After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Speaking with the Dead: Ancient Necromancy

Episode Date: April 30, 2026

In Ancient Mesopotamia, the boundary between the living and the dead was not always fixed... some even believed it could be crossed. But why would the living seek counsel from the dead? How common were these practices? And what answers did people hope the spirits might reveal?In this episode, Anthony is joined by the brilliant Dr. Irving Finkel! Irving is a returning guest and Curator in the Department of Middle East at the British Museum. Be sure to check out our other episode with Irving, Earliest Evidence of Ghosts... Edited by Hannah Feodorov and Anna Brant. Produced by Tomos Delargy. Senior Producer is Freddy Chick.For tickets to see Anthony and Maddy talking about her new book, Hoax, click here: https://www.conwayhall.org.uk/whats-on/event/hoax/Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello everyone, it's me, Maddie. I am back. Well, not quite. I will be back on the pod very soon. But in the meantime, if you've missed your fix of Anthony and me together, you can now catch us live on stage at Conway Hall in London on the 7th of May. There we'll be discussing my brand new book, Hoax, Truth and Lies in the Age of Enlightenment out that very same day. We'll be discovering how fake news is not. nothing new, chatting about what it's like to spend time in the darker side of the Georgian world, and meeting the three extraordinary, bizarre, and often frightening characters at the heart of the book. Cobbies of hoax will be available on the night, which I'll be signing after the show, and hopefully chatting to as many of you as possible. So get your tickets now. The link is in the show

notes. You can go to the Conway Hall website or follow the link in my Instagram bio. I'm so excited about this book and I just can't wait to share it with you all. Do come along. It is going to be the most fantastic evening. See you there. Magic incantations. Mysterious rituals. A human skull. In the ancient world, the boundary between the living and the dead was not always fixed. In ancient Mesopotamia, some believed it could be crossed. But why would the living seek counsel? from the dead. How common were these practices and what answers did people hope the spirits might reveal? In Mesopotamia, priests and exorcists followed precise instructions to summon the dead, dragging up souls from the underworld to answer questions about the future.

We know this because they wrote it down. Clay tablets, thousands of years old, detailing exactly what to do. Anoint the skull, call on the sun god, and wait. You will see the ghost. He will speak to you. But were they serious about this? Did people really try to raise the dead? And if they did, what were they risking? Today, I am joined by none other than Dr. Irving Finkel, who will take us into the ancient world of necromancy. Welcome to After Dark. Hello and welcome to After Dark, I'm Anthony. And as you may know by now, Maddie is exploring the deepest depths of the Amazon jungle.

And while she's away, I am running solo with some incredible guests. And today, of course, is no different. In this episode, we'll be exploring the history of necromancy in the ancient world specifically. And who better to help us than the one and only Dr. Irving. Finkel. Now, we know that Irving is a huge hit with the After Dark audience. Every time he comes on, or the one

time that he's been on, he's only been on once, it was a huge huge success for us, so we're so glad to have him back. Because I'm naturally 30. It's because you're naturally just into all of them. You've written a book called The First Ghost for Goodman's Day. It's perfect for After Dark. And we're going to be talking about that today

when we are talking about this. But of course, Irving is also the curator in the department of the Middle East at the British Museum. True. Irving, welcome back to After Dark. I'm glad to be here. I'm so, so glad that you are here in our little cocoon of a studio in East London.

Now, tell me this, necromancy is a very strange thing for many people. But for those of us who are interested in the darker side of history and some of the darker stories that come through this, and as I say, you've written the first ghosts. So you definitely have expertise and interest in this area. What do you think it is about these types of subjects, these darker death-focused histories that continue to inspire people, to broaden their historical perspective, or to find history interesting for the first time? There's something about these stories, these histories. Well, my feeling would be answering that question is that things that you refer to as

the dark, furtively dark things, which attract people. people. Sometimes it's compounded by Hollywood and manipulative things in the modern world, but underneath subconsciously, I think many things about that side of the world are part of the human psychological makeup and they are in fact embedded in the essence of being a human being and that many people stifle such fears or such obsession or such interest, they don't think about it, or if they do, they don't pursue it, they change the subject in their heads and that sort of thing. But nevertheless, the power of it reflects something which I think is very, very deep-seated in the human psyche and goes back to the time when the dark was, in

fact a source of fearfulness, as it were, before light or before electric light all the way back in time when the fear of the unknown and what's behind this and what's under that and what happens to the dead and people get mysterious. All those things add up to a kind of ascription to this. A, there's a side of the world that we don't understand. And the deliciously appealing thing about that side of the world is it's full of things which are quite full. frightening, but they don't give you a heart attack. So it's a kind of like a bit like this. If you have a toothache, you can ignore the toothache. But when you start biting on the tooth because it hurts, then you start biting on the tooth to see how much it's going to hurt. You can't stop biting on the tooth. Then when you get in the grip of this sort of interest, it's a bit like that. I think it's almost like describing that there's something ironically illuminating about the dark. Do you even think it's, do you think it's fair to even call it the dark side of history? Or do you think that's to Hollywood, as you kind of hinted at there? Well, I think the dark side is imbued with the cinema and literature and other kind of

manipulative forces. And it doesn't really represent the way people see things, because on the whole, it's not clear what anybody means to another person when they talk about the dark side. It's not a very helpful category. It's a kind of category. It's a kind of catch all, and things like the question of what people have done in the past for religious or spiritual or other reasons, which when we look at them, you think, is a bit of a darkness about that, or, I don't think they should have been doing this, that's sort of sensorious stepping back, and where darkness might come as a critical phrase, these things are real, and they've absolutely happened. And the whole question of necromancy, which you started

off with is a prime illustration of this matter because necromancy means divining by the dead because necro is all to do with that death. And manse is this word like mantic and so forth, which means divination. So necromancy is, you might call the art, science, the indulgence or the monstrosity of summoning the dead who are supposed to be dead to come back and tell you what you want to know. That is the basic premise of it. So people who do this, who believe in it, ascribe to it, practice it or commission it, subscribe to this idea that when a human person is dead and buried, they are still accessible on some level. So it doesn't mean that their fungus-covered corpse is going to walk through the door and sit down and say, what do you want

to know, sunshine? It's more that the essence of them can be kind of compelled to reappear and answer questions. So this is quite a common phenomenon where we can trace it in the history of the world's activities. There are many cultures where necromancy, even if frowned upon and not talked about, has been practiced from ancient times and probably up until modern times. So this is an interesting thing. So it's predicated on this point.

point, which I've always found the most remarkable matter about it altogether, that a living person phones up, so to speak, a dead person who comes up and says, what do you want to know? And you say, who's going to win the Grand National? And according to the system, the dead person who's just been revived long enough to tell you somehow knows who's going to win the Grand National. And I never quite understand, and there's no explanation for the mechanism whereby this supposedly dead person has any idea at all who's going to win the Grand National. How does that work? Now, the reason I'm centering on this issue is that working in the British Museum and reading these Keneaform tablets from Babylonia, which is what I do for what people call a living with the living, among the sources that we have written on clay tablets over a 3,000-year period.

there are a few about necromancy, and they are very specifically about necromancy. That is to say, somebody calling up the dead to interrogate them. And they are very remarkable, but also they establish ground rules for what you might mean by necromancy when you discuss it over lunch at Christmas with your auntie and other people in the bar about how much fun is being a necromancer and what you can find. out and all their sorts of things. So, for example, there was a king of Mesopotamia in the 7th century called Ashwa Bar Nepal, who was king of the world. Very important exhibition there in the museum once. I hope you went to see it. I did. Good. Well, he was king of the world, king of the

universe and king of everything else. And the thing was this. When he was a young whipper snapper, he wasn't the crown prince of Assyria. His older brother called Shamash Shumukin was older than him, and no doubt counted on being king of Assyria himself. And the thing was, I don't know what Shamashamukim was like as a bloke, but his brother was very, very capable, very gifted, very on the war. And it was obviously felt in the court by some people that he should be the next king, never mind the older brother. And this is what happened in the dead of night.

Asher Barney Powell probably, I suppose he must have been about since, 16, 17 or something. He went down into the deepest basements of the palace to meet a professional Cuneiform exorcist to come necromancer whom he knew in order to summon up the spirit of his dead grandmother to find out whether he was going to become king of Assyria. So quite a meaty issue. And there is a tablet in the museum broken in all the wrong places, which in point of fact describes this, that he asked her, will I be the king of Assyria in due course? And apparently the tenor of the letter was yes. So the old queen with her, I don't know, lacy hairdress and knitting needles, whatever they do in the nether world, if you were a queen of Assyria, came up and said, as it were, son, don't worry. So she went back, and Ashabana, in fact, became king of Assyria with a lot of trouble with his brother thereafter.

Now, the thing about that is this. We have lots and lots of letters about the king in the palace from diviners and exorcists and doctors and the military people, all the administration of the empire. They're all realistic. They're all practical. They're all sensible. And we believe everything in them, even if it's a bit propagandistic here and there. But it's stuff. And this is one letter among all those letters. And there is no reason whatsoever not to believe. that's what happened. Because they're telling us in the same way that they tell us all the political things, all the warfare things, this is what they're also telling us here. And one thing I just want to dig a little deeper on Irving, because I find this fascinating, even for ourselves today, what we end up with then in this story that you're talking about and in the wider idea of necromancy in the ancient world specifically is we have people in the present or their present, talking to people from the past that are dead, about the future. So we have this idea of the cyclical nature of life and how we can move between the present, the past and the future. And I think something has happened in the meantime, very 19th century, I suppose, development of going, actually you speak to the dead about the past.

You use them to solve things about, oh, who murdered my granny's cat? And where's the gold buried in the god? Exactly, that kind of thing. So do you think that tells us something about that ancient society where there's that cycle of past, present, future that can coexist? It must do. It must do. The trouble is that we don't have detached intellectual treatises or explanatory texts, which would throw direct light on it, but the implication of it is certain that there was, I think, a continuum of past, present and future. It was a continuum that when you're not here but there, you can lock into it in some measure. I think that must be correct.

So that, and they talk about, there's an expression in Babylonian, which means time in the future and time in the past, and it's the same word. So we have this kind of confirmed in a sense that it's like a spectrum on which you step at some point and you're in a fixed position at some point, but the past and the future are still part of the universe in which, you operate. It must be, as you say, something like that. And, of course, reading this letter and going, ho-hum about it, raises the other issue that if you have a testimony from antiquity or from the Middle Ages or any other period about something, and whether you can take it at face value

and believe what they wrote, or whether you have to take it with a secondary guess, or whether you have to reinterpret it and that's not what they really meant or something like that. But this is folly, if you have a written source from the past, you mustn't second-guess it. You must take it at face value, I mean, not being naive and believing everything automatically, but basically if somebody, if a letter like that comes to us, it's a witness. And we can support it because among all these documents, we have this fantastic manual written by a necromancer whose job it was commercially, as it were, summoned to a household, a rich household, where somebody wanted to ask something of a dead person to do the operation. And this thing is a whole caboodle,

several days of organisation, cleaning up special activities, probably fasting and all this sort of stuff to get everything ready in order to do it. So it wasn't done lightly or frivolously, and it certainly wasn't done by people who lived in the country who didn't have enough money to feed their children or anybody like that. It's an upper class matter. So what we might call the aristocracy, people who were generals, people like that, in with the palace, in with this, in with that, living in the higher echelons might have a pressing issue to find out that they decide to call in this necromancer. They didn't have a yellow pages kind of phone book, but there is a cuneiform tablet, which lists all the different kinds of necromancer. So it's not that it's

just end for necromancer for stop. But there was someone who would bring up a ghost and there was a female person who would bring up a ghost and they would bring up this kind of spirit and that kind of spirit. There were about eight different titles of people who could operate in this in this specially subtle thing. And it's ringed around with rather appealing subtlety. For example, in Mesopotamia, it was believed that if you saw a very special thing, and it's saw a ghost yourself and the ghost spoke to you that was very, very dangerous. Right. And very bad news. But if you are a necromancer and you're going to bring a ghost up into the household to talk to the father or whoever it was who wants to make an inquiry, they're obviously going to hear the voice

because that's the whole point. So some of the magic required to bring up the ghost is also required to fence the person around where the intrinsic danger, which normally would be the, case, it doesn't apply. So in other words, we have a rational treatment of an issue which modern persons might say is wholly irrational, but nevertheless, in its own terms, it was real and serious and done, and so it is treated with intelligence and so forth. And the marvelous thing about this tablet is it tells you what to do. The nub of it is that you have to have a human skull. This is fascinating because in this day and age, we live with this idea of manuals. We love a how-to guide, be it on the internet, be it in books, whatever it is. Give me the step-by-step thing

of how I can achieve X, Y or Z. And here we have this ancient document, this ancient piece of material culture that is going step by step through what necromancy would involve should you want to do it. So here is this laid out for us. And as you say, Irving, it starts with The skull. Take us through some of those steps that you would need to raise the dead. This is a fantastic thing. You have to have a skull. So this itself raises a question because do you have to have the skull of the person whom you want to interrogate or would any old skull do? And this we don't know. But among the upper echelons of society when they lived in big houses, it is the case that very

often when people died, they were buried in the courtyard. Sometimes in a special grave with or something like that. And they were on the premises. So it would mean that, say, for example, you thought your great-grandfather or your grandfather would know, you could procure the skull of the great-grandfather or the grandfather for the ritual.

So this is a funny matter because it doesn't say that you have to have the person, but if you could get it, it seems like you would. And the skull, of course, which hasn't got horrible things on it, like worms coming out of the eye sockets or anything like that, nothing of that kind of tall, a nice, clean, picked white skull.

The exorcist, who's done all the preparations, what he does is this. He, the ruminants, full of incense, for one thing. And the skull is put in the middle wherever it is, and he anoints this skull with a special oily preparation for which the components are listed. and the components are a bit like the witches in Macbeth, you know, the eye of newt and leg of toad and all that sort of stuff. They're all that are all components that you don't find in, for example, medical prescriptions with oily things. They're not like that. So it must have been a secret recipe in the mounts of them, but they make this oily preparation and they anoint the skull.

And then the exorcist, who has special possession, has this job. He has to call upon the sun god, who's, of course, either in heaven or of course, if it's nighttime, he's underneath because they go round and round around, of course, like good sons do. So he have to call up the sun god and request him to bring up a spirit of the dead person in order to enter into the skull. And the skull then becomes the medium of communication. and the ritual concludes when this happens that it says whatever you ask him, that's to say the dead person,

he will tell you. So, mimma tashalushu Iqabika, whatever you ask him, he will tell you. So Shamash, who's in charge of the dead in the underworld, gets the message from the Babylonian and says, okay, where is this guy, let me think, I know, 116 C or something,

goes down, gets him, and I don't know how he brings him up, it doesn't tell you, but this figure, or the part of the figure, or the essence of the figure, passes in such a way that it can articulate the message using the skull. So I published this thing, I found this tablet, wrote a lot about it more than one place, it's a very interesting thing to me,

but what is most interesting is the sweeping and cleaning up of the place and getting everything ready, and which takes a lot of time and they have to have a notice with an arrow pointing down stuck in the ground and all sorts of funny things like that. When it comes to it,

you've got the household owner, probably the wife wouldn't go anywhere near it, I imagine maybe the oldest son, maybe not, maybe everyone was very frightened. The person who was curious enough to do this or driven enough, I think probably under extreme conditions

to take recourse to this, would be sitting there and waiting and it would be dark, there'd be insiniscence, swirling about. And I always imagine that the exorcists who do this kind of work, they didn't wear like

three-piece suits and an umbrella and bowler hat that you might see on the underground being John Cleese. They were undoubtedly dressed for the point with long, straggly hair, I imagine, and probably ancient tattoos and God knows what's hanging from the rope round their wigs, probably wearing a sort of dressing gown affair, all that kind of stuff.

For sure, they must have dressed the part. See, all the mystique about it and all that. So you do this, call upon this, the loud voice, and then there's silence, and then you wait. So it occurred to me that if you'd done all this, paid all the money up front, taking out insurance, all the rest of it, and you were actually in there. And something happened that made a noise like the guy banged it with his knees, the skull went like that. Or you'd have a heart attack. You'd have a heart attack. You'd never be able to say, oh, that's good.

and can I ask you what time it will be or something? The whole thing must have been wreathed around in so much tension that I don't know how it worked. Now, but we know it happened. There's more than one reference, and we know lots of other things about it. One interesting thing is this, that we have necromancy of a kind in the Old Testament.

Yes, yes, it is meaty. Because the praxis of calling up somebody with a skull passed into Jewish magic of the post-biblical period into the Middle Ages. And they also used a skull in the same kind of way because they were in Babylon. They had all those years of captivity, as they call it in Babylon. And the people among them, the doctors and the thinkers, they knew all about the Babylonian things. And somehow this survived on into the Middle Ages. And there is a rabbi called Rashi in about the 14th century who wrote about divining

by a skull and asking questions of it. And he says in this commentary, the thing is, does the voice really come or does the person imagine it? So in the 14th century, he's appraising this inherited dogma, this treatise, how they do that, and asks himself. Because, you know, if you're a 14th century rabbi, you don't have a closed mind about anything to do with a spiritual or psychological world. I mean, it's all bread and butter.

So you wouldn't have said any of it's impossible because who can say this? But he asked himself, did it really happen or did a person imagine it? It is ringed around quite a lot of episodes to do with necromancy that come down to us, especially the one in the Bible. But it does feed into your idea, Irving,

about this idea of why do we so easily dismiss these things? Whereas if it had been a political issue, we'd say, well, yes, that probably happened. There may be some, you know, propaganda going on around it, but we can say that this happened in some fashion. Or a military thing. Yes, okay, they might be spinning this a little bit, but we can say that it happened.

But when it comes to these things, sometimes the question comes up going, oh, it's very fanciful. They probably didn't actually do that. It was a metaphor. It was a metaphor for something else. Exactly. But why would you discount that?

Because as you're saying, there's this appraisal then later in the 14th century. But we can also use some of the mythology of the time, can't we? The ancient mythology, I'm thinking about Gilgamesh, for instance, and there are other texts as well that put a little bit of meat on the bones, so to speak, about what's happening societally around these things and how central it can be to people's lives. Well, it sounds silly to say it, but death is central to human life, not to the mad extent

that the Egyptians did it, but for most people it is, and the older you get, the more pressing the matter seems to become. But in fact, necromancy, for example, special dealing with the ghosts like that does not crop up in literature as a topos. It is not a theme in Mesopotamia. We know all about the dead and the underworld and about ghosts coming back of their own volition because often people in the netherworld are miserable and unhappy or they have some issue to work out and they come back and they make trouble. So the mechanism of the dead not really being down there when they should be and coming back here when they shouldn't is a universal matter. People of all cultures and all religions and all literatures show that this belief is part of the human inheritance that the dead,

wherever they are, whatever's happened to them, can sometimes come back. This is a universal matter. And people don't like it when you say that. And clearly, Eric's don't like it when you say that. But it's true. There's no question about it. It is part of the human matter. But the specific, sophisticated proposition that you can get one of them to come up, especially possessed of the knowledge of the future, that's a separate matter.

And finding it in Babylonia is not something that's going to shake the world and make people to reappraise their ideas. But the thing is, it's jolly well embedded in the Old Testament. You know in the book of Samuel, that sound like a preacher, we read in one Samuel that what happened was that Saul, King Saul, was having terrible time with the Philistines. Everybody knows about the Philistines. And Saul didn't know what's going to happen. He wanted to know what was going to happen. And it's described in the Hebrew text and then subsequently in the Latin and Greek translations and everything even up until this very day in which we've done.

live, that what he did was this. He called upon somebody in the court to take him to this lady who lived in a place called Endor. Now, Saul, who was supposed to be a righteous and obedient king, had outlawed magicians, necromances, gibberers, magicians, all those sorts of people who mucked around with the dark side, as you would call it, out of my kingdom. He made it illegal. but when he was in trouble and he wanted to find out from the underworld what was going to happen all that went out in the window

and he went off with two trusted assistants to this lady who's gone down in history and in quiz books and other kind of monstrous forms of publication as the witch of Aindor but the thing is she wasn't no witch because in the biblical text she is called Balaat Ove

and Ba'alat Ove means the mistress of ghosts. So she was not a witch. She guarded the entrance to the underworld as they believed in it. About 1,000 BC, this place in Indoor, there was an entrance that went all the way down to the underworld. And this is what happened, that Saul wanted to speak to the prophet Samuel. So a prophet, no less. He's going right to the top. Well, almost right to the top.

He's a man for sure who is going to know what's going to happen. Yeah, yeah, of course. He's in with all the high authorities, the best kind of voice you can get. Good old Samuel. Which indoors, they called her. It was very appalled to see it was Saul. And he thought she thought she was going to be. No, no, no, no, it's fine.

It's fine. So they bring up Saul. And if you read the text in the Bible, it is my favorite bit of the Bible, because it is so believable. Because the prophet Samuel, after her ministrations or whatever she does, he comes up. And he stands, I suppose, in the mouth of the cave or whatever it is that goes down there,

and he says to the king, why did you disturb me? Not, hello, it's me, or you are in a messy situation, or bet you didn't think I'd come, why did you disturb me? So when you read this in the Hebrew text and the later translations, it sounds like he was half asleep on the sofa with a bag of peanuts watching a crappy film for the third time. You were the doorbell rings. The doorbell rings. So anyway, Samuel tells him that the future is very bleak.

It's very bleak indeed. And he goes back down having divulges. And the thing is that Saul came with two trusty young guys who I always think are like Rose and Crows. handsome Gildenstern in Hamlet. They went with him to find the indoor lady. And she, seeing this, he wants to go down the mountain and go back home again. She makes supper for him. She won't let him go without having something to eat.

So if you read this text, never mind the Old Testament, the New Testament, never mind anything about the Bible, you just read this episode. It is unbelievably believable. It's as if it was true. true, right? And if it were, if it did happen, or he thought it happened, or something like that, the two boys there are the only people from whom we could have got the information, Gildenstern and Rosencrantz, because Saul was killed. And the witch of Endor would never tell nobody. So they must have come home and written it down if you believe, A, the Bible is true,

B, it was written, C, somebody did it, somebody had the typewriter, it was them. So when you read it, it's overpoweringly convincing. And I always think, how comes Shakespeare never utilised this scene one of his plays? It's perfect for Shakespeare. Absolutely. So what I wanted to tell you is this, that when you read it with no axe to grind, there's no shadow of a doubt in your mind that this is a literary construction. It is, so to speak, a metaphor, or he thought he heard this and he didn't hear that.

So that's fine. There were theologians who inherited this narrative about Saul and Samuel and coming up and speaking, and they didn't like it. Because, you know, they always have a dicky view about all this kind of matter. They didn't like it. So what you get in these miscellaneous treatises is very deft, barrister-like explanations of why it isn't actually what happened. It's just the way they've described it. It's sophistry of a very miserable and low level to try and get rid of it. But the thing is, if you just read it, it is astonishing. And what it tells us, what it, what we inherit from this consideration is that the whole issue is by and large unacceptable to persons in general. That mucking about with the dead in a necromanic way is not a wholesome activity.

So they try to expunge it entirely. Of course they didn't, and we have the original text. But it does put a sort of light on it, which means if you want to investigate it, you have to be determined and ringed around with fire yourself and carry a blazing sword so that you are in a state of purity and safety. But I find it rather amusing. And also, the other human thing about it is that Saul had made in the Bible a huge noise about driving out of the kingdom

all the people who mucked about with this kind of stuff exorcists all of them they were all thrown over the border and then when there's a bit of problem reaches for the telephone and first person

to call them back you know it's kind of an interesting thing I think we see that today right you will in different forms you will get sceptics who say oh that wouldn't be for me I wouldn't I wouldn't but then sometimes when things go wrong in life

they're going to the tariff card readers or they're going to the psychic mediums or whatever. So it's interesting that under pressure, people sometimes default back to these very ancient practices that can so very easily be dismissed. But one thing that's not as easily dismissed. And I remember this so clearly from our last conversation that, you know, it was quite a while back now, but I was really struck by this idea. And you mentioned it again today that the dead, especially with more, you know, as we would say,

elite families maybe, are potentially in the courtyard. And when I was rereading for today's episode, when I knew you were coming in, I was reading about some of the disposal of bodies in different cultures in the ancient world. And I was also learning that for children, sometimes they're buried even within the walls of the house to keep them even closer. And what is very tangible to me is that there seems, amongst all of what we've discussed today, is that there seems to be this real tactile proximity to death, which can only mean to me that they view death in a different way than we do. And I love this idea that you described.

And I know we don't know for certain, but I think there's real sense in it of going, okay, whose skull are we using? Well, actually, we have access to skulls, potentially, depending on who we are, because we can go out into the courtyard, or we can access Bertha's skull from six years ago, she's dead. And we have a skull at our disposal, which is not something we can really identify with today. It's much more difficult today. It is. You can only get the made of plastic. And I don't think that would work. The sun god's not going to react to that. Death is universal and it's timeless. And I find that a very comforting thing, actually. But do you

think their attitude to death is quite different to ours than in terms of that proximity? Well, I think in one respect, certainly, because people didn't live as long in antiquity as they do now. There is a kineiform tablet somewhere, or rather, which has the ages of man on and lists them in ascending order. And I think it's probably true that most men die between the ages of 30 and 40, something like that. So 50, 60, 70 and 80 are unusual. and so that means that if this is truth, that's the general pattern around, then your life expectancy is curtailed from a modern point of view. So in other words, the brevity of life and the fact that whatever you do,

either in battle or through disease or through being gored to death by a bull or just folding over and giving up, is with the passage of time, relatively not far off. Because nowadays people talk about young 80-year-olds and people who are 90. In fact, it's politically offensive to refer to a 95-year-old as an old person. And, you know, once you're over 100 and you've got your message from the royal family, then maybe you can take it seriously.

But in fact, that has expanded substantially. And it might be that that's part of it because, you know, they had epidemics, they had diseases, they had disasters, like we do, but the facilities to cope with those things and to repair ill health were not quite as accomplished as they are today, although they weren't devoid of effect. For sure, they weren't. But nevertheless, I think people's lives were on more of a knife edge than they think they are today, although this might also be an illusion. So it's an interesting question. I think it's, I don't know, it's fascinating to me.

Proximity to death is very, like it just, I think it's an Irish thing as well where, you know, we wake the dead, we have them in our house, we, I saw my first dead body when I was six. It wasn't, it wasn't, it was probably strange when I was six, but therefore it becomes not very strange very quickly because you are in a different proximity. Now, I'm not saying it's the same kind of proximity as we see in these ancient texts, but there's something, we experience death. differently in Ireland, I think, than is experienced here. And I'm pushing that way further back in terms of what they're experiencing there in the ancient world. And that proximity must do something, I think, to the way that one understands one's time here. But then feeding back to that initial point that you made about this, you're on a continuum at some point, that it's not necessarily the end just because you get to that point, that there's more that can be done on that

continuum even after death. I want to ask you one final part in question in terms of what you think necromancy specifically can teach us about these ancient cultures and ancient societies. Well, firstly, it reflects a matter-of-fact attitude to death. So it's not ringed around with tragedy and drama and stuff in the texts that we find. I mean, obviously people cried and mourned, but the topic of death was not something that people flinched away from in conversation. As far as I can understand it, I don't think that would be the case. You know, the necromancy ritual that we were talking about, by the way, the word for it is grimroar, which is good for an English person who knows the word grim. It's rather the ideal term for a manual for...

necromancy, because this manual also tells you how to get rid of everything. So there is a set of spells at the end, which are exorcistic. So the last thing you want to do is to release Uncle Henry, she sits down and has a lovely time explaining things to everybody, and, you know, I think I'll be here for a while to come, you know, that sort of thing. So there are these exorcistics who have to drive the person back. But, you know, we have a huge amount of cheneiform. I mean, in the BM, there's 135,000 tablets, something like that.

There's only about two or three which have anything to do with this subject. So it wasn't, it wasn't, you know, we have thousands of things to do with getting rid of devils and demons. Right. Thousands. Well, lots of, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Huge literature on getting rid of ghosts and evil spirits. And the idea of bringing them up flies.

in the face of normal life. So it would only be certain circumstances. It must be very compelling circumstances. Unfortunately, we don't know what it might be. But there is a much later text where one of the questions is about whether someone's going to find a wife, as far as I can see. It's much less formal. And, you know, by the way, and this is in the Seleucid period, so about 300 BC, and it looks

as if the old systems which are in the hands of very careful practitioners who didn't make a lot of noise, that I think some forms of this activity might have moved into booths in a market. You know, because you talked about those tarot cards, which people used to do in markets to tell people's fortunes. I think it's always been the case that if you wander around, there's someone who can tell your fortune from this or that, and there were probably people who would, So this late text from the third century sounds a bit like that. You know, you slide a couple of coins across the counter,

and the lady would say, oh, well, looks like, yes, well, he says you're going to become a bank manager, or something like that. It's hard to tell. But all the texts add up to a very small amount. But it is a universal matter. And it's very interesting. Of course, you're supposed to say to people, don't try this at home.

But actually, I think they should try it. It would be very interesting to see what happened. You know, once I had to give a lecture about, in fact, about a long, long time ago. And it was in a very smart Georgian building for a proper historical society. And it was the summer and it was incredibly hot. And so they pulled all the drapes so that the room was almost in darkness for me to give this talk. And I sat at the front in front of a table and I'd taken the precaution of bringing with me a skull. because I happen to have one.

As you do? Well, in fact, it belonged to my father. It's not his actual skull. That went with the rest of him, wherever that is now. But when he was a dental student at Guy's hospital, you had a real skull. Now, as I said, it's plastic or worse. Anyway, this came to me in due course,

and I was very delighted to have this skull because I've always fancied having a go at this ear of Newt and think, one day I shall do it. Anyway, so when I gave this lecture, So I plunk the skull next to me on the table and talked about it and explained how it all worked. One of my colleagues came in late and was sitting right at the back of the room. So lots of heads in between. And there was with her, this little lady she knew, I didn't know, she might have been a nun or something like a nurse or something.

And she brought her to this talk, they were sitting at the back. And my colleague Dominique told me afterwards something hysterical happened. Because from where they were seated, they could see me and they could see the dome of the skull, but not the nose and jaw because of the angle. And this lady asked my colleague, who is that person sitting next to the speaker? And she thought it was a very small part. Or maybe she was seeing it reanimated. Well, I wanted to ask her whether it said anything. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

What you were seeing. Listen, I am going to have to end it there. we could talk to you forever, Irving. You know we'll have you back if you will be so gracious as to graces with your presence again. Be it, tomorrow morning. Yeah, you just sleep here. Well, you're locked in now. You're not going anywhere.

But I just want to thank you for spending time with us on After Dark because our listeners will really relish this conversation. And if you ever do decide to go through with the eye of Newt and a skull, give our producers a call because we feel we will turn off that. We will be there for that as well. Marvelous. Listen, thank you so much for watching and listening to After Dark, wherever you get your podcasts. Leave us a five-star review. Wherever you get your podcasts, it helps other people who are interested in necromancy in all things, dark or maybe not dark history, to find us to. Until next time, I hope you've enjoyed this episode.

Go and listen to Irving's last episode and buy his book, The First Ghosts. And until then, happy listening.