Thus, from the time of the Homeric poems to the early classical age, we pass from a situation in which the dead were believed to interact with the living only under very specific circumstances-when their bodies were unburied, for example-and then usually at their own discretion, to a situation in which the living believed that they could invoke the dead at their pleasure for almost any reason, and particularly to harm others; the dead were now a significant source of potential problems. The extremes of both paradigms were found elsewhere in the ancient Mediterranean: there were societies that believed that the dead were completely cut off from the living and societies that believed in vigorous and continual interaction between the two, much of it at the behest of the living.4 And yet, the switch from one to the other within a single culture and a fairly short time can scarcely have been by chance. What might have led to this change among the Greeks?
ENCOUNTERS WITH OTHER CULTURES
We should begin by pausing on the observation that there were other Mediterranean peoples who believed that the interaction between the living and the dead was more frequent and varied than the Greeks did. Two of them are cultures that also had frequent contact with the Greeks during the so-called "orientalizing period," which preceded and coincided with the changes we are discussing: Mesopotamia (which was, during most of the time that interests us, part of the Assyrian Empire) and Egypt. As other scholars have demonstrated, the Greeks borrowed many artistic, religious, and literary ideas from these cultures; it is worth considering whether they borrowed some aspects of their beliefs and practices regarding the dead as well.' Although the borrowing was neither wholesale nor a matter of simply adopting foreign practices as they stood, we shall see that Greek interaction with these cultures did have an effect on the way they viewed the dead.
Mesopotamia. The Mesopotamian dead were an extremely active lot, and there were many ritual texts describing ways for the living to control them. In some, we learn that, like Greek ghosts, the Mesopotamian dead would return to persecute the living because they were unhappy either over the circumstances of their death-they had died in a lonely spot or in a gruesome manner-or because they had been mistreatedsurvivors had omitted to bury the deceased or to care for them after death. As in Greece, the effects of the anger of the Mesopotamian dead varied, although most of them might be described as "psychological": they might make a victim sleepless, nauseated, crazed, short of breath, or anorexic; cause cold sweats, hot flashes, frenzy, or pain in any part of the body; bring on miscarriages or neonatal sicknesses. Any of these conditions might be fatal.6 Ceremonies designed to assuage these potentially dangerous souls usually included orally invoking the ghost so that it could rise to receive offerings. Regular offerings were also made to the ghosts every month at the time of the new moon, which reminds us of those made to the dead and their mistress Hecate at the time of the new moon in Greece; in both cases, the intent seems to have been to stave off attacks of the dead by preventing them from becoming unhappy in the first place. The Mesopotamians often expected something more in return from the dead than simply to be left alone, however. Once invoked to receive their nourishment, the dead might be asked to carry out tasks for the living. Most of the tasks were defensive: the ghost might be asked to rid a kinsman of illness, for example, or even to drag another, harmful ghost back to the Underworld.7
A ghost might also be asked to prophesy while he was back on earth or even be invoked specifically for that purpose by means of magical ointments and the filling of a ditch with offerings; the latter technique, of course, reminds us immediately of Odysseus's actions at the border of the Underworld. Mentions of necromancy begin to show up in Mesopotamian texts about 900 B.C.E. It played a significant role during the reign of the Assyrian king Esarhaddon (681-669 B.C.E.) and was popular thereafter. Indeed, giving advice to the living must have become an important aspect of the ghost's interaction with the living, for as JoAnn Scurlock notes, one of the words for ghost (etemmu) was etymologized by Mesopotamian scholars to mean either "opener of ears" or "sayer of orders." 8 As Brian Schmidt has shown, there is no evidence at all for necromancy in other eastern Mediterranean cultures (including the Levant, Egypt, and Anatolia) until about the time of Esarhaddon's reign.9 Thus, he concludes, it is likely that other cultures adopted the idea from the Mesopotamians; contact would have been facilitated by Esarhaddon's expansion of the Assyrian empire into Egypt and the eastern regions of Anatolia. It is at about this time, too, that evidence for ritualized necromancy begins to show up in Greece, and it seems likely that the Greeks adopted the idea from the Mesopotamians as well, either directly or through contact with one of the other cultures that had already done so. Similarly, scholars have argued that another Mesopotamian divinatory technique, hepatoscopy, made its way westward during the same period.10
Mesopotamian magicians also used the dead offensively in a variety of ways." For example, we hear of ghosts being told by magicians to "seize" victims, which reminds us of the Greek inscriptions from Selinus and Cyrene discussed in chapter z, in which ways of warding off attacking ghosts are described. We also hear about Mesopotamian practitioners "marrying" victims to ghosts; we do not know exactly what this was supposed to do, but it certainly does not sound good. Practitioners might also place a figurine of a victim in a newly dug grave-even in the lap of a corpse. The ghost of the corpse was expected to carry the victim off to the Underworld, which surely would have had deleterious effects. Some portion of the victim-fingernail, hair, even semen-might supplement or replace the figurine.12 This rite has analogies in the Greek use of figurines to curse enemies and may have been borrowed by the Greeks from the Mesopotamians (although the Egyptians had a similar practice as well, suggesting another possible point of adoption); the Greeks, too, often added some physical remnant of the intended victim to the doll.13
There were many rituals designed to "cure" those who suffered from these ghostly attacks, as well as many amulets and ointments against them (some for the body and some to be smeared on strategic places such as the door of the house). Often, a figurine made of clay or wax was used to represent the ghost. It might be treated well: be offered food and drink and literally "sent down the river" with traveling provisions or be buried if it represented the ghost of an unburied person. Or the figurine might be treated badly: be burned or melted.14 This Mesopotamian idea that a ghost might be controlled through the manipulation of a statue is similar to the Greek practice of binding or exiling statues that represent dangerous ghosts, examined in chapter z; the latter may be a development of the former.15 Alternatively, the suffering individual might be assimilated to a pig that was then killed, as if to fool the ghost into taking the animal's life instead. As Burkert notes, variations of this practice show up in the Roman method of averting child-killing demons by killing pigs and in the Greek method of purifying blood guilt through the sacrifice of a piglet.16 As in the Greek and Roman cases, spoken incantations accompanied all of these rites, which were addressed both to the ghosts themselves and to gods assumed to control them.17
This brief survey suggests that there may have been both broad and specific Mesopotamian influences on Greek beliefs concerning the dead. Broadly, the Mesopotamian belief in an active dead, awaiting the beck and call of the living, may have suggested to the Greeks that all of the dead (not just the unburied or unhappy) were able to return to the upper world and that they could be compelled to serve the living as well as injure them. More specifically, the Greeks may have adopted particular Mesopotamian uses for the dead, such as necromancy, or particular techniques for controlling them, such as aversion through piglet blood and manipulation of statues that represented them.
Egypt. Like the Greeks and Mesopotamians, from earliest times the Egyptians blamed their unhappy dead for causing all sorts of problems, including bad temper and marital discord, as well as serious illnesses and obstetrical disasters.18 The reasons for their unhappiness were the same as in Greece and Mesopotamia as well: they had not been buried properly, the
y had been murdered, they had died too early.
In contrast, techniques for sending dead spirits against other people, like those the Mesopotamians and Greeks used, do not show up in Egypt until the imperial period, long after native Egyptian magic had been influenced by other cultures. The closest analogue to any such thing in earlier Egyptian sources are the so-called "letters to the dead," extant examples of which date from Dynasty 6 to late Dynasty zo (about z300-Izoo B.c.E.). These were sent by living members of a family to those who had died.19 The fact that some of them were inscribed on bowls or vases implies that they were accompanied by offerings of food or drink. In most cases, the letter complains about the way that the survivor is being treated by some other member of the family or a family friend; in a few, the complaint concerns illness or misfortune that has been caused by another ghost. In all of them, the dead addressee is asked to intervene on behalf of the afflicted person. The specific way in which the dead individual is to do this is not usually stated, although in one letter the petitioner asks that the dead appear in his dream, fighting against an illness on his behalf, and in another letter dead parents are asked to seize another ghost to stop it from harming their children.20
It has been argued that these Egyptian letters to the dead were the models for the Greek curse tablets, primarily because both were written messages to the Underworld. The fact that some curse tablets were pierced with nails after having been rolled or folded is adduced as additional proof; this action is understood to be a variation of the Egyptian practice of piercing figurines that represent accursed enemies (a practice found in Greece and Mesopotamia as well).21
The seven- to eight-hundred-year gap between the youngest letters to the dead (thirteenth century) and the oldest curse tablet (late sixth or early fifth century) should caution us against leaping to conclusions, however. Moreover, there are significant differences between the letters and the tablets, which have been overlooked. The first concerns the addressees. The letters were sent to deceased family members who might be expected to help not only out of affection for the writer but also out of concern for the welfare of the family as a whole and for the continuance of their own funeral cult. "Who then will pour out water for you [if you refuse to help us]" says one letter, for example.22 The messages on the curse tablets, in contrast, are usually directed to Underworld deities such as Hecate and Hermes, who are expected to rouse dead souls into action; there is no indication that these souls are members of the sender's family and in fact, as noted in chapter z, there is every reason to believe that they were not. Notable, too, is the difference in types of requests made. The letters focus on what can be called matters of "justice"-claims concerning stolen inheritances, for example, or complaints of wrongful prosecutions. Although matters of justice are brought up in some curse tablets, primarily from later periods,23 most of them demand help in affairs that have little or no relation to it. Indeed, requests to ruin another merchant's business, for example, which are frequent in the curse tablets, are far from just, at least by our standards, even if we concede that in the ancient business world such requests represented just another technique for getting ahead. The tone of the letters differs from that of the tablets as well. The letters begin with the same sort of greeting as do Egyptian letters between the living and continue in that fashion ("How are you?"), even if the emotions of the writer occasionally drive him or her to rather heated expressions of anger.24 The situation in which the plaintiff finds himself is sometimes described in detail and the reasons that he deserves help are spelled out. In the tablets, we seldom hear much about the circumstances that have compelled the plaintiff to invoke the dead: the purpose is stated in a rather brief and businesslike manner. A final difference lies in the fact that the scribes of the Greek curse tablets and their clients remain anonymous, whereas those composing the Egyptian letters make no attempt to conceal their identity.
The curse tablets also betray a greater debt to oral commands than the Egyptian letters. Although the letters were read aloud at the time of their deposition, they were composed like written documents, as if the oral performance were secondary to the letter itself. The earliest curse tablets, in contrast, consist of a victim's name alone, and we must assume that the plaintiff's orders about what should be done to the victim were pronounced aloud when the tablet was deposited. Later tablets usually go into more detail, but frequently employ phrases that remind us of ritualized pronouncements. Some use phrases that we would call "performative utterances," such as "I bind so-and-so!" The overall ef fect suggests that the Greeks were translating oral formulae into a written form; the famous "binding song" of the Erinyes in Aeschylus's Eumenides provides a perfect example of what such oral equivalents would have sounded like.25 As I discuss below, practitioners who specialized in invoking the dead were credited with using epoidai (sung spells) at least as frequently as curse tablets, and there is generally a strong connection between these practitioners and the power of both music and the spoken word. This aligns with a broader trend in Greek magic, which, as David Frankfurter has argued, is primarily oral in nature in contrast to the scribal nature of Egyptian magic. Indeed, in the spells of the later magical papyri, where Greek and Egyptian methods meet, we sometimes find the practitioner instructed to pronounce a spell aloud even as he is inscribing it to the chthonic gods and souls of the dead, as if the spoken component could not be set aside even when the technique of writing was used.26
In sum, although the curse tablets and the letters share the unusual characteristic of being a written means of soliciting help from the dead, beyond this they are quite different. Indeed, if we seek a thematic equivalent for the Egyptian letters in Greek practice, we come closer with oral invocation of familial dead such as we see in the Choephoroi: there, Orestes and Electra call upon their father to help them redress the desperate situation in which they have been placed by their mother and remind Agamemnon that the continuance of his family line, as well as their own lives and the avenging of his murder, depends upon his intercession.27
In fact, it is easier to imagine that the Greeks developed the idea of writing to the dead independently of any Egyptian influence. Such a development could reflect a belief that written curses were more powerful than spoken, which accords in turn with the broader cultural belief (which we begin to see in the late archaic period, about the same time as the curse tablets first appear), that the written word had a special efficacy. Its tangible, physical existence intensified the message it conveyed, whether that message were directed to a spirit of the dead on a lead tablet or to the general public on an engraved stele.28 Inscribing the words in an unusual way-as was often the case in magic-intensified their power even further. Of course, writing something down also is more tangible in the sense that the words do not die away as they are spoken. A written invocation of the dead could "pronounce itself" over and over again, as long as it existed, compelling them to harm the hapless victim ad infinitum.29 This rule is proven by its inverse: late stories tell of how injured people were miraculously cured when curse tablets and other magical paraphernalia that had been directed against them were discovered and destroyed.30
Summation. From early times, both Egyptian and Mesopotamian beliefs assumed a cosmos in which the dead were constantly interacting with the living, both at their own initiative and at the request of the living. This is in contrast to the picture presented in our earliest Greek sources, which suggests that although some unhappy dead might come back under special circumstances, in general the dead were weak and separated from the world of the living. Thus, the change in Greek attitudes toward the dead during the orientalizing period can be explained in part by hypothesizing that the Greeks encountered new ideas amongst the Mesopotamians and Egyptians. Some specific Greek techniques for interacting with the dead may have been adopted from these cultures as well. The use of figurines to represent and control troublesome ghosts, the invocation of souls specifically for necromancy, and sending the dead against one's enemies may have come
from Mesopotamia; the possibility of invoking familial dead for help in times of trouble may have come from Egypt, Mesopotamia, or both. Burkert's suggestion that the Greeks borrowed methods of solving problems caused by the dead from Eastern cultures goes along with this idea, for it would be natural to adopt solutions to problems from the same place as one adopted the means of causing them. Other rites, such as offering food, libations, and other gifts to the dead, were probably always part of Greek cult (one may wish to nourish one's dead even without being afraid of the consequences if one does not) but such rites may have taken on additional significance following Greek exposure to foreign rituals in which, for example, gifts were used to invoke souls. In the Iliad, Achilles' funeral gifts to Patroclus seem designed simply to please the departed man but by the time of Aeschylus, Clytemnestra is using gifts to bribe Agamemnon's ghost to leave her alone and Atossa is using them to help persuade Darius's soul to appear. Other Greek techniques, such as the use of curse tablets, probably developed once the belief in an active dead was in place, and are innovations that reflect aspects of the Greek mentality that were widespread at the time, rather than being specific to magic.
Restless Dead Page 11