NECROMANCY, the art of revealing or foretelling future events by a pretended communication with the dead.

This most superstitious and impious imposture appears to have had its origin at an early period in Egypt, and to have been thence propagated in every nation with the manners of which history has made us acquainted. The conquests of Sesostris might introduce it into India; the Israelites would naturally borrow it from the people amongst whom they sojourned four hundred years; and it would easily find its way into Phoenicia, from the vicinity of that country to the land of its nativity. From the Egyptians and Phoenicians it was adopted, with the other rites of paganism, by the Greeks; and with Grecian literature and Grecian manners it was imported into Rome. It was not, however, confined to the pagan nations of antiquity. It spread itself throughout all the modern nations of Europe, and took such deep root as to be long retained even after those nations had been converted to the Christian faith.

Of its early antiquity we have complete evidence in the writings of Moses, where it is severely condemned as an abomination to the Lord; and although it appears to have even then spread into Phoenicia, we might yet conclude that its birthplace had been Egypt, because, at their exod, the Israelites were corrupted only by Egyptian superstitions, and because necromancy seems to have been one of those whoredoms which the prophet Ezekiel represents his countrymen as having brought with them from Egypt, and continued to practise until they were carried as captives into Babylon.

If from sacred we proceed to consult profane authors, we shall find them not only affirming that Egypt had been the birthplace of necromancy, but in some degree accounting for the origin of so impious a delusion. From Diodorus we learn that the Grecian fable of Charon the ferryman of hell, of Styx, Cocytus, the Elysian Fields, Tartarus, the judgment of Minos and Rhadamanthus, &c. with the whole scenery of the infernal regions, were imported from Egypt into Greece. The ancient Egyptians, and indeed all the people of the East, made use of caves as burying-places; which were well suited to the solemn sadness of surviving friends, and proper receptacles for those who were never more to behold the light. In Egypt, many of these subterranean cavities being dug out of the natural rock, still remain, and command the admiration of travellers; and near to the pyramids in particular there are some apartments of a wonderful fabric, which, though they extend in length upwards of four thousand feet, and are about thirty feet in depth, appear to have been, if not entirely dug, at least reduced to form, by the chisel or the pick-axe of the artist.

From the practice of burying in such caverns sprung the opinion that the infernal mansions were situated somewhere near the centre of the earth, which by the Egyptians was believed to be not very distant from its surface. In these dreary abodes, it was easy for such adepts as the priests of Egypt to fabricate Erebus, and Tartarus, and the Elysian Fields, and all those scenes which were displayed before the initiated (see Mysteries), and by them described to the millions of the people. As it was in those dark abodes that necromancy was practised, it would be no difficult matter for such magicians as withstood Moses, to impose so far upon the credulous vulgar as to make them believe, that in consequence of their invocations they actually saw the ghosts of their friends ascend out of the earth. It appears from the book of Exodus, that the Israelitish women were, even in the wilderness, well acquainted with the use of the mirror, which was therefore undoubtedly known to the Egyptians. But a mirror of a particular form, and properly illuminated at the instant required, might be easily made to reflect, in a cavern from which all other light was carefully excluded, the image of the deceased, when called upon by the necromancer; and we can also readily conceive, that with respect to the question to be proposed, a person might be concealed, prepared to give such ambiguous answers as would satisfy the inquirer, and at the same time to save the credit of the oracle. The terrified imaginations of the spectators would aid the delusion, and make a very slight resemblance pass for the ghost or s∕δωλoy of their departed friend; or the necromancer might assign plausible reasons why a spectre, after having dwelt for some time in the infernal regions, should lose something of its resemblance to the body which it animated. Such juggling tricks, though performed by artists less accomplished than Jannes and Jambres, have gained credit amongst people much more enlightened than the Egyptians can possibly have been when the science of necromancy was invented by their priests.

That the Israelites, notwithstanding the prohibition of their legislator, continued to practise the rites of necromancy, is apparent from Saul’s transaction with the witch of Endor. From the same transaction, it is likewise apparent that the witches of Israel, and therefore in all probability the necromancers of Egypt, pretended to evoke the ghosts of the dead by a demon or familiar spirit, which they had at their command to employ upon every emergency. This demon was called ob ; and therefore Saul desires his servants to find him a woman who was mistress of an ob. ^[1. The original or radical signification of this word occurs in Job (xxxii. ver. 19), where Elihu compares his belly to new bottles, which he calls οboth, the plural of οb. But as bottles were then made of leather, new bottles filled with wine and ready to burst, as Elihu describes them, would of course be of a form nearly globular. Hence it may be inferred that the original import of οb was round or globular ; but b and p being labials, are often changed into each other; and, therefore, from the Hebrew ob is derived the Greek ’«ψ, oculus, iπ<roμaι, video, and the Latin ops, a name under which the earth was worshipped. Uþis was a name of Diana or the moon: the father of one of the Dianas was likewise Upis ; but this Upis was undoubtedly the sun. Now the difference between upis and opis is nothing; and hence we are led to believe, that as they are all derived from ob, this word was employed by the early idolaters of Egypt to denote the first and greatest of Pagan gods, the Sun. If so, those wretches who pretended to be mistresses of obs were exactly the same kind of impostors with the Pythonesses of the Greeks. ] It is probable that those wretched impostors had in their pay some persons who occasionally acted the part of the demon, and, when the execution of the plot required their agency, emitted, by means of a cavity dug for that purpose, a low hollow voice from below the ground. Hence we find Isaiah, in his denunciations against Ariel, saying, “Thou shalt be brought down, and shalt speak out of the ground; and thy speech shall be low out of the dust, and thy voice shall be as one that hath a familiar spirit [7:16:73](an ob), out of the ground, and thy speech shall whisper out of the dust.”

But although the Egyptian priests were undoubtedly the inventors of the whole mystery of necromancy, and although it was from them imported into Greece by the Selli or priests of Dodona, it does not appear that the Grecian necromancers pretended to be masters of obs or familiar spirits. Mopsus, Orpheus, Linus, Eumolpus, and others, who either travelled into Egypt in quest of knowledge, or were actually natives of that country, instructed the early Greeks in this occult science; but whatever might be the practice of these apostles themselves, their disciples professed to do all the feats of magic by performing certain rites, by offering certain sacrifices, by muttering a certain form of words, and by charms, spells, and exorcisms. By these they pretended to evoke the dead as certainly as the Egyptians and Jews did by their familiar spirits. By a small display of critical learning this might easily be proved from the popular story of Orpheus and Eurydice, which certainly was founded on one of these necromantic deceptions exhibited in a cave near Dodona, where the priests had a hades or infernal mansion, in humble imitation of those with which the first of them were well acquainted in Egypt. It is indeed evident, without the aid of criticism; no man of any letters can be ignorant, that whatever superstitions of this kind prevailed amongst the Romans were borrowed from the Greeks. But we all know that Virgil makes one of his shepherds, by means of certain herbs, poisons, and senseless charms, raise up ghosts from the bottoms of their graves; and Lucian has fabricated a story of this kind, which may be considered as an exact parallel to that of the witch of Endor. Just before the battle of Pharsalia he makes young Pompey travel by night to a Thessalian sorceress, and anxiously inquire of her the issue of the war. This female necromancer, by a tedious process of charms and incantations, conjures up the ghost of a soldier who had been recently slain. The phantom, after a long preamble, denounces a prediction much of the same kind with that which the king of Israel received from Samuel at Endor; and though we have elsewhere shown, that nothing but the spirit of God could have foreseen the inevitable destruction of Saul, his sons, and his army, it was very easy for any man of tolerable sagacity to foresee the defeat of Pompey’s raw and undisciplined troops by the hardy veterans of the victorious Caesar.

It would be endless to enumerate all the fallacious evocations of ghosts, and the ambiguous responses returned by those pretended spirits, of which we have received accounts from the poets and historians of the celebrated nations of antiquity. We shall therefore proceed to mention a few which occur in the fabulous history of more modern nations, and then leave the subject to the meditation of our readers. In Mallet’s Northern Antiquities we have the following account of a necromantic exploit, between which and the descent of the ancient heroes into hell it is impossible not to remark a striking similitude.

Odin, the sovereign of man, arises. He saddles his horse Sleipner; he mounts, and is conveyed to the subterranean abode of Ilela. The dog which guards the gates of death meets him. His breast and his jaws are stained with blood. He opens his voracious mouth to bite, and barks a long time at the father of magic. Odin pursues his way; and the infernal cavern resounds and trembles under his horse’s hoofs. At length he reaches the deep abode of death, and stdps near the eastern gate, where stands the tomb of the prophetess. He sings with a voice adapted to call up the dead; he looks towards the world; he engraves Runic characters upon her tomb; he utters mysterious words; and he demands an answer, until the prophetess is constrained to arise and utter the words of the dead. “Who is this unknown that dares to disturb my repose, and drag me from the grave, in which I have been dead so long, all covered with snow, and moistened with the rain ?”

The Gaelic druids pretended to be masters of the same secret. This is evident from the name of a species of divination called taghairm, notuncommon amongst the Scotch Highlanders so recently as in the beginning of the eighteenth century. This word seems to be compounded of ta, which in some parts of the Highlands is still used to denote a spirit or ghost, and ghairm, which signifies calling upon or invoking. Taghairm, therefore, in its original import, is necromancy in the most proper sense of that word.

There were different kinds of taghairm, of which one was practised in Skye. The diviner covered himself with a cow’s hide, and repaired at night to some deep-sounding cave, whither the person who consulted him followed soon afterwards without any attendants. At the mouth of the cave he proposed aloud the questions of which he wanted solutions; and the man within pronounced the responses in a tone of voice similar to that with which the obs, or pretended demons of antiquity, gave from beneath the ground their oracular answers. That in the latter days of taghairm, the Gaelic diviners pretend to evoke ghosts, and from them to extort solutions of difficulties proposed, we have no positive evidence; but that such was the original pretence there can be little doubt, when we reflect either upon the place where this species of divination was practised, or upon the import of the word by which it was denominated.