The Ancients - Witches

Episode Date: October 29, 2023

From seductive sorceresses to withered necromancers, witches play a varied - and vital - role in ancient history. Recorded in classical epics by the likes of Homer, and immortalised in tragedies by Euripides, the names Circe and Medea resonate across society and culture even today. But how did witchcraft and magic aid them in ancient societies, and what does it tell us about how women of power were viewed in the ancient world?In this episode Tristan welcomes Dr Mai Musié and Dr Regine May to the podcast to delve into the mystical world of Ancient Witches. Looking at how Circe and Medea's powers reflected their position in society, sinister necromancy, and the role that Greek tragedies played in immortalising the idea of the Witch - why were these women so powerful, and why were they so feared?Discover the past with exclusive history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code ANCIENTS sign up now for your 14-day free trial here.You can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's episode where we've got a special Halloween episode for you today, we're having a look at some of the most well-known witches from Greco-Roman literature.

We'll be going from beautiful seductresses of Greek mythology like Circe and Medea, to the likes of the necromancer Eryctho and her role in Julius Caesar's war against Pompey. Now, to give an overview of these figures, well, I was delighted to interview not one but two guests for the episode today. They are Dr. May Musier, an ancient historian and public engagement specialist who has done so much to connect the ancient world with modern communities through projects like Classics and Communities, and Dr. Regina May, Associate Professor at the University of Leeds. So relax and enjoy the next 50 minutes as we discuss all things witches in the Greco-Roman world.

May, Regina, it is wonderful to have you both on the podcast today. Thank you for having us. You are more than welcome. This is a special Ancients Halloween episode. The first time we've kind of done a special Halloween episode on the Ancients in the years of this podcast. Witches and ghosts in the Greco-Roman world. We've got a lot to cover. We've kind of divided it up. May, you're going to do ancient Greece. Regina, you're going to do ancient Rome. If we delve into it straight away, May, I'm going to start with you. Witches in Greek mythology. This is where we see some of the archetype witches of ancient history, don't we?

And that's right. So in ancient Greek epic and literature, we do have two very prominent witches. So witches are far more prominent than their male counterparts. It doesn't mean that there aren't any male sorcerers and so forth, but you do get this huge presence of witches. And their presence goes back as far back as the Homeric epics, if not earlier. And there are two archetypes, as I mentioned, and they stand out in the formation of the witch figure. And we've become quite familiar with those. So when I say Circe and Medea, that isn't going to be unfamiliar or unusual for a lot of our audience and listeners. So to begin with, Circe, we see her appear in Homer's Odyssey, composed around, say, the 7th century BC. And she seems to be Greek literature's first witch,

the first example trail of a witch. She uses drugs and potions, and that's where we get our word pharmacy from, is the word for drugs, pharmaka and pharmakos. And there is a little bit of ambiguity when it comes to, is she a woman, is she a goddess, or a combination of both. And her powers seems to be, she can transform men into pigs. And we have a very famous scene of that with Odysseus and his men being turned into pigs in the Odyssey. And she has the ability to transform them into pigs and then back again. And so there's this kind of magical rejuvenation. And that comes across with Medea as well. So what is this story of Odysseus meeting Circe? Is this on his travels following the Trojan War, they venture to this island and boom, there she is. and she has these potions and so on which

therefore ultimately transforms some of them into animals that's pretty much it isn't it yeah so Odysseus is trying to get back home after the Trojan war and one of the key episodes in the Odyssey is meeting Circe and she is on this island and they appear on this island and a lot of the Odyssey is all about sort of getting lost on the way home so he takes quite a long time to get back home and so he lands on this island and he asks his comrades to go and explore and some of the comrades go and explore and they see you know a house and you see beautiful maidens and they finally encounter Cersei and it is at that point then that they get turned into pigs but around the sort of her house and the gardens etc you will see different kinds of animals so there is this if you look back you can see that there are hints of males particularly being transformed into

different kinds of animals so it isn't necessarily just pigs and so there is this attachment of the idea of animal transformation one of the first kind of known animal transformation linked to witches' powers. And it happens in that episode. Odysseus himself doesn't get turned into a pig, by the way. He gets seduced by Circe and therefore she falls in love with him and he finds a way to not be transformed himself. But it's interesting though isn't it May the story of Circe if you say this is the earliest known witch from Greek mythology her whole portrayal is significant as you say these

are drugs and potions and so on but also I'm guessing her legacy must be seismic too because of the witches that follow her in Greco-Roman literature. That's right you will see the things that she performs the magic she performs is repeated not just within Greek and Roman literature but what comes after and so they become this kind of stock, you know, sort of ticking list, I guess. She uses not just drugs and potions, but spells and a wand and an ointment. As I said earlier, in some of the sources, the animals around her island are sailors that transform into lions and wolves, made of different animal parts which is a bit grotesque but then there's also another aspect where she can be invisible or send her soul

flying through the air and then there is another perspective another attachment to her magic which is the kind of erotic magic. And that is quite significant because that becomes reoccurring whenever you think of witches, whether it's witches in classical or medieval or even modern age, they're always attached to the erotic magic, the sort of the potion, the drug that is used on usually so-called innocent men to fall in love with them or so forth. Well, I guess, therefore, that leads us into our other archetype figure who you mentioned earlier. Regina, we will get to Rome soon, don't worry. But before that, May, we've got to talk about Medea, don't? Yes and poor Medea I mean she is cast as this othered

woman she comes from the Colchis by the Black Sea she is different in every aspect so not just being a sort of an independent woman but also being other as in non-Greek. And her story really is very, very interesting because it becomes a kind of reoccurring story throughout of what a witch is like. So the earliest source that we hear from with regards to Medea is the Atheogone, so the stories of the gods. And that's where we learn of her ancestry. So we learn that she is directly related to Helios through her father now in some sources Circe is her aunt or niece depending or sister and it all gets a bit conflated and they are also seen as daughters of Hecate who is this goddess and she is the goddess of everything that is quite beyond the

association with the underworld and so forth. Hecate, who poisons her own father and marries her uncle. The other source that we get is the Oponais of Rhodes, the Argonautica, which gives a fuller description of events leading up to Euripides' famous play, The Greek Tragedy Writer, where that recounts Jason and the quest for the golden fleece. And Euripides, the playwright who writes in the 5th century BC, immortalised Medea in his Greek tragedy of the same name. And then Ovid takes over that. So he provides the most elaborate, extant account of Medea's regeneration and in order to help Jason. And this involves a cauldron. So again, you've got these kind of checklists of items. Okay, so you've got, again,

items. Okay, so you've got, again, drugs, the ability to control elements, the landscape, the moon and the stars, and snakes are associated with those two figures as well. And then the traditional rites of evocation, where she calls Hecate from the underworld. And she uses the evil eye against a foe. And these things reoccur over time. And, you know, if you think of a modern witch now and you say, well, can you describe the sort of powers that she has, then those associated with Circe and Medea tends to come up quite a lot. Forgive my ignorance, but what is the evil eye? It is still very much all over the modern Mediterranean. You get these amulets warding off against it, which are blue with an eye in the centre made of glass, made of ceramics.

They are just the power of a witch or of an evil demon to control you via eye contact and they are means of making sure that they have no power over you including these amulets and in antiquity they involved anything from saying certain spells or using certain antidotes against the evil eye to ward off the spellcaster's power over you. It is even believed that when Caesar was assassinated, his famous last words to Brutus at Tu Brute are not only saying to his close acquaintance, I am disappointed that you are part of the plot against me as well, and so I die, but also might have been a recognition and a curse involving the evil eye against Brutus. So it was absolutely everywhere. Yeah, Kaisu Technon.

And keeping on Medea a bit longer, May, it's interesting, her character, her portrayal, Medea a bit longer. May, it's interesting, her character, her portrayal, as you say, Jason and the Argonauts goes to the region of Colchis, you know, not part of the Greek world. It's interesting that you have this figure and there is this portrayal, this idea that witchery, that this sorcery, that this person doesn't come from the Greek world. It comes from a place seen very much on the periphery, a place, I guess, maybe less well known to these figures. That's absolutely right. And if there is something strange and unknown and Greek people unable to understand,

then those sort of things were associated to the periphery of the known world. And funny enough, Thessaly is in northern Greece. It kind of borders ancient Macedonia. And that in itself becomes strange and attached to witchcraft and things that are sort of against the normalization of nature. So it's not just the lands are beyond, but it's also the land that circles around Greece. So anything that challenges the patriarchal system, anything that challenges the normal way of doing things becomes othered. the normal way of doing things becomes othered so in Circe's typecasting she is othered because she is very strong and independent and uses her skills whether they're kind of her looks etc

for her gain and so forth and this cannot happen with respect to this sort of male-dominated society. And then with Medea, you've got this, yes, she is closer home, but again, she is beyond Greece. And even though it is helping their Greek hero, she does things that are unacceptable, things that are quite barbarous and she's often sort of seen as a kind of barbarian and therefore could never be accepted in Greek society and that's the kind of one of the real tragedies of the play is the fact that she's never been able to be accepted in the society that Jason belongs to. And then that becomes a kind of a stereotype of any woman who stays out of her lane, you know, geographically or physically or emotionally, it becomes really tough, a person in your own right as an individual, but that goes against the Greek thinking in a very patriarchal system and so Thessaly gets quoted quite a lot in Greek and Roman literature as being this home of witchcraft and predominantly females

performing witchcraft around that area. Well let's talk about Thessaly now because this is interesting if we say we've gone from Medeirion Colchis, outside the Greek world, to Thessaly, a land of horses, this important region of what is today Greece, in roughly the central area. Regina, why does Thessaly develop this really strong association with witches? That is a really good question. Well, it is in northern Greece, so it is a little bit of a backwater to civilization. It also is closer to the east where magic was said to originate from. So magic was believed to come from the east, like Medea comes from the east, Viathraes into Thessaly. And that becomes, in the Roman imagination, the place where all good

witches come from. But already in some Greek literature, Thessaly, Thessalian witches are the first who are said to be old witches rather than the young and beautiful archetypes like Medea and Circe, who are to some extent divine or related to the divine and Thessalian witches are more mundane they are ordinary Greek women they are still outsiders in society because they are aged and because they live in a backwater and because what they do is associated with something illicit and disturbing. One of the things that the salient witches became famous for very quickly was the so-called salient trick that involved cosmic disorder. They were famous for being able to pull down the moon

and darkening the skies at midday, reverting the flow of rivers and things like that. So creating wholesale chaos. And that involves also including softening the borderline between life and death. So the idea of marginalized women is transformed from Medea and Circe, who were outsiders also because they were not entirely human to human women who are outsiders because they create chaos and do not follow the patriarchal view of how a woman should actually behave and Thessaly as the borderline country is a great symbol of this marginalization of these women. It's so interesting how they use that region, you know, as you say, to getting into the mindset

of these ancient Greeks and then these ancient Romans particularly. And I guess we have to address that. The sources that we have for witchcraft in this region and for witchcraft in the Greco-Roman world, it's almost always written by elite men with a particular agenda. Oh yes, we have very few writings by women and mostly male writers cast women as outsiders, the antagonists to their own lives. And what is more alien to an elite Roman writer than a to an elite Roman writer than a middle-class or even lower-class elderly woman who is not interested in what a male elite Roman is interested in. So women are quite often associated with witchcraft and they themselves become cast into the role of the antagonist throughout Roman and Greek literature, really.

And so, are there any particular Roman poets that hear the story of Thessaly and its association with witchcraft and really use it in their own literature? Oh, there are quite a few. And the ones I would like to pick out are, for example, Horace or Lucan, because they give us portraits of really viciously evil old female hags who are threatening the Roman elite to the extent that they can destroy the cosmos surrounding everybody. So if you start with Horace and his witch Canidia, because she's one of the best portrait witches in Latin poetry, she's sometimes darkly funny and sometimes quite scary. Her name, Carnidia, means grey-haired, so she's clearly quite old. And we encounter her throughout the poetry of Horace. Horace was writing in the first century BC. He was loosely linked with the

court of the Emperor Augustus via his patron. And as we've seen, witches are the enemies of poets and lovers. And that becomes a trope in poetry because Horace creates this powerful adversary in this witch as an agent of chaos. So Canidiana friends are old, ugly, promiscuous, on the opposite of the beautiful young girl who is usually the topic of Roman love poetry. Horace writes biting satires and the ugly witch is the deliberate opposite of that girl, so a quasi-incarnation of Horace's satirist style. He makes witches a literary concept, but one that is seated within absolute Roman reality. Romans believed in witches and feared what they were capable of.

And I think there might even be a hint at something darker in Horace's obsession with witches, because this older woman using witchcraft and specifically erotic magic is a glance of what might happen when the desirable young mistress of the love poetry just grows a little too old and less attractive to the man. And we might ask what would she be happy to do at that time to keep her lovers? And that is an uncomfortable thought for the poets. Canidia, sometimes she has a sidekick called Sagana, which is Latin pun for saga or a wise woman. They are quite useful because they can have conversations and we can overhear their evil deeds and they specialize in poison and traditionally love potions and poisons use

similar ingredients in antiquity. So we have lots of stories where wrongly applied love potions end up driving people mad or even killing them. So love potions and poison and killing are very closely related and all associated with the witch. So Kanidia is this incarnation of the archetypal evil witch. So she is the other, the woman who can be blamed for so many things that can go wrong in so many people's lives. She still lives at the margins of society in that space just outside social order. So in Satyrs 1.8, we can see Canidia and Sagana in action in quite a funny description of what normally is quite a terrifying ritual. They try to perform erotic magic and a necromancy, they try to perform erotic magic and a necromancy and they do this of course in the usual way they do it at night in the garden of maecenas that is a garden that has just newly been planted at this

time over what used to be a graveyard for the roman poor so this is a liminal space, which is not quite civilized like a beautiful garden, but has an underbelly of destruction, neglected graves. And therefore, this is an ideal hunting ground for these women because they actually need bones and human body parts, plus poisonous herbs to affect their magic. So they are obviously clearly outsiders and they look it. So they are dressed in black rags, they are pale like the dead, they howl at the moon, they dig up bodies from their graves and they slaughter black lambs and pour blood into a ditch in order to call up ghosts of the bodies surrounding them. So they are utterly, utterly gross. They also use something we consider like voodoo dolls,

all of this to create love magic. They're so powerful and scary that the moon goddess is too scared to watch. And so she hides behind a tombstone, which is a bit of an echo of this Thessalian trick of being able to pull down the moon. So this is really all scary, you should think. But the poem is actually narrated by the statue of the god Priapus, who is a rather low-key god who is in charge of fertility, and he looks it as well. Yes, he's the frescoes with the absolutely massive phallus, isn't he? The famous one from Pompeii. Yes.

How that can actually stand up and not fall over is a really good question. So he sees a frequent garden ornament. And he is now upset by these witches doing this in his garden. And he makes a farting noise and scares them away. And so the last image we have of them is that Canidia leaves behind a false teeth and Sagana a wig. So this version of the witch shows them as potentially successful in their craft, but still there can be figures of ridicule because Romans ridiculed old women.

An old woman is always associated with being drunk and therefore a person of ridicule. But even in this darkly funny version, the woman's magic works. They do manage to pull down the moon and Hecate and some screeching ghosts do appear. It's just that Priapus doesn't want to tell us what really exactly happened so we may wonder is Canidia always ridiculous but unfortunately not. That is quite a story before we go on to the next figure I mean just for me listening to all of this it is interesting how you've almost gone from the the sorceress of Medea and Circe to the old hag with false teeth and wig and all of that, just kind of a grotesque kind of image that is

portrayed centuries later by the likes of Horace. Yes, it's an astonishing change in the fate of the witch, isn't it? So it's not really the case that it's only the Roman witches are always old and ugly and the Greek witches are always beautiful and young. This is also a difference between what the Romans and the Greeks thought might be real and in real life and what is mythological background and archetype for it. So they are already in fragments of Greek comedies and also in some Greek poetry from the time that the Argonautica were written, of course, women who are still beautiful, who are still trying to use witchcraft and specifically erotic magic to bind lovers to them. But these women are part of the demi-monde, as it used to be called, hetairai, working ladies who do have to fear growing old and who are very much trying to bind men to them as long as they could, because that is their source of income. So there is a graduation from the mythological background

to literary depiction of women who are young, but who are already in fear of what they might become, an unattractive, starving old woman, and therefore use magic, specifically erotic magic, in order to ensure that this doesn't happen or is postponed as long as possible. And from that, of course, it's only a small step to the Roman depiction of hags who are beyond that stage where holding lovers is still possible into forcing them to be with them against the wish of the males. So it's gradual, but the end result on the Roman side is quite horrifying. And obviously, as we said, these are male writers who really want to portray themselves as both the victim, but also slightly apart from the power of these women. And that gives us this friction between these darkly funny portraits of witches who absolutely can make magic and who are successful at it,

whilst at the same time not being entirely successful in the way that they want. Because that gives the male author still a little bit of control over these women. Well, let's go even more horrifying, more terrifying in this strand. We've got to talk about this figure of Eryctho, don't we? Because, oh man, this story, it's one to give you nightmares. Eryctho is the worst witch of them all. She is the character we find in Lucan's Vassalia. That's an epic from 65 AD. It's about the civil war in Rome between Julius Caesar and Pompey. And this epic features this utterly terrifying Thessalian super-witch called Erechzo in book six. This is an epic about Roman history and the dehumanizing chaos of civil war. And Erechzo's

supernatural powers are even more terrifying because Lucan's epic is one which does not on the whole feature gods as characters interfering with the humans. Instead we have this otherworldly witch dealing with the bodies of the recently dead on one of the bloodiest battlefields of the ancient world. Pharsalus, the battlefield, is in Thessaly, where the day after the encounter with the witch, Julius Caesar will utterly destroy the troops of Pompey. So this is a blood-soaked battlefield. And just before that battle, Pompey's son, Sextus, does something completely despicable. He consults the witch to learn his and his father's destiny. And Lucan chose this to show the utter inadequacy of the generals involved with this, because you shall not consult a witch, especially not a witch like this one.

Like Canidia, Erixo lives in deserted tombs and is a wasted, pale, unkempt old hag. She's active at night when she busies herself near funeral pyres. So she looks very much like the dead she works on when she collects the bones of the untimely dead for general magic use. So she's the scariest of this large, powerful tribe of Thessalian witches who are able to disturb the cosmic order. So their magic can make rivers leave their natural course. They can control the elements. The climate can go haywire. Earth is jolted out of course.

The stars fall down. And interestingly, she still evokes Thirsi, Medea and Hecata in her prayers so she sees herself as a successor and heir to those but even the gods on Olympus fear Eryx though and even the moon again when she's pulled down by the Salian Witch is forced to deliver magical ingredients on the witch's command. So, Sicilian witches can create love spells and force reluctant lovers, but Erechzo can do much worse than that. Namely, she can call up the dead from their graves and force them to her will. That is why she collects these dead bodies and the corpses of the recently dead and retrieves their body

parts and she tears those corpses apart with her own teeth. So it's a really long, really unsettling description of how Erixil behaves. In this case, it's really interesting how you have this depiction of a super witch, you know, collecting body parts and being able to raise people from the dead, which is mad. And then associating them with this massive figure of the late Roman Republic and his son, who's also not very much liked by the early imperial period. It almost seems that Eric Tho is used to smear Pompey's reputation, the whole reputation of his family. This is almost has a political purpose in it too. Well, absolutely. You can always see how Horace used these women to make a point about his poetry. Lucan, who does not like many of the characters

in his epic at all, he uses these women to make a point about the horror and the futility of civil war, because civil war is chaos. It is the creation of a world in which nothing is sacred, in which everything is turned upside down. And Erechtho is the embodiment of that chaos. Lucan even suggests that the reason why the battles that the Romans fought against each other were placed in Thessaly is because Erixo used her magic to make this happen. Maximum bloodshed, the Pharsalus battle is one of the worst in Roman history. And that happens near Erixo's home because it gives her plenty of ingredients for her witchcraft and enough corpses for the foreseeable future. And it is her forcing the Romans to do it, but the Romans being in a position to be forced to hold these horrible battles in her own backyard.

in her own backyard. So what she is doing there is a symbol of the chaos of civil war, and there's nothing that Romans feared more than that civil war. And she will perform this necromancy, and she will predict, therefore, that the outcome of the civil war is going to be awful. The prophecy will say that sexist Pope Pompidou will lose the war and die horribly. So she drags the corpse of a recently deceased soldier to her cave, reanimates him, and forces him to reluctantly give that prophecy. And in a way, necromancy really is the gravest insult to nature that you can imagine. And it's a sign here that for Lucan, that civil war has corrupted all moral and societal rules into a disarray of really cosmic scale. Well, we really have gone somewhere from Circe to Eric Tho in this podcast so far. But we've got to

talk about Apuleius, don't we? Of all figures, this is big on witches. Absolutely. This is a novel all about witchcraft. It's from the second century AD, written by a philosopher who himself was in his early life accused of being a magician and who knows absolutely everything there is to know about ancient magic. In this novel, a young man named Lucius is turned into a donkey by magic and then travels as a donkey through Sicily and then later Greece to experience under various owners all kinds of treatment the donkey can experience including hearing a lot about witches and in the end

actually he is saved by the goddess Isis who is Egyptian and therefore linked with the idea of otherworldly magic. And Lucius, in the end, becomes her devotee and priest. But even before anything happens, already in the first book of the novel, we encounter various witches, and Lucius is just incredibly curious because he knows he goes to Thessaly, and he wants to find more out about

those Thessalian witches that he has heard so much about. And he encounters quite a few of them in stories told to him in order to make sure that he does not dabble with witches, but he's not particularly bright. So he obviously goes straight for hearing about witches and finds himself turned into a donkey as a result. The first story is about a man called Socrates, who is emphatically not the philosopher that Apollaeus usually works on. usually works on and he travels to Thessaly and encounters an old innkeeper an old lady who does obviously use love magic and binding magic to make him her own so that's how she acquires her lovers and he knows that he is an unwilling victim of magic and he wants to escape. He is helped by a friend. They run away and hide in an inn. And in the middle of night, unfortunately, the witch Meroy, that name, Meroy is a place in Egypt. And so again, links Egypt into the story very early on.

It also associates her with being a drunken old woman. So the name is quite telling. And she breaks into the inn with her sister. They stab Socrates to death. They pull out his heart, replace it with a sponge. And then his friend can only watch because they've also used magic to immobilize him. Now, the next morning, all of a sudden, Socrates wakes up to the absolute astonishment of his friend, who prefers not to mention the situation. So they leave the inn. And as soon as they come to a brook, Socrates bends over, drinks from the water, but the sponge that the witches had replaced his heart with falls out, as the witches had planned to do. And then he keels over, he is dead again, and it becomes clear that he had been a walking, talking corpse all the time since the night. So these witches are able to take revenge on men who are unfaithful, they are murderous, and they're obviously really quite dangerous. Lucis doesn't heed this,

and he hears other stories about these witches also performing necromancy, but he still does a beeline for the next available witch, watches their knightly turning into an owl. And when he wants the same for him, it is the magical apprentice of her that accidentally gets the wrong kind of ointment, turning him into a donkey. So throughout Apuleius, witches are incredibly powerful, like Eryxor is powerful, like Canidia is powerful. They can really do magic, and the Romans believed that this magic was possible. Using magic was the scariest thing, the worst thing you could do in the ancient world. It's one of the very few things that is a capital offence. You could be put on trial, like Apuleius was, for using witchcraft. And if you were found guilty, you would be put to death. It's worse than murder. And Apuleius survived, but his characters don't always

survive. So such is the power of belief in witchcraft. One last question quickly. I'd like to ask a bit about the legacy of this story, because it seems that that legacy, it endures for centuries, even down to, let's say, like the 15th century. Oh, that is true. The writers on witchcraft did use these ancient witches as evidence that certainly the Romans believed witches existed. So Eryxos, Canidia, a slightly lesser extent, Apuleius' witches find themselves in those witchcraft handbooks as evidence for the real existence of witchcraft. But Apuleius has a very clear legacy as well, because he wrote a book about demons as creatures which are immortal,

but which are intermediaries between the world of the humans and the world of the gods. And they were used then to explain why witches in the Middle Ages could actually affect witchcraft in a universe which is controlled by a benevolent Christian God. Clearly, there have to be demons which are doing the seducing and which are doing all those evil things in a demonic pact with the witches. This comes into the belief system from Apollos' book on the daemonion, the god of Socrates, which was then taken over and discussed very clearly by Saint Augustine, who is really an important linking point in the belief in demons, in witchcraft. And that is the fault why, is the reason why we have lots of women put on the stake in the middle ages because they made pacts with demons to go on to another piece of literature we have from

the greco-roman world a piece of literature that we have done an entire podcast on together already and this is the figure of heliodorus i mean mean, May, first of all, who is Heliodorus, your favourite? That's right. I can talk about Heliodorus until the cows come home. And we certainly have dedicated a whole podcast to Heliodorus' novel, the Athopika. So Heliodorus is one of the Greek novelists at that intersection of the sort of the new creation of the novel as a genre. And we tend to date him around the third, fourth century. But like with everything, we are never certain. And there is ambiguity with respect to nailing down any of the Greek novelists. So they wrote between the 1st century AD to the 4th century AD. Now with Heliodorus, what was slightly unusual about him

and his tale is that he tends to centre quite a lot of the othered figures in, you know, figures in, you know, historical kind of writing and literary sources. And his story tends to be quite linear rather than circular. So he starts off from Greece, travels around Egypt and sort of Nubia and ends up in ancient Ethiopia. And that's where it's very very different because the two heroes Caracalla and her partner end up in Ethiopia rather than going back to Greece. Now the story that you're referring to is a very particular scene of necromancy and it is basically towards the end of the book so there are about 10 books and this is towards the end around book book. So there are about 10 books, and this is towards the end around book seven. And the heroine and her partner separated. And, you know, so she's trying to get back to him to be reunited. And her guide, her foster father is an Egyptian priest called

Calasiris. Now, we can talk about picking up a few points here of the kind of duality of Egyptian wisdom and the way that it was seen amongst Greeks and Romans. So you have this kind of like highly regarded wisdom associated with Egypt, but you also got this kind of base, you know, low association with black magic too, and this kind of charlatan idea as well associated with Egyptians so there is this kind of dual perspectives about Egyptians that comes through the text itself so it plays to the kind of stereotype of Egyptians as a whole. Now Kelesar is he's a priest and the things that are associated with him are usually seen as quite a positive thing. And also note that he is male too. And the scene that we're

about to talk about involves an old woman, so a crone, which picking up on the tradition there. So the heroine and the priest are heading towards Bessa, a land where they encounter a field of slayed bodies. Again, these are kind of a fight and has occurred. And the slayed bodies are of Persians and Egyptians. And then this old woman, this old crone is embracing her dead son. And she's lamenting and so forth. She tells them that it's not safe for them to continue, but she can introduce them to the villagers. But first she has to perform some nocturnal rites. Now, these nocturnal rites become this kind of reanimation of her son's body. So she uses the same sort of tactics that are kind of associated with Erechtho and also, in a sense, Circe, when she's telling Odysseus to travel to the underworld

for him to try and get back to Ithaca. Now, this kind of like ghost invocation rites tends to involve, tends to take place at night. It focuses around a kind of pit and fire and the libations of honey and milk and wine and water. And then there's usually a sacrifice of a black cattle, usually a sheep. And I guess the blackness is saluting that of the underworld and of night. And so, and then there is always some aspect of blood so this is really really important and it allows to drain into the pit the ghost to drink and then the prayers are made to the ghosts and to the underworld so the ghosts arrive and then do the bidding of the the witch the old crone and so forth but what is

really interesting with the figure of the old crone in heliodorus is that the ghost of her son comes up and he then tells her off for bringing him up because she's using these rights these um nocturnal rights that firstly should not be seen so she doesn't realize that the heroine and her foster father are hiding behind you know a rock and they are witnesses to this and the fact that one of them is a priest and then the other is this you know sort of young girl this sort of virgin and therefore should not be seeing this kind of rites being carried out. And then the other aspect is the way that the old crone uses certain of those rites to reanimate a corpse, which goes against nature. So, again, you have this kind of there's a good way of communicating with ghosts and there's a bad way of communicating with ghosts. And the old crone does it in a bad way.

And she gets her just desserts because the ghost tells her that she will die in a horrific way. And in a self-fulfilling prophecy, she is terrified by that. And then, you know, as she runs away, she gets impaled by a sword that's lying on the ground. Oh, nasty. So in a way, there are certain similarities with Erechtho, there are certain similarities with Circe. And so you can see that Heliodorus is using the traditions, the kind of literary traditions of what has gone before and it's

also using that kind of battlefield setting and you know there's elements of it found in the Odyssey you know as we talked about with the the pit and the fire the libations that Cersei asks Odysseus to use in order to travel around to the underworld and I guess in this sense there is also an element of a voodoo doll for necromancy too and the blood and usage of the sort of using the blood and then the corpses prophecies are quite sort of vigorous as well so in response they give a prophecy of death and doom which then becomes this kind of self-fulfilling you know as i said the witch rushes over to the battlefield and on her way she impales herself and therefore her kind of reckless anger towards of what she's

been seen by the witnesses and also her belief that she's become this kind of victim of an evil eye which Regina touched upon earlier and I guess we talked about the underworld mysteries that must not be revealed and that's where she's also being punished that actually you know there are witnesses to this thing that needs to be done under the cloak of darkness and in the you know the occurrence of a full moon and that's pretty much it that's it i mean what a story and i think it's really nice that we've kind of been able to end on heliodorus he's such a clever figure isn't he as you say combining these elements from roman tradition but also cersei so you've got cersei eric though but you've also got ghosts you've got sorcery you've got necromancy.

I mean, it's a horrific story, but it is, as you say, when you look at the traditions that he's using, it's still really, at least I think, it's quite impressive in its own right. If we have more time, I'd love for us to talk more about ghosts now, but I think we should probably wrap up there. This has been fantastic. Is there any last words that either of you would like to say? Okay, so I think before we go, it might perhaps be useful for everybody to learn what kind of body is useful for necromancy, because not all of them can be used. There are certain requirements, so the body has to be dead before there are a lot of times. So that's why a battlefield is quite a good place to find a body like that. They also need to be dead by violence. So they kind of died of old age. And they also have to remain unburied. Only if these requirements are met, you can actually use a body for necromancy. And that is why the old woman of Bessa and also Miericzo quite like

to live where there are graveyards, but also specifically where there are battlefields, because many of those people unfortunately remained unburied. And also, just to say the fact that actually you can see why the archetypal witches still remain quite prominent now and how women who step out of their lane gets associated with these figures. It's this kind of pushing back against the patriarchal system, which is really interesting to see. Well, there you go. There was Dr. May Musier and Dr. Regina May

talking all things witches in Greco-Roman literature, from Circe to Heliodorus. I hope you enjoyed the episode today. Now, last things from me, you know what I'm going to say, but if you have been enjoying the ancients recently and you want to help us out, well, you know what you can do. You can leave us a lovely rating on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts from. It really helps us as we continue to grow the ancients and to share these amazing stories from our distant past with you and with as many people as possible. But that's enough from me and I will see you in the next episode.