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When Necromancy Goes Underground:
Talking Skulls, Tents and Other Divinatory Apparatus in the Greek Magical Papyri
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The practice of consulting the dead for divinatory purposes is widely practiced cross-culturally and is firmly attested in the Greek world, although in our literary sources it clearly plays second fiddle to the oracular shrines of Apollo and Zeus. Nonetheless, poets do speak of the underworld journeys of heroes, like Odysseus and Aeneas, to learn about the present or future and we hear of rituals of psychagogia designed to lead souls or ghosts up from the underworld. These are usually performed at the tomb of the dead person, as in the famous scene in Aeschylus' Persians, or at other places where the Greeks believed there was an entrance to the underworld. Herodotus tells us that the Corinthian tyrant Periander visited a nekromanteion, "oracle of the dead" in Ephyra to consult his dead wife (5.92) and that Croesus, when he performed his famous comparative testing of Greek oracles, sent questions to the tombs of the heroes. Amphiareus at Oropos and Trophonios at Lebedeia (1.46.2-3). In general, it seems that the popularity of certain Apolline oracles (Delphi and Clarus) grew during Roman Imperial times, as did that of various hero shrines where necromancy was performed. It is clear, however, that more personal and private forms of necromancy fell into disfavor, especially with the Romans, whose poets (beginning with Horace and Lucan) repeatedly depict horrible, ugly witches performing graveyard rituals or battlefield ceremonies that involve the handling and disfigurement of corpses. The Roman emperors, moreover, slowly began to make certain forms of divination illegal, cracking down first on private ceremonies and itinerant professionals, and then by the mid-fourth century CE more specifically on nocturnal graveyard visits and necromancy. In my paper I address the relative absence of necromantic recipes in the magical papyri and argue that at least two types of spell, a popular sunset offering charm to Helios and a series of spells connected to the Thessalian king Pitys, seem to reflect this anxiety when they try to reconfigure standard necromantic spells in such a way that the practitioner no longer needs to perform the spell at a graveside at nighttime. In particular I will show how explicit references to the older graveside rites are rendered innocuous by the use of ambiguous terminology, such as the Greek word skênos ("corpse" or "tent") and the word skyphos, which means both "skull" and "drinking cup". I will argue that just as we see various public cults domesticated and miniaturized in the PGM (e.g. dream divination at a healing sanctuary), we also see the same process with rites of necromancy, which are now uprooted from the graveside and performed in the privacy of one's own home.
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