the proleptic appearance of the suitors' ghosts to Theoclymenus are explained away in various fashions in order to preserve a Homeric world that keeps nicely to our own, modern standards of reality. Or they are grudgingly accepted but it is emphasized that such scenes are relatively uncommon in the poems, and probably accidental imports from other, contemporary but "less admirable" epics, such as the Thebais or Argonautica.87

  Interestingly, scholars who hold dear this view of the Homeric world never have any problem accepting the constant interference of the gods on the battlefield-even when it takes the spectacular form of the gods snatching their favorites away from danger in the middle of a cloudor the appearance of miracles wrought by the gods, such as the tears of blood that preceded Sarpedon's death and the wondrous conveyance of his body from the battlefield and home to Lycia afterwards. Nor do these scholars seem to have any problem accepting, for example, Hera's use of Aphrodite's magical kestos, Odysseus's use of the magical herb moly to avert the enchantress Circe (much less Hermes' prior possession of this herb), or the use of incantations by Odysseus's uncles to stanch the blood in his wound.88 We seem to glimpse behind this very carefully constructed worldview two unspoken rules:

  i. Fantastic occurrences are acceptable so long as they are wrought by the gods. This reflects an old attempt among historians of religion earlier in this century to divide "miracle" from "magic" on the basis of who performed it: gods (or rather, God) in the case of the former, mortals or demons in the case of the latter. Implicit of course is the assumption that the former is "good" and marks the hero who benefits from it as one of the "chosen" but the latter is "bad" and must be rejected. This presumed dichotomy between miracle and magic was rejected several decades ago by subsequent historians of religion after further research showed that it was inapplicable to almost any religious system other than Christianity and perhaps Judaism; those who continue to apply it to systems other than these reveal a completely inappropriate (and probably unconscious) Christianocentric bias. It must be emphasized that until very late times, there is nothing in
our sources that suggests that the ordinary Greek made any such division or rejected the mortal use of miraculous powers as "unethical" or "demonic."

  z. Fantastic occurrences are acceptable so long as they are wrought by females (Aphrodite, Hera, Circe). I hope that I need to say little about the problems in accepting this premise-it should be clear that it reflects, again, a presumption inherited from earlier generations of scholars, according to which most forms of magic, and especially disreputable, deceptive types of magic, were the business of women. As we shall see in chapter 3, the most important form of Greek magic and the one that relied on interaction with the dead (goeteia) was exclusively the province of men until the early imperial period.

  I note that neither of these unspoken rules takes care of the scene in which Odysseus's uncles sing incantations-this is usually passed over silently by the scholars who cling to an anti-magical view of Homer. But let us go back to the specific issue. Once we accept a more catholic Homeric worldview, in which such things as ghosts and magic are comfortably at home, is there still reason to assume that interaction with the dead, in particular, would have been rejected as somehow unheroic and thereby have been omitted from the poems deliberately, despite the existence of such a belief at the time when the poems were being composed? Did Homer or his audience, in other words, consider it to be intrinsically unheroic to call upon the dead?

  The first thing we must remember in considering this possibility is the fact that there are plenty of characters in the Homeric poems, such as Althaea and Epicaste, who have the opportunity to make use of the active dead if they wish and who are not bound by any heroic standards that might prevent them from doing so. If belief in an active dead, much less a belief in the power of the living to invoke them, was current at the time of the poems' composition, it is hard to imagine that the poet could so successfully suppress all awareness of it in cases such as these (as well as throughout the extensive nekuia of Odyssey i i ), particularly given the slippages that occur elsewhere in the poems-the contradictions, the anachronisms, the minor inconsistencies of plot. It is far easier to assume that he simply did not know of any such belief.

  Secondly, even if it were considered unheroic to call upon the dead, the heroic stature of any given character could scarcely be affected by the unsolicited appearance of a dead person at the dead person's own initiative. In fact, Patroclus's ghost does exactly this, without any apparent damage to Achilles' reputation. If we were to try to construct some rule to explain this episode while preserving the general rule that Homer suppresses belief in the return of the dead, we would end up with an absurd premise such as "the unburied dead make honorable ghosts and are allowed to appear so long as they articulate heroic values in their interaction with the living, but all other ghosts would be unheroic no matter what they said." Nor does Theoclymenus's proleptic vision of the ghosts of the newly dead suitors, on their way down to the Underworld, cast any unheroic shadow on Theoclymenus. His own audience laughs and calls him senseless, but we, the omniscient audience of the poem itself, are meant to accept and respect his vision.

  Finally, to return to an observation made earlier, when in later times belief in a more active dead does become common, and the dead begin to be used against competitors in agonistic situations, there is no evidence that any censure is attached to the process. Nor does there seem to be any censure attached to consulting the dead at oracular shrines, for example. The dead were understandably approached with a hesitancy born of uncertainty concerning the mood they might be in, but not with any hesitancy born of shame. If we are to assume that it was unheroic for the Homeric warrior to use or even interact with the dead, we must also assume either that standards of acceptable behavior changed quite a bit between the composition of the poems and the late archaic age or that the Homeric hero was always an extraordinary character, held to standards that not even members of the earliest audiences of the poems would have embraced for themselves. Again, I think it far easier to assume that belief in an active dead was absent at the time when the poems were being composed.

  As I said earlier, I believe it is best to look for the simplest explanation for Homer's omissions. I trust that this brief discussion has demonstrated that any approach other than assuming that Homer was unacquainted with the beliefs we see well attested in later sources requires elaborate and unlikely presumptions. Thus, the conclusions I proposed at the beginning of this section seem to offer a good working model of how Greek beliefs evolved. Some further support will be added to this model in the next chapter, where I examine non-narrative evidence and attempt to show, in several cases, how rituals in which the living interacted with the dead developed and changed. In chapter 3 I discuss the model as a whole and offer some reasons that the beliefs developed as they did.

  Rituals Addressed to the Dead

  Reprinted here with the kind permission of the Associated Press.

  SINGAPORE (AP)-There is probably nothing to worry about, but people in Singapore believe that the gates of hell opened yesterday.

  Chinese tradition holds that the gateway opens during the seventh lunar month-Aug. 3 to Sept. i in the Western calendar this year-freeing the spirits of the dead to roam among the living.

  Restless spooks are said to visit their living relatives to share in the comfort of their homes. But the ghosts of those who died without descendants, or who were ignored by their kin while alive, may wander the streets, hungry and envious.

  Unless appeased with food and entertainment before they return to hell, these wayward spirits might cause mischief, according to tradition. So open-air puppet shows, Chinese operas and pop concerts are staged for the dead and their descendants, and hungry ghosts are invited to public feasts, which usually consist of chicken, pork, rice and fruit.

  To ease the ghosts' passage among the living, ancestor worshippers can obtain make-believe passports called "permits for the souls." Pocket money issued by the Bank of Hell also is available. The fake currency-so called "hell money"-is set aflame by worshippers.

  "It is a month for being jittery. Believers avoid going out at night. Some may forbid their children to do otherwise perfectly normal things like going swimming," said one Singaporean.

  Excerpted from a story that ran in U.S. newspapers in August 1997

  In chapter i, I used evidence from narrative sources to examine ancient Greek beliefs concerning the dead and how they changed over the course of three centuries or so. Now I turn to other types of evidence, both to test the accuracy of the conclusions reached earlier and to try to extend them. We cannot proceed chronologically here, as we did in chapter i. Although the dates of individual pieces of evidence remain important, the pieces cannot be sorted neatly into packets according to date, or even genre. My approach, instead, will be a topical one.

  In deciding which topics to discuss (there are too many for all of them to be included), I have looked for those that might provide good tests of the hypotheses offered in chapter i. In particular, I have tried to collect evidence that gives us insights into what the Greeks really believed about the dead, in order to verify what might otherwise, perhaps, be dismissed as literary topoi. This means that I have paid particular attention to our evidence for what the Greeks did about the dead-that is, for actions performed by the living in expectation of affecting the dead, for rituals involving the dead. A number of them, as we shall see, were similar to the Singaporean rituals described in the newspaper story quoted above, in that they attempted to please, appease, and thus keep away the potentially angry ghosts.

  Of course, the questions of what rituals "mean," of how their interpretation must be approached, and of how they can be used to enhance our understanding of religious beliefs are thorny and much debated. This is not the place to rehearse all the arguments made during the past century; I shall simply acknowledge that I approach the study of Greek ritual with the assumption that careful analysis and sensitivity to the nature of the sources will enable us to recover, at least in part, the religious
beliefs that underlay them. Certainly, caution is necessary: for some individuals in ancient Greece, as in other cultures, participation in a ritual signified nothing more than a realization that it was to his or her social advantage to participate; participants need not have believed in a ritual to go through its motions. Moreover, not every participant in a ritual understood its aim to the same extent as others, much less knew why it was supposed to work. And yet, at least some of the participants in a ritual must have believed that it would really accomplish what it claimed. Otherwise, the ritual would either have died out or have metamorphosed into another ritual that more directly addressed and expressed the hopes of the participants.

  RITUALS FOR-AND AGAINST-THE DEAD