#gruesome / grotesquely funny ways by an assortment of snakes

[catilinas]

was reading up on divination and necromancy and tate...i have questions:

“It is not, therefore, surprising to find the doctrine that human sacrifice is necessary to successful ghost-raising, and Cicero hurling against Vatinius the charge of sacrificing boys for necromantic purposes. It is a piling on of the horrors, a motive which inspires many of the extravagances of magical ritual, when the most powerful spell for coercing the presence of the dead is held to demand the sacrifice of an unborn babe, ripped untimely from its mother’s body (Lucan, Pharsalia vi. 556; Ammianus Marcellinus xxix. 2. 17). And another theory, which we have already noticed, doubtless assisted to cement the connection of human sacrifice with necromancy, the belief that in articulo mortis the spirit of the dying man hovered between the worlds of the living and the dead, and was able to give tidings of the future because it stood on the threshold of the next world.”

like whats all this then thought the pharsalia was about a fucked up city akdjsakld

IT HAPPENS............ if you haven't already read it im gonna point you towards greek and roman necromancy by daniel ogden for Necromancy Answers and probably also stuff on the greek magical papyri. which i unfortunately Have Not Read.

but honestly i don't think the baby-sacrifice in the pharsalia is even that big a part of the necromancy though? the thing about the spirit of a recently dead guy Lingering IS a thing even in homer (thinking about patroclus' ghost) but whether that ghost can see the future is v dependant on what you're reading bcs there is some but not much consistency in how the underworld works. like odysseus only gets a prophecy(ish) in the underworld from tiresias, who could see the future even when he was alive. vergil's underworld is like. you can know about the future there because it has already happened. less to do with where the ghosts are than the fact that the ghosts of people who haven't been born yet already exist.

and then the necromancy scene in lucan...... if you haven't read it i Extremely recommend it because it is just so weird and fun and fucked up. even before the ghost shows up (and refuses to talk about the future!!!) it's already temporally Weird, bcs erichtho summons the soul of a corpse that died in the battle of pharsalus...... when the battle of pharsalus Hasn't Happened Yet. the corpse is already from the future. althoughhh i do think the recently-deadness of the corpse (or uh. recently about-to-die-ness) is more important to the necromancy that the sacrificing an unborn baby part? the spell uses a lot of Weird Ingredients (including whatever 'moon slime' is supposed to be) that are kind of. in between aliveness and deadness. reminds me of the gifts pygmalion gives his statue in the met that are all things like. amber and and pearls and (presumably cut) lilies (funerary on main) things kinda uncategorisable as alive or dead. i think they can be read more as a spell to bring it to life (even if it was never dead) than as gifts. and sacrificing an unborn baby is like. how can you kill something that hasn't actually been born yet. the hashtag Liminality of what it is is more relevant than ooooohhhhhh human sacrifice. (im ignoring whatever cicero says about child sacrifice bcs he says a similar thing abt the catilinarian conspiracy and sallust is like yea he made that up. rip but i don't trust invective to contain real details of necromancy :/)

THE other thing about the baby-sacrifice thing in lucan specifically is that you might end up w weird/bad takes on necromancy in General if you don't think abt how lucan is making His necromancy specific to the pharsalia as a whole. like it's uhhhhhh metapoetic. erichtho is a vates. lucan is a vates. but lucan also (IN another quite meta passage) claims that the battle of pharsalus was so terrible that it means every generation born after it is effectively Dead...... maybe i am reading too much into this but wow that time-travelling apocalyptic battle sure can kill multiple things before they are born or it happens huh.

ALSO not to get into my undergr*d th*sis or anything but imo lucan is doing v interesting things w the figure of the matrona in the necromancy scene. especially in how the matrona was supposed to be involved in death rituals. like it's her job to clean the corpse and keep some hair and ideally catch the dying person's final breath in a kiss, symbolising the preservation of their Memory...... meanwhile erichtho's preparations for necromancy are like. steal some hair from a corpse. get another corpse. Wash It. she bites a corpse's tongue off in like a perversion of catching its final breath. she has messy, let-down hair which yea makes her look like a corpse herself but also makes her look like a mourning matrona. erichtho (and. dare i say lucan. let's not get into that) is like a fucked up and evil inversion of a roman matrona AND that's where the baby-sacrifice is relevant. bcs what's more the opposite of denying a dead person's legacy to continue than killing a child which is the living, physical embodiment of continuing legacy. ESPECIALLY if it's to replace that Memory Continuing Into The Future w a necromantic prophecy (= memory Of the future) that ends up not even doing that and just restating the infinitely repeating past.

anyway yeah have you considered reading the pharsalia. it's about so much more than just. a fucked up city :-)