WEBVTT - The Necromantic Urge, Part 3 0:00:00.160 --> 0:00:03.880 But Macmore and Sodosmo were necromancers who came from the 0:00:03.960 --> 0:00:08.320 dark Isle of nat to practice their baleful arts in 0:00:08.440 --> 0:00:13.800 Tinniath beyond the shrunken seas. But they did not prosper 0:00:13.960 --> 0:00:17.400 in tinniaf for death was deemed a holy thing by 0:00:17.400 --> 0:00:20.599 the people of that gray country, and the nothingness of 0:00:20.640 --> 0:00:24.480 the tomb was not lightly to be desecrated, and the 0:00:24.600 --> 0:00:32.840 raising up of the dead by necromancy was held in abomination. 0:00:33.200 --> 0:00:37.000 Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio. 0:00:42.840 --> 0:00:44.879 Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My 0:00:44.960 --> 0:00:45.360 name is. 0:00:45.360 --> 0:00:48.920 Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and we're back 0:00:49.000 --> 0:00:53.640 with part three in our series on necromancy, the ancient 0:00:53.720 --> 0:00:57.720 practice of consulting the dead or the spirits of the 0:00:57.800 --> 0:01:02.080 dead for the purpose of divination of accessing hidden knowledge. 0:01:02.680 --> 0:01:05.640 Yes, despite the fact that a lot of our modern 0:01:05.720 --> 0:01:10.920 pop cultury uses of necromancy tend to involve raising of 0:01:10.959 --> 0:01:13.760 the dead. And actually that quote that I read at 0:01:13.800 --> 0:01:16.119 the top of this episode is from the nineteen thirty 0:01:16.120 --> 0:01:19.360 two short story The Empire of the Necromancers by Clark 0:01:19.360 --> 0:01:23.040 Ashton Smith, and it is full of raising the dead 0:01:23.600 --> 0:01:26.640 via the necromantic arts. But as we've discussed in these 0:01:26.680 --> 0:01:31.399 episodes so far, necromancy, as we loosely categorize it, is 0:01:31.480 --> 0:01:34.600 more situated in the realm of divination. 0:01:35.120 --> 0:01:37.640 Now. In the previous episodes in the series, which if 0:01:37.640 --> 0:01:39.480 you haven't listened to yet, you should probably go check 0:01:39.520 --> 0:01:42.839 those out first. But in these previous episodes, we talked 0:01:42.880 --> 0:01:48.920 about accounts of necromancy or pseudo necromantic legends from ancient China. 0:01:49.480 --> 0:01:52.800 We talked about accounts of how necromancy was practiced or 0:01:52.800 --> 0:01:56.480 may have been practiced in ancient Mesopotamia, including consulting these 0:01:56.920 --> 0:02:00.600 tablets that have descriptions of the incantations use and the 0:02:00.640 --> 0:02:03.200 potions to prepare if you want to speak to the 0:02:03.240 --> 0:02:07.520 dead through a prepared skull in a special ritual. In 0:02:07.600 --> 0:02:09.600 part two, we talked about a lot of accounts of 0:02:09.639 --> 0:02:12.920 necromancy as practiced or at least as used as a 0:02:12.960 --> 0:02:16.840 plot device in stories from ancient Greece and Rome, and 0:02:17.000 --> 0:02:19.680 today we wanted to come back and finish out the 0:02:19.680 --> 0:02:22.040 discussion by talking about necromancy a little bit more. 0:02:22.600 --> 0:02:24.680 Yeah, We're going to jump around a little bit here. 0:02:24.760 --> 0:02:26.360 Later on in the episode, I think we're going to 0:02:26.360 --> 0:02:32.320 get into some medieval Christian ideas about necromancy, what it was, 0:02:32.480 --> 0:02:35.040 and whether you should do it or not. A spoiler, 0:02:35.320 --> 0:02:37.720 they tended to say no, don't do it. But with 0:02:37.800 --> 0:02:39.280 some caveats I'll get into. 0:02:39.520 --> 0:02:42.359 I also want to interrogate the boundaries of necromancy a 0:02:42.400 --> 0:02:46.320 little bit and maybe pick apart the concept somewhat. But 0:02:46.440 --> 0:02:49.320 before we do that, there's a question that's been coming 0:02:49.400 --> 0:02:51.800 up because we've been looking at examples from the ancient 0:02:51.800 --> 0:02:54.520 world of how this may have been practiced, or at 0:02:54.600 --> 0:02:57.519 least was thought by some to be practiced in the 0:02:57.560 --> 0:03:00.800 ancient world. My question would be, well, how far back 0:03:00.880 --> 0:03:04.440 does it go? What's the earliest evidence we have of 0:03:04.520 --> 0:03:08.520 people trying to communicate or consult with the dead. 0:03:09.560 --> 0:03:11.639 Yeah, so let's get into that a little bit again, 0:03:11.840 --> 0:03:16.080 with the huge caveat that the term necromancy can be 0:03:16.160 --> 0:03:20.280 applied very broadly or very specifically, and is ultimately just 0:03:20.360 --> 0:03:24.160 a word. So with that in mind, I will refer 0:03:24.240 --> 0:03:27.760 back briefly to the paper The Origins of necromancyho or 0:03:27.800 --> 0:03:30.160 How We Learn to Speak to the Dead by Czech 0:03:30.160 --> 0:03:35.720 academic Andreis Kavkar. He argues for a connection potentially between 0:03:35.840 --> 0:03:40.160 ancient shamanistic practices and what we might think of as necromancy, 0:03:40.760 --> 0:03:44.800 with individual human beings often serving as psychopomps for example, 0:03:45.120 --> 0:03:49.200 you know, guardians, guie, there to guide one spirit from 0:03:49.200 --> 0:03:53.480 this world into the next. Other functions that would put 0:03:53.520 --> 0:03:57.160 a living mortal shaman in some form of communication with 0:03:57.200 --> 0:04:01.080 the deceased or also imaginable. This in addition to just 0:04:01.160 --> 0:04:06.480 general ancestor veneration, ancestor cults, and ancestor worshiped. So it's 0:04:06.560 --> 0:04:12.760 not it's not inconceivable to consider all of this potential 0:04:13.560 --> 0:04:16.919 hallmark of human spiritual and religious thought going back to 0:04:17.160 --> 0:04:20.479 very early human culture, as a coping method for the 0:04:20.520 --> 0:04:23.760 emotionally and socially devastating reality of death. 0:04:24.160 --> 0:04:26.599 Right, we don't know, but it seems perfectly plausible that 0:04:26.960 --> 0:04:29.880 it could be something like first, people you know, just 0:04:30.120 --> 0:04:33.440 merely emotionally missed their dead loved ones and wanted to 0:04:34.040 --> 0:04:36.600 you know, continue thinking about them and talking about them 0:04:36.600 --> 0:04:39.360 and so forth, and maybe from this arose some kind 0:04:39.360 --> 0:04:43.279 of culture of keeping their memory alive, out of which 0:04:43.320 --> 0:04:46.480 arose some kind of idea that well, maybe there are 0:04:46.600 --> 0:04:49.360 ways to still talk to them somehow, and maybe they 0:04:49.400 --> 0:04:50.919 have something to say to us. 0:04:51.360 --> 0:04:53.880 Yeah, because I mean, we undeniably have a desire to 0:04:54.040 --> 0:04:57.839 speak to them. I mean, that's proven out in so 0:04:57.880 --> 0:05:02.039 many countless examples, including our own individual experiences. I mean, 0:05:02.080 --> 0:05:04.560 I think a lot of us have visited the grave 0:05:04.760 --> 0:05:11.080 of a deceased loved one and spoken to them, you know, 0:05:11.320 --> 0:05:16.279 varying degrees of understanding or expectation of them hearing us, 0:05:17.000 --> 0:05:20.159 and certainly of them speaking back to us. But to 0:05:20.320 --> 0:05:24.040 speak to the dead, I think is not necessarily this 0:05:24.480 --> 0:05:27.760 you know, this alien, supernatural thing. I think it comes 0:05:27.800 --> 0:05:30.800 from a very natural place in the human psyche, and 0:05:30.800 --> 0:05:32.640 I mean probably gets back into this idea that, yeah, 0:05:32.680 --> 0:05:36.279 when someone dies, it is emotionally and socially devastating and 0:05:36.320 --> 0:05:37.880 we have to find ways to deal with it. 0:05:38.320 --> 0:05:40.719 On the other hand, while you can imagine that historical 0:05:41.120 --> 0:05:45.560 or prehistoric development, and it certainly seems plausible, it's hard 0:05:45.600 --> 0:05:48.760 to have decisive evidence for things like that, or to 0:05:48.800 --> 0:05:52.960 have decisive evidence of practices of communicating with and getting 0:05:53.000 --> 0:05:56.640 knowledge from the dead from before times of say literary 0:05:56.640 --> 0:05:58.719 writings about such right. 0:05:58.600 --> 0:06:01.120 Right, because the literature gives us more insight into what 0:06:01.400 --> 0:06:03.919 was done, why it was done, and what the expectation was. 0:06:04.600 --> 0:06:09.240 In many instances, sometimes you know, there are still questions, certainly, 0:06:09.640 --> 0:06:12.080 but otherwise what are you left with. You're left with 0:06:12.160 --> 0:06:15.200 human remains, and you can sort of look at like 0:06:15.279 --> 0:06:19.560 two broad categories situations where human remains have not been 0:06:19.560 --> 0:06:23.680 manipulated by human beings and situations where they have been 0:06:23.680 --> 0:06:27.640 manipulated by human beings and added caveat. As we've discussed 0:06:27.680 --> 0:06:29.520 in the show before, and we've recently had a guest 0:06:29.560 --> 0:06:32.040 in the show to discuss this, like sometimes that's up 0:06:32.040 --> 0:06:35.000 for dispute too, with one side saying I don't think 0:06:35.040 --> 0:06:37.560 these bodies were manipulated by human beings. I think they 0:06:37.560 --> 0:06:41.720 were manipulated by predatory animals, and then the other side saying, no, 0:06:41.800 --> 0:06:46.520 this is evidence of humans manipulating their dead, and intentional 0:06:46.560 --> 0:06:49.280 manipulation of the dead has been going on for a 0:06:49.400 --> 0:06:52.080 very long time, at least since the time of the Neanderthals. 0:06:52.520 --> 0:06:56.000 We move bodies, and we've moved bodies for various purposes, 0:06:56.320 --> 0:06:59.400 and a rich global heritage of funerary practices have grown 0:06:59.400 --> 0:07:02.640 out of these two nitions. But with the oldest burials, 0:07:02.880 --> 0:07:05.280 you look at them and yeah, we just have very 0:07:05.320 --> 0:07:07.280 little to go on when we're trying to decide try 0:07:07.320 --> 0:07:11.200 and figure out like what was the intent behind this practice? 0:07:11.480 --> 0:07:13.360 Was it a practice, and what was the intent? 0:07:13.760 --> 0:07:17.320 Right? So, given those extreme caveats, what are some of 0:07:17.360 --> 0:07:20.680 these pieces of ambiguous evidence people might point to to think, 0:07:20.800 --> 0:07:24.520 I wonder if this was used for romantic purposes, for necromancy. 0:07:25.280 --> 0:07:30.320 Well, Kapcar highlights ancient archaeological sites linked to ancestor Coults 0:07:30.360 --> 0:07:33.360 as being some of the main candidates for some form 0:07:33.400 --> 0:07:36.440 of ancient necromancy in the Middle East. And I should 0:07:36.480 --> 0:07:39.200 add that he's not arguing, like one hundred percent this 0:07:39.240 --> 0:07:41.920 is necromancy. He's just saying, like, Okay, beyond what we 0:07:41.960 --> 0:07:45.080 can be certain about, what evidence could we make an 0:07:45.160 --> 0:07:48.720 argument about. A specific mention is made of the plaster 0:07:48.880 --> 0:07:53.480 covered heads of cuttle Hook dating back to seventy five 0:07:53.680 --> 0:07:57.679 hundred to fifty seven hundred BCE. We've mentioned this place 0:07:57.680 --> 0:08:01.400 on the show before, specifically in our Invention episodes on 0:08:01.600 --> 0:08:04.840 the coffin, the Toilet, and the Mirror, as well as 0:08:04.880 --> 0:08:07.520 our stuff to Blow your Mind episodes on brain and 0:08:07.640 --> 0:08:11.040 head theft. Because there does seem to be some sort 0:08:11.040 --> 0:08:12.920 of ritual removal of the head here. 0:08:13.320 --> 0:08:17.280 Well, let's zero in on the example of plastered human 0:08:17.400 --> 0:08:20.920 skulls from the ancient fertile Crescent to see what we 0:08:20.960 --> 0:08:23.200 can figure out from them. A rob I've attached a 0:08:23.200 --> 0:08:25.640 picture for you to look at here. This is a 0:08:25.760 --> 0:08:29.960 famous plastered skull from I think dates given are sometimes 0:08:30.080 --> 0:08:33.640 nine thousand or nine thousand, five hundred years ago. This 0:08:33.679 --> 0:08:36.720 is sometimes known as the Jericho skull. It is one 0:08:36.920 --> 0:08:39.920 of the skulls recovered from the tell or the mound 0:08:40.280 --> 0:08:43.400 of the ancient settlement of Jericho. And this is from 0:08:43.520 --> 0:08:44.880 the Neolithic period. 0:08:45.280 --> 0:08:49.640 Yeah, this is quite intriguing to look at because again 0:08:49.760 --> 0:08:52.720 you have a human skull, but it has been covered 0:08:52.760 --> 0:08:55.240 in plaster in a way to sort of it seems like, 0:08:55.440 --> 0:08:58.880 to recreate the flesh of the dead. And then we 0:08:58.960 --> 0:09:01.160 have what I believe these are shells that have been 0:09:01.160 --> 0:09:03.800 placed in where the eyes would be. 0:09:04.040 --> 0:09:07.800 Yeah, exactly. So there are multiple artifacts of this type 0:09:07.880 --> 0:09:10.880 from the ancient Levant and some from Turkey, from again 0:09:10.960 --> 0:09:16.000 the site of Chattelhuyuk. And essentially what these are real 0:09:16.160 --> 0:09:20.520 human skulls, sometimes without the mandible, so without the lower jaw, 0:09:21.640 --> 0:09:25.640 filled in with earth or plaster, and then covered on 0:09:25.679 --> 0:09:28.679 the outside in plaster at least on the front, and 0:09:28.840 --> 0:09:32.720 decorated with individual facial features. So as you said, Rob, 0:09:32.800 --> 0:09:36.400 seashells for eyes, they might be clam shells or cowie shells, 0:09:36.440 --> 0:09:41.640 some kind of shells, marine shells to simulate eyeballs, and 0:09:41.679 --> 0:09:46.439 then plaster facial structure, so maybe even like eyelids, overlapping 0:09:46.480 --> 0:09:49.720 the seashells in a way, and of course painting on 0:09:49.760 --> 0:09:52.600 the outside, so hair and eyebrows and mustaches and so 0:09:52.679 --> 0:09:55.680 forth would be painted on the plaster. I was actually 0:09:55.960 --> 0:09:59.440 watching an interview with a curator at the British Museum. 0:09:59.440 --> 0:10:03.240 Coincident only another in the series Curator's Corner, which I 0:10:03.280 --> 0:10:07.120 mentioned in Part one of this series for unrelated reasons. 0:10:07.120 --> 0:10:10.480 That was just an interview with an author named Irving Finkel, 0:10:10.559 --> 0:10:13.640 who we were reading a paper from that was about 0:10:13.679 --> 0:10:17.240 ancient Mesopotamian exorcism practices. This is an interview with a 0:10:17.320 --> 0:10:21.040 curator from the British Museum named Alexandra Fletcher about the 0:10:21.120 --> 0:10:24.200 Jericho skull, and she opines that the Jericho skull, the 0:10:24.240 --> 0:10:28.199 one you're looking at here, Rob is probably the oldest 0:10:28.280 --> 0:10:33.360 example of portraiture in the British Museum's collection because of 0:10:33.400 --> 0:10:37.480 the assumption that it was made to resemble a specific person, 0:10:37.800 --> 0:10:40.480 though we don't know that we don't know for sure, 0:10:40.520 --> 0:10:43.920 but these skulls are usually assumed to have been made 0:10:43.960 --> 0:10:47.840 to resemble the person the skull belonged to in life. 0:10:47.720 --> 0:10:49.959 Which makes sense, right. I mean, if you're gonna do 0:10:50.000 --> 0:10:52.160 a plasters sculpture of someone and you have their skull 0:10:52.200 --> 0:10:55.320 on hand, like there you go, that's the perfect foundation 0:10:55.480 --> 0:10:57.439 upon which to create your art. 0:10:58.320 --> 0:11:01.480 And there's an interesting scientific and technological parallel to this 0:11:01.600 --> 0:11:04.240 that comes up in a second. So Fletcher goes into 0:11:04.280 --> 0:11:08.120 describing some work analysis work that has been done on 0:11:08.160 --> 0:11:11.960 the Jericho skull. She says, as background, he was part 0:11:11.960 --> 0:11:14.559 of a group of seven people who were buried together 0:11:14.760 --> 0:11:18.559 uncovered in the nineteen fifties, and she talks about research 0:11:18.640 --> 0:11:22.120 to try to analyze the human skull underneath without damaging 0:11:22.160 --> 0:11:26.040 the plaster surrounding it, at least surrounding the front of 0:11:26.080 --> 0:11:29.400 the skull. The back is more exposed, and she says 0:11:29.480 --> 0:11:33.360 that the researchers used CT scanning to create an image 0:11:33.360 --> 0:11:36.960 of the bone underneath without hurting the plaster, and that 0:11:37.040 --> 0:11:40.760 revealed some interesting stuff. For example, this man's nose was 0:11:40.760 --> 0:11:43.360 broken sometime in life, and it shows how it had 0:11:43.400 --> 0:11:47.640 been broken and healed, and as a child, this man 0:11:47.720 --> 0:11:53.120 had had his head bound to possibly to shape the 0:11:53.160 --> 0:11:55.840 skull as the man grew up, so there was a 0:11:55.880 --> 0:11:58.200 sense in which the skull was sort of pinched, and 0:11:58.240 --> 0:12:00.880 you can see a ridge in the the skull where 0:12:00.920 --> 0:12:04.000 it was pinched that way. And this as he developed, 0:12:04.160 --> 0:12:07.120 he had slightly elongated skull for this reason. 0:12:07.920 --> 0:12:11.959 Oh yes, yes, not an uncommon practice in certain parts 0:12:12.000 --> 0:12:12.920 of the ancient world. 0:12:13.280 --> 0:12:16.400 After death, the inside of the skull was stuffed with 0:12:16.720 --> 0:12:19.120 soil and clay, and there's a hole in the back 0:12:19.160 --> 0:12:22.040 of the skull where Fletcher says, you can still see 0:12:22.080 --> 0:12:25.560 the indentations of the fingers of the person who packed 0:12:25.600 --> 0:12:27.680 the clay into the brain cavity. 0:12:28.320 --> 0:12:28.720 Wow. 0:12:29.280 --> 0:12:31.880 But the interesting parallel to the ancient plaster surrounding the 0:12:31.880 --> 0:12:36.040 skull is that by analyzing the bone structure, modern scientists 0:12:36.080 --> 0:12:38.960 were able to with a good degree of accuracy, they think, 0:12:39.040 --> 0:12:44.240 reconstruct this man's face. The process is considered not exact, 0:12:44.320 --> 0:12:48.040 but pretty accurate, to the extent that Fletcher claims that 0:12:48.120 --> 0:12:52.280 if people who knew this man in life walked into 0:12:52.480 --> 0:12:55.080 the room and saw the reconstruction, she says she thinks 0:12:55.120 --> 0:12:58.040 they would instantly recognize him. So in a way, we 0:12:58.080 --> 0:13:02.720 have used modern technology to reconstructed this man's face around 0:13:03.040 --> 0:13:06.280 around the basis of the skull, much like ancient people 0:13:07.080 --> 0:13:10.000 used I guess probably memory of what this man looked 0:13:10.000 --> 0:13:13.160 like to reconstruct his face in plaster around the skull. 0:13:14.280 --> 0:13:18.559 Yeah. Yeah, it's fascinating though again we we we can't 0:13:18.600 --> 0:13:21.280 know one hundred percent you know why they did this, 0:13:21.440 --> 0:13:25.199 and certainly you can you can make arguments for the 0:13:25.640 --> 0:13:29.920 lifelike qualities being bestowed upon the skull in order to 0:13:30.760 --> 0:13:33.439 communicate with it. I mean, that's that's certainly the hard 0:13:33.520 --> 0:13:37.199 nechromatic angle to take on it, and and others have 0:13:37.240 --> 0:13:40.400 found this interesting as well. These skulls are brought up 0:13:40.480 --> 0:13:43.600 by Julian James in his book The Origin of Consciousness 0:13:43.600 --> 0:13:46.960 and the Breakdown of the Biicameral Mind as being you know, 0:13:47.600 --> 0:13:51.160 one of the many different bits of evidence or alleged 0:13:51.160 --> 0:13:54.160 evidence from the ancient world that he uses to back 0:13:54.240 --> 0:13:57.559 up this this hypothesis of the bicameral mind. 0:13:57.840 --> 0:14:01.920 Yeah, he probably is leaning heavily on the interpretation that 0:14:02.280 --> 0:14:04.480 people talked to these skulls, which again I want to 0:14:04.520 --> 0:14:06.720 really emphasize, like we don't know that all we have 0:14:06.800 --> 0:14:10.360 are the artifacts. There are not there's not literature describing 0:14:10.400 --> 0:14:12.640 how these skulls were used in the ancient world, so 0:14:12.679 --> 0:14:13.439 we just don't know. 0:14:13.760 --> 0:14:15.720 Yeah, we don't know if they spoke to the skulls. 0:14:17.760 --> 0:14:19.280 For the most I mean, we don't know if the 0:14:19.280 --> 0:14:22.440 skull We assume the skulls did not answer, though Jane's 0:14:22.440 --> 0:14:26.440 would argue that they possibly did. And yes, if Julian 0:14:26.480 --> 0:14:30.000 Jane's hypothesis was correct, that would impact everything we've been 0:14:30.000 --> 0:14:33.320 discussing about in terms of necromancy, because it would mean that, yes, 0:14:33.400 --> 0:14:37.880 there here is a neurological way that the dead not 0:14:37.960 --> 0:14:40.160 only could speak to human beings but spoke to them 0:14:40.200 --> 0:14:42.440 on a regular basis. Go back and listen to our 0:14:42.440 --> 0:14:45.240 old episodes on his hypothesis if you want to know 0:14:45.280 --> 0:14:48.840 more about that. But yeah, at the end of the day, 0:14:49.080 --> 0:14:51.960 did they just simply recreate these faces in order to 0:14:52.000 --> 0:14:55.760 honor them, to remember them, and if they were speaking 0:14:55.760 --> 0:14:58.440 to them, like we can sort of imagine like a 0:14:59.160 --> 0:15:04.520 broad scale a spectrum of possible necromancy, you know, and 0:15:04.560 --> 0:15:08.920 there's you know, there are certainly versions of this interpretation 0:15:09.000 --> 0:15:10.920 in which they might have been speaking to these skulls, 0:15:11.080 --> 0:15:15.640 but we're not actually seeking knowledge from the dead that's right. 0:15:16.120 --> 0:15:17.920 So I want to get deeper into that in a minute. 0:15:18.240 --> 0:15:21.480 But in a way, this connects to what I thought 0:15:21.560 --> 0:15:26.040 was an interesting little side comment that this British Museum 0:15:26.080 --> 0:15:30.560 researcher Alexander Fletcher makes in this interview where she just 0:15:30.640 --> 0:15:32.520 kind of says that, you know, the longer you work 0:15:32.600 --> 0:15:35.840 with work with these skulls, do research on them, especially 0:15:35.880 --> 0:15:38.360 maybe from the you know, the reconstruction of the face, 0:15:38.720 --> 0:15:40.760 the more you come to see the skulls not just 0:15:40.800 --> 0:15:44.600 as an artifact but as a person. And I was like, wow, 0:15:44.640 --> 0:15:47.520 maybe I am over interpreting, but that seems perhaps revealing 0:15:47.520 --> 0:15:49.520 about the effect they might have had on the people 0:15:49.560 --> 0:16:02.200 who originally made them as well. Yeah, I want to 0:16:02.200 --> 0:16:04.240 come back to the idea of adding some sort of 0:16:04.640 --> 0:16:11.160 complications to the idea of necromancy or divination through the 0:16:11.240 --> 0:16:15.680 dead as a coherent and discreet practice. So I was 0:16:15.800 --> 0:16:18.320 thinking about this, and I was thinking about how in 0:16:18.480 --> 0:16:21.560 a lot of these early settlements where these plaster skulls 0:16:21.560 --> 0:16:24.560 are found, you know, the settlements with permanent structures like 0:16:24.800 --> 0:16:28.800 Chattlehoo Yuck, which you mentioned in Jericho, there are other 0:16:28.880 --> 0:16:32.000 interesting features about how the dead were dealt with as well. 0:16:32.080 --> 0:16:35.480 Not just the creation of plaster skulls, but in these settlements, 0:16:35.600 --> 0:16:40.320 it seems sometimes the bodies of the dead were buried 0:16:40.640 --> 0:16:45.640 inside people's houses. So maybe your grandparents' bones might not 0:16:45.720 --> 0:16:49.000 be often a cemetery somewhere else that you go and 0:16:49.080 --> 0:16:51.880 visit from time to time, but right in the house 0:16:51.960 --> 0:16:56.520 with you, maybe buried under the floor or under your bed. Again, 0:16:56.560 --> 0:16:59.360 we don't know for sure why they did this. All 0:16:59.440 --> 0:17:02.640 kinds of specs abounds. In some cases, it looks like 0:17:02.640 --> 0:17:06.479 the bodies might have been removed elsewhere for the flesh 0:17:06.520 --> 0:17:08.760 to rot off the bones or be picked off the bones. 0:17:08.760 --> 0:17:12.720 Maybe the bones were defleshed somewhere else and then maybe 0:17:12.760 --> 0:17:15.280 brought back inside the house and then they would live 0:17:15.640 --> 0:17:18.960 under the floor, under your bed or something. But these 0:17:18.960 --> 0:17:22.040 are also places where we encounter plastered skulls. So it 0:17:22.119 --> 0:17:25.480 just seems it seems possible to me that if the 0:17:25.600 --> 0:17:29.680 skull had some kind of significance as as a conduit 0:17:29.760 --> 0:17:34.639 for communication with the dead, I wonder if it wasn't 0:17:34.680 --> 0:17:40.280 a special, discrete, transactional event ritual like we've been talking 0:17:40.320 --> 0:17:42.200 about in some of these Greek stories. You know where 0:17:42.200 --> 0:17:45.120 you go to the oracle and you know what I mean, 0:17:45.240 --> 0:17:48.480 like it being a special event. I wonder if it's 0:17:48.560 --> 0:17:51.720 more like just a kind of continuous belief that, yes, 0:17:51.840 --> 0:17:54.119 Grandma is still here with us, she's in the house, 0:17:54.200 --> 0:17:55.200 she lives with us. 0:17:55.520 --> 0:17:57.840 Yeah, I mean I can easily imagine that that being 0:17:57.880 --> 0:18:00.520 the case. Again, it's not too far away from sort 0:18:00.520 --> 0:18:04.920 of the mild background supernatural ideas that many of us 0:18:04.960 --> 0:18:07.840 may may dabble in, you know, like to think about 0:18:08.200 --> 0:18:13.480 a deceased love one being nearby, you know, I think 0:18:13.480 --> 0:18:15.160 it is something that a lot of us probably due 0:18:15.200 --> 0:18:17.520 to some degree without even being on the level of 0:18:17.640 --> 0:18:19.600 like I believe in ghosts, you know. 0:18:20.200 --> 0:18:23.240 And so if the situation were something more like that, 0:18:23.760 --> 0:18:26.199 to the extent that you would seek advice from your 0:18:26.240 --> 0:18:29.520 grandparent in this context, I wonder if it would give 0:18:29.680 --> 0:18:33.800 kind of the wrong impression to call that necromancy, because again, 0:18:33.840 --> 0:18:36.679 of the all the stories we have in which the 0:18:36.720 --> 0:18:39.919 necromancy is usually more a like I was saying, a discrete, 0:18:40.040 --> 0:18:44.399 transactional kind of event, ritual versus something that is just 0:18:44.640 --> 0:18:47.920 intimate and continuous in part of life. 0:18:48.080 --> 0:18:51.200 Yeah, so many of these stories, ancient and modern. To 0:18:51.280 --> 0:18:54.199 pick necromancy as kind of an extreme thing, you do 0:18:55.240 --> 0:18:59.800 you know, when when other attempts to remedy a situation 0:18:59.840 --> 0:19:03.680 have not worked, that's when you seek out the necromantic solution. 0:19:04.320 --> 0:19:06.439 But then again, just to emphasize how little we know 0:19:06.520 --> 0:19:09.040 for sure, there could be totally different explanations as well. 0:19:09.080 --> 0:19:12.199 I mean, maybe burying the bones in the house and 0:19:12.240 --> 0:19:15.760 putting a plaster face over your ancestor skull, maybe that 0:19:15.920 --> 0:19:19.560 was just merely a form of honoring and remembering people, 0:19:19.720 --> 0:19:22.200 just like you might I don't know, have a photo 0:19:22.359 --> 0:19:25.200 of a dead relative on the wall today or something 0:19:25.240 --> 0:19:28.320 buried with them. You know, we miss our ancestor who 0:19:28.320 --> 0:19:31.679 has passed on, So maybe we keep the bones or 0:19:31.840 --> 0:19:35.080 plaster the skull in a way under the house or 0:19:35.080 --> 0:19:37.040 in the house in a way of remembering them. 0:19:37.320 --> 0:19:39.520 Yeah, and so certainly these are not neutral skulls. These 0:19:39.560 --> 0:19:44.160 are skulls that are conceivably connected to loved ones. But still, 0:19:44.200 --> 0:19:47.800 like even like human understanding and appreciation of skulls is 0:19:47.840 --> 0:19:50.640 kind of complex because they take on all these symbolic meanings, 0:19:51.040 --> 0:19:53.159 but then they're also there's also this sort of like 0:19:53.720 --> 0:19:56.600 coolness to the skull that has the same to exist 0:19:56.600 --> 0:19:59.920 for a long time. And you know, we get into 0:20:00.080 --> 0:20:04.280 this with other skull based on traditions and artifacts as well, 0:20:04.440 --> 0:20:07.639 is discussed in their recent either recently rerun or about 0:20:07.640 --> 0:20:10.520 to be rerun episode where I interviewed Brian Hoggart about 0:20:10.960 --> 0:20:15.320 anti witchcraft precautions, some of which involved putting skulls, particularly 0:20:15.400 --> 0:20:18.399 horse skulls, in the foundation of a building. Like a 0:20:18.400 --> 0:20:20.399 lot of it's just kind of like, well, horse skulls 0:20:20.480 --> 0:20:23.480 are really interesting looking. They don't look like horses, but 0:20:23.600 --> 0:20:27.919 yet they are horses, and horses have this important place 0:20:28.440 --> 0:20:31.680 in human lives. So yeah, there are number of different 0:20:31.680 --> 0:20:34.280 ways you can go in and try and figure out 0:20:34.280 --> 0:20:35.520 like why was this important? 0:20:36.040 --> 0:20:38.639 Right, So there's just so much like we don't know 0:20:38.680 --> 0:20:42.720 anybody who has too confident or too certain a theory 0:20:42.720 --> 0:20:45.760 about what these what these remains meant, and how they 0:20:45.760 --> 0:20:48.280 were used. I think you should be highly skeptical of that. 0:20:48.800 --> 0:20:52.800 But I do think one interesting piece of information that 0:20:52.880 --> 0:20:56.520 we can use is not from the ancient world itself, 0:20:56.560 --> 0:21:02.480 but just from looking at practices of veneration today by analogy, 0:21:02.520 --> 0:21:06.240 which is a totally common practice all over the world. 0:21:06.720 --> 0:21:09.439 That's right, we discussed We've discussed some of these already, 0:21:09.480 --> 0:21:13.160 at least in passing, particularly the importance of ancestor veneration 0:21:13.320 --> 0:21:14.760 in Chinese culture. 0:21:14.840 --> 0:21:18.120 Right, And so I was looking for some documentation of 0:21:18.480 --> 0:21:21.720 people today with religious practices that could be considered to 0:21:21.720 --> 0:21:25.879 include strong elements of ancestor veneration and also something that 0:21:25.920 --> 0:21:30.840 could be considered divination via deceased ancestors. And I think 0:21:31.080 --> 0:21:33.639 from what I can tell, this combination of beliefs is 0:21:33.680 --> 0:21:36.440 not especially unique or unusual. Lots of people around the 0:21:36.440 --> 0:21:40.080 world practice forms of ancestor veneration that might include some 0:21:40.280 --> 0:21:43.520 way of establishing contact with the dead or getting information 0:21:43.640 --> 0:21:46.240 or messages from them. But I wanted to find one 0:21:46.280 --> 0:21:49.720 clear example with documentation of specifics so we're not just 0:21:49.760 --> 0:21:53.159 dealing with generalities. And I came across an interesting paper 0:21:53.440 --> 0:21:57.400 looking at the Bapetti people. So this was by maur 0:21:57.600 --> 0:22:01.520 kang E k Lebaka, who is a scholar at the 0:22:01.640 --> 0:22:06.239 University of South Africa specializing in African musical arts and ethnomusicology. 0:22:06.600 --> 0:22:09.679 The paper was called the Art of Establishing and Maintaining 0:22:09.800 --> 0:22:14.840 Contact with Ancestors, a Study of Bapeti Tradition, published in 0:22:14.880 --> 0:22:18.840 the journal HTS Theological Studies in the year twenty eighteen. 0:22:19.080 --> 0:22:22.879 So the Bupeti people mostly live within northern South Africa, 0:22:22.960 --> 0:22:27.720 and Lebaca, synthesizing the work of some previous ethnographers, describes 0:22:27.840 --> 0:22:31.879 a common view of ancestors among the Bupeti people. Again, 0:22:32.320 --> 0:22:34.960 same caveat with all of the examples we've talked about, 0:22:35.600 --> 0:22:38.760 beliefs are not usually universal within a culture. All you 0:22:38.800 --> 0:22:42.480 can do is describe commonly found beliefs. He says, first 0:22:42.520 --> 0:22:44.600 of all, in the words of a scholar named Mibiti, 0:22:44.720 --> 0:22:49.400 there is a widespread belief in many African traditional religions 0:22:49.520 --> 0:22:53.360 that quote, death does not annihilate life, and the departed 0:22:53.480 --> 0:22:57.000 continue to exist in the hereafter, So the dead or 0:22:57.080 --> 0:23:01.760 not gone, they remain spiritually alive in some sense. Also, 0:23:01.880 --> 0:23:06.960 Lebaca says that the character of ancestors is believed to 0:23:07.119 --> 0:23:12.159 remain fundamentally unchanged since they were alive. Dead ancestors go 0:23:12.240 --> 0:23:16.520 on existing. They remain themselves in good and bad ways, 0:23:16.560 --> 0:23:20.520 so they can protect and advise their descendants. But they 0:23:20.520 --> 0:23:25.480 are also not like perfect, perfected, ethereal beings. They're like us, 0:23:26.119 --> 0:23:28.480 and they are like they were in life, so also 0:23:28.560 --> 0:23:32.000 prone to jealousy and motivations of that sort. He says, 0:23:32.040 --> 0:23:35.280