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Women in Ancient Greece A Sourcebook Bonnie Maclachlan
Women in Antiquity is an extremely useful compilation which is intended to be, without doubt, a reference book for all those with an interest in well-written ancient history spanning all its complexity, a must that cannot go missing from any library.
Agnès Garcia-Ventura, Università degli Studi di Roma, Italy
This volume gathers brand new essays from some of the most respected scholars of ancient history, archaeology and physical anthropology to create an engaging overview of the lives of women in antiquity. The book is divided into ten sections, nine focusing on a particular area, and also includes almost 200 images, maps and charts. The sections cover Mesopotamia, Egypt, Anatolia, Cyprus, the Levant, the Aegean, Italy and Western Europe, and include many lesser-known cultures such as the Celts, Iberia, Carthage, the Black Sea region and Scandinavia. Women’s experiences are explored, from ordinary daily life to religious ritual and practice, to motherhood, legal rights, sex, and building a career. Forensic evidence is also treated for the actual bodies of ancient women.
Women in Antiquity is edited by two experts in the field and is an invaluable resource to students of the ancient world, gender studies and women’s roles throughout history.
Stephanie Lynn Budin is an ancient historian who focuses on ancient Greece and the Near East. Her published works include Artemis (Routledge, 2015), Images of Woman and Child from the Bronze Age (2011), The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity (2008) and The Origin of Aphrodite (2003), as well as numerous articles on ancient religion and iconography. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and bunnies.
Jean MacIntosh Turfa received her PhD in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology and Latin from Bryn Mawr College, USA. She was a consultant for the Kyle M. Phillips Etruscan Gallery of the University of Pennsylvania Museum, where she is currently a Consulting Scholar.
Rewriting Antiquity
Rewriting Antiquity provides a platform to examine major themes of the ancient world in a broad, holistic and inclusive fashion. Coverage is broad both in time and space, allowing a full appreciation of the selected topic rather than an exclusive view bound by a relatively short timescale and place. Each volume examines a key theme from the Ancient Near East to Late Antiquity, and often beyond, to break down the boundaries habitually created by focusing on one region or time period.
Volumes within the series highlight the latest research, current developments and innovative approaches, situating this with existing scholarship. Individual case studies and analysis held within sections build to form a comprehensive and comparative overview of the subject enabling readers to view matters in the round and establish interconnections and resonance across a wide spectrum. In this way the volumes allow new directions of study to be defined and provide differing perspectives to stimulate fresh approaches to the theme examined.
Available:
Sex in Antiquity
Mark Masterson, Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, James Robson
Forthcoming:
Childhood in Antiquity
Lesley Beaumont, Matthew Dillon, Nicola Harrington
Globalisation in Antiquity
Konstantin Vlassopoulos
Disability in Antiquity
Christian Laes
Women in Antiquity
Stephanie Lynn Budin and Jean MacIntosh Turfa
WOMEN IN ANTIQUITY
Real women across the Ancient World
Edited by Stephanie Lynn Budin and Jean MacIntosh Turfa
First published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Every effort has been made to contact copyright-holders. Please advise the publisher of any errors or omissions, and these will be corrected in subsequent editions.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-138-80836-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-62142-5 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK
6
Josué J. Justel
31
Cécile Boëlle-Weber
Yurie
‘Chrysis the Hiereia having placed a lighted torch near the garlands then fell asleep’ (Thucydides Iv.133.2): priestesses serving the gods and goddesses in Classical
Matthew P. J. Dillon
50 The Athenian businesswoman
Edward E. Cohen
51 Hellenistic women and the law: agency, identity, and community
Gillian Ramsey
The Nuragic women: facts and hypotheses
Fulvia Lo Schiavo and Matteo Milletti
53 Seianti Hanunia Tlesnasa: an Etruscan aristocrat
Judith Swaddling
54
55
Larissa Bonfante
Jean MacIntosh Turfa
56 Etruscan marriage
Gilda Bartoloni and Federica Pitzalis
57 Women of the princely families in Etruria
Gilda Bartoloni and Federica Pitzalis
58 To give and to receive: the role of women in Etruscan sanctuaries
Ingrid E. M. Edlund-Berry
59 Women and textile production in pre-Roman Italy
Margarita Gleba
60 The Ager Faliscus and its
Maria Anna De Lucia Brolli and Jacopo Tabolli
61 Daunian women: costume and actions commemorated in stone
Camilla Norman
62 Female slaves and slave-owners in ancient Etruria
Enrico Benelli
74 Continuities in rape and tyranny in martial societies from antiquity onward 1041
Kathy L. Gaca
Index 1057
ILLUSTRATIONS
3.1 Seal of Queen Puabi from Ur.
3.2 Ur-Nanše’s stela from al-Hiba.
3.3 Seal of Daqum.
3.4 Seal of Takunai.
3.5 Seal of Aman-Aštar.
3.6 Seal from Ur.
3.7 Seal of Waqartum, ancient impression.
4.1 Urkesh palace plan, c.2250 bc
4.2 Nude female statuette from the favissa in A12f194.
4.3 Small jar in the shape of a nude woman (A12.108).
4.4 Cylinder seal with the representation of a sacrifice (A15.270).
4.5 Urkesh “family scene” (q2).
4.6 Uqnitum inscription held on backs of two servants (q1).
4.7 Uqnitum and her daughter (q4).
4.8 Seal of Zamena, the wet-nurse of Uqnitum (h2).
4.9 Earliest seal of Tuli, cook of Uqnitum (h3).
4.10 Later seal of Tuli (h5).
4.11 Seal of Tar’am-Agade, daughter of Naram-Sin.
5.1 Calcite disc with relief scene of Enheduana. (Courtesy of Penn Museum, image no. 150424.)
7.1 Imported and recut Old Babylonian cylinder seal found in Cyprus.
7.2 Cylinder seal from Tello. Uruk Period.
7.3 Reconstructed seal of Ninhilia.
10.1 Perimortem depressed skull fracture on the cranium of a Hasanlu male. 143
10.2 Antemortem fracture of right zygomatic and maxillary bones. 143
10.3 Bones of the human skull – lateral view. 145
12.1 CT-scan of a mummy.
12.2 False toe discovered on an Egyptian mummy.
12.3 Elaborate hairstyle on an Egyptian mummy. 190
List of illustrations
13.1 Sexual activity, Wadi Hammamat. 200
13.2 Sexual practices, Deir el-Medina. 201
14.1 Stela of Setjau. Berlin 13466. 6th Dynasty. 208
14.2 From Tomb of Neferhotep (TT 49) 18th Dynasty. Time of Aye. 209
14.3 Royal tomb at Amarna. 211
15.1 A woman in the tomb of Roy (TT 255) showing her titles. 222
15.2 A choir of chantresses. 223
15.3 Musicans playing in the gateway of the first pylon at Medamud temple. 224
16.1 Plan of the Gurob New Kingdom town. 230
16.2 Palace quality faience bowls and ceramics from Gurob. 231
16.3 Lady Resi and the unnamed singer of Amun. 237
17.1 Woman and child in birth booth. 247
17.2 Four-room house at Deir el-Medîna. 249
18.1 Tiye and Amenhotep III receiving gifts on the occasion of his third jubilee. 258
18.2 Woman dressed for a special occasion. 262
18.3 Representation of a squatting woman suckling a child. 263
20.1 Map of Ancient Nubia. 281
20.2 Ba-figure of a woman. 284
20.3 Queen Kadimalo and less important woman worshipping the goddess Isis. 289
20.4 Procession of Nubians before the ‘King’s Son of Kush’ Huy. 289
20.5 Pylon façade of the mid/late first-century ad Temple of Apedemak at Naga. 292
21.1 Probable wedding scene from vase (c.1600 bc) found at Bitik, near Ankara. 309
23.1 Puduhepa pouring a libation to the Sun Goddess alongside her husband, King Hattusili III. 330
23.2a Scenes of female musicians and dancers on two relief vases from Hüseyindede. 335
23.2b Scenes of female musicians and dancers on two relief vases from Hüseyindede. 335
20.1 Outline of periods, locations and dates in Nubian chronology. 281
45.1 Reconstructed mean living statures of females and males in Ancient Greece. 651
Maps
1 Mesopotamia and Levant. 5
2 Egypt. 175
3 Cyprus. 343
4 Greece and the Aegean. 553
5 Europe. 965
(See also Figures 20.1, 38.1, and 71.1.)
ABBREVIATIONS
AA Archäologischer Anzeiger
ÄA Ägyptologische Abhandlungen
AbB Altbabylonische Briefe in Umschrift und Übersetzung (Leiden 1964ff.)
ABC Grayson, A. K. (1975) Assyrian and Babylonian Chronicles. Locust Valley, NY: Glückstadt.
ABSA Annual of the British School at Athens
ABV Beazley, J. D. (1956) Attic Black-Figure Vase-Painters. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press
AE Archaiologike Ephemeris
ÄF Ägyptologische Forschungen
AfO Archiv fŭr Orientforschung
ÄHK Edel, E. (1994) Die Ägyptische-hethitische Korrespondenz aus Boghazköi. Opladen, Germany: Westdeutscher Verlag
AHw W. von Soden, Akkadisches Handwörerbuch
AJA American Journal of Archaeology
AJAH American Journal of Ancient History
AJP/AJPh American Journal of Philology
AJPA American Journal of Physical Anthropology
AMI Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran (Berlin 1929–1938); Erg.-Bd. = Ergänzungsband (1929ff.); NF = Neue Folge (1968ff.); Erg.-Bd. (NF.) = Ergänzungsband (Neue Folge)
AmerJTropMedHyg American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene
AnnPerugia Annali della Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia, Università degli studi di Perugia
AOAT Alt Orient und Alt Testament
AoF Altorientalische Forschungen (Schriften zur Geschichte und Kultur des Alten Orients)
ArAn Archivum Anatolicum
ArchClass Archeologia Classica
ARCHIBAB Archives Babyloniennes
Archiv.Path Archives of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine
ASCSA
List of abbreviations
American Schools of Classical Studies in Athens
ASOR American Schools of Oriental Research
AthMitt Athenische Mitteilungen
AUCT Andrews University Cuneiform Texts (Berriens Springs, MI: 1984ff.)
AuOr/AulaOr Aula Orientalis
BAAL Bulletin d’Archéologie et d’Architecture Libanaises
BABesch Bulletin antieke beschaving: Annual papers on classical archaeology
BACE Bulletin of the Australian Centre for Egyptology
BaF Baghdader Forschungen
BAR British Archaeological Reports
BASOR Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research
BCH Bulletin de Correspondance Héllenique
BE The Babylonian Expedition of the University of Pennsylvania, Series A: Cuneiform Texts Philadelphia
BICS Bulletin of the Institute for Classical Studies
BIFAO Bulletin de l’Institut Francais d’Archeologie Orientale, Le Caire
BIOR Bibliotheca Orientalia, Bruxelles
BMJ British Medical Journal
BSA British School at Athens, Bulletin
CA/ClAnt Classical Antiquity
CAARI
Cypriot American Archaeological Research Institute, Nicosia
CAD The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago
Cah.D.A.F.I. Cahiers de la Délégation archéologique française en Iran
CAJ Cambridge Archaeological Journal
CANE Civilizations of the Ancient Near East (ed. J. Sasson). Hendrickson Publishers, 1995
CAT (see KTU)
CCEC Cahier du Centre d’Études chypriotes
CEG Hansen, P. A. (1983) Carmina Epigraphica Graeca, Vol. 1. Berlin
CGC Catalogue général des antiquités égyptiennes du Musée du Caire
CHANE Culture and History of the Ancient Near East
CIE Corpus Inscriptionum Etruscarum. Leipzig and Florence (1893– )
CJ Classical Journal
CM Cuneiform Monographs (Groningen, The Netherlands: 1992ff.)
COS Contexts of Scripture. W. W. Hallo and K. L. Younger (eds). Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2003
CP Classical Philology
CQ Classical Quarterly
CRAI(BL) Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres
CRRAI Comptes rendus de la Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale
CSE Corpus Speculorum Etruscorum
CT Faulkner, R. O. (1973 and 1977) The Ancient Egyptian Coffin Texts I–II. Warminster, UK: Aris and Phillips.
CTH Laroche, E. (1971) Catalogue des textes hittites. Paris: Klincksieck.
CurrAnth Current Anthropology
CW Classical World
List of abbreviations
DE Discussions in Egyptology
DMOA Documenta et monumenta Orientis antiqui
EJA European Journal of Archaeology
EMC/CV Échos du monde classique/Classical Views
EncIr Encyclopaedia Iranica
ET Etruskische Texte (2 editions): regional corpus of known Etruscan inscriptions. Rix, H. (ed.) (1991) Etruskische Texte. Editio minor, first edition, two volumes. Tübingen, Germany: Gunther Narr
FGrH Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker ed. F. Jacoby (Berlin, Leiden 1923–1958)
FM Florilegium Marianum
G&R Greece and Rome
GM Göttinger Miszellen
HA(e)B Hildesheimer Ägyptologische Beiträge
HdO Handbuch der Orientalistik
HEO Hautes Études Orientales
HSCP(h) Harvard Studies in Classical Philology
HSS Harvard Semitic Studies
HT(h)R Harvard Theological Review
HW2 (aka HethWb., HWb2) J. Friedrich/A. Kammenhuben, Hethitisches Wörterbuch
IG Inscriptiones Graecae
INSTAP Institute for the Study of Aegean Prehistory
IPriene Von Gaetringen, F. H. (1906) Inschriften von Priene. Berlin.
IrAnt Iranica Antiqua
JA Journal Asiastique
JAEI Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections
JAMA The Journal of the American Medical Association
JANER Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions
JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society
JAR Journal of Anthropological Research
JARCE Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt
JAS Journl of Archaeological Science
JBL Journal of Biblical Literature
JBVO Jenaer Beiträge zum Vorderen Orient (Wiesbaden).
JCS Journal of Cuneiform Studies
JDAI Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archaologischen Instituts
JdI Jahrbuch des deutschen Instituts
JEA Journal of Egyptian Archaeology
JEH Journal of Egyptian History
JESHO Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient
JFH Journal of Family History
JHS Journal of Hellenic Studies
JHS Journal of Hebrew Scripture
JhumEvol Journal of Human Evolution
JNES Journal of Near Eastern Studies
JPR Journal of Prehistoric Religion
JRA Journal of Roman Archaeology
List of abbreviations
JRS Journal of Roman Studies
JSS Journal of Semitic Studies
JSSEA Journal of the Society of the Study of Egyptian Antiquities
KBo Keilschrifttexte aus Boghazköi. Leipzig and Berlin: J. C. Hinrichs
KMT KMT: A Modern Journal of Ancient Egypt
KTU M. Dietrich, O. Loretz, J. Sanmartin (1976) Die keilalphabetischen Texte aus Ugarit. 1. Kevelaer and Neukirchen-Vluyn, Germany. Second enlarged edition: The Cuneiform Alphabetic Texts from Ugarit Münster, Germany, 1995
KUB Keilschrifturken aus Boghazköi. Berlin: Akadeime-Verlag
LÄ Lexikon der Ägyptologie I-IV, (eds) E. Otto and W. Helck, 1975–1989
LSAM Sokolowski, F. (1955) Lois sacrées de l’Asie mineure. Paris.
LSCG Sokolowski, F. (1969) Lois sacrées des cités grecques. Paris.
LSCG Suppl. Sokolowski, F. (1962) Lois sacrées des cités grecques: Supplément. Paris.
MDAIK Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts, Abteilung Kairo
MDP Mission de la Délégation française en Perse
MEFRA Mélanges de l’École Française à Rome: Antiquité
MMJ Metropolitan Museum Journal
NABU Nouvelles Assyriologiques Brèves et Utilitaires
NEA Near Eastern Archaeology
OBO Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis
OJA Oxford Journal of Archaeology
OLA Orientalia Lovaniensia analecta (Leuven, Belgium: 1975ff.)
OpArch Opuscula Archaeologica
OpRom Opuscula Romana
P&P Past and Present: A Journal of Historical Studies
PBS University of Pennsylvania: The Museum Publications of the Babylonian Section
PBSR Papers of the British School at Rome
PEQ Palestine Exploration Quaterly
PIFAO Publications de l’Institut Francais d’Archeologie Orientale
PIHANS Publications de l’Institut historique-archéologique néerlandais de Stamboul (1956ff.)
PM Porter, B. and Moss, R. L. B.: Topographical Bibliography of Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic Texts, Reliefs and Paintings I–VII. Oxford 1973–1979
Procs.Roy.Soc. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London
PRU Le Palais Royal d’Ugarit II–VI, 1955–1970. Paris: Geuthner
RA Revue d’Assyriologie et d’Archéologie orientale
RDAC Report of the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus
RE Gary M. Beckman, Texts from the vicinity of Emar in the collection of Jonathan Rosen (= HANEM 2, 1996).
SBL WAW Society of Biblical Literature Writings from the Ancient World series
SEG Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum
SEL Studi Epigrafici e Linguistici sul Vicino Oriente Antico
SHC II Knapp, A. B. (ed.) (1996) Sources for the History of Cyprus Volume II: Near Eastern and Aegean Texts from the Third to the First Millennia BC. Altamont, NY: Greece and Cyprus Research Center
SIG3 Dittenberger, W. (1915–24) Sylloge Inscriptionum Graecarum, third edition, volumes 1–4, Leipzig, Germany
SIMA Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology
SMEA Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology
StBoT Studien zu den Bogazköy-Texten (Wiesbaden, Germany: 1965ff.)
StEtr Studi Etruschi
TAPA Transactions of the American Philological Association
TBR Daniel Arnaud, Textes syriens de l’âge du Bronze Récent (= AulaOr Suppl. 1, 1991).
ThesCRA Thesaurus Cultus et Rituum Antiquorum (eds) V. Lambrinoudakis and J. C. Balty. Los Angeles, CA and Basel, Switzerland (2004– )
THeth Texte der Hethiter (Heidelberg, Germany: 1971ff.)
TMHC Texte und Materialen der Frau Prof. Hilprecht Collection of Babylonian Antiquities im Eigentum der Universität Jena (Leipzig)
TTKY Türk Tarih Kurumu Yayinlari (Ankara, Turkey: 1935ff.)
UF Ugarit-Forschungen
VO Vicino Oriente. Annuario dell’Istituto di Studi del Vicino Oriente, Università; di Roma (Rome: 1978ff.)
WO Welt des Orients
YBC Yale Babylonian Collection
YOS Yale Oriental Series
ZÄS Zeitschrift für Ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde, Berlin.
Z(f)A Zeitschrift für Assyriology
ZivaAnt Živa Antika: Antiquité vivant
ZPE Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik List of abbreviations
CONTRIBUTORS
Miranda Aldhouse-Green is Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at Cardiff University, Wales, UK. She currently holds the post of academic and technical advisor with Sky Atlantic for a major forthcoming drama series on ancient Britain.
Linnea Åshede earned her PhD in 2015 with the dissertation Desiring Hermaphrodites: The Relationships of Hermaphroditus in Roman Group Scenes. Research interests include all things gender-queer, classical reception, and posthumanist theory. She also butlers for two demanding cats and two anarchist bunnies.
Gilda Bartoloni graduated in 1967 in Etruscology, having studied with Massimo Pallottino at Rome, and from 1976 has been professor of Etruscology at the Universities of Lecce, Siena and Paris IV Sorbonne, and visiting professor at the Universities of Copenhagen and Vienna. Since 2001 she has been full professor at the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’. Her scientific interests include especially Etruscan and Latial protohistory, and she has published handbooks on the Villanovan and Etruscan cultures and mortuary archaeology, as well as over 100 works on the relations between the Italic peoples and other Mediterranean cultures, and curated the exhibition on Etruscan Princes between Mediterranean and Europe, held at Bologna in 2000. She has participated in and directed many archaeological excavations in Etruria and Latium, most recently the Veii project of the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’ (the settlement of Piazza d’Armi) and the Villanovan necropolis of Poggio delle Granate at Populonia. In 2003 she began research at Poggio del Telegrafo (Populonia). In collaboration with the Soprintendenza of Toscana she is responsible for the excavation of the Campassini site (Monteriggioni), of the handicraft area of Quartaia (Colle Val d’Elsa) and of the Pugiano sanctuary (San Gimignano). She is an ordinary member and auditor of the Istituto di Studi Etruschi ed Italici, and has been director of the newly reinstalled Etruscan and Italic Antiquities Museum of the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’.
Hilary Becker is Assistant Professor of Classics, Department of Classical and Near Eastern Studies, Binghamton University (USA). She has published articles dealing with Etruscan property, archives and settlement patterns and co-edited along with Margarita Gleba the volume Votives, Places and Rituals in Etruscan Religion (2009). She is currently researching a Roman
imperial pigment shop in the Area Sacra di S. Omobono in Rome as part of the ongoing excavations there.
Gary Beckman, since 1992 Professor of Hittite and Mesopotamian Studies at the University of Michigan, has published widely on Hittite religion and on Hittite social organization and diplomacy. His most recent book is The babilili-Ritual from Hattusa (2014). The focus of his current research is the reception and adaptation of Syro-Mesopotamian culture by the Hittites. He is completing an edition of the tablets of the Epic of Gilgamesh recovered from the site of the Hittite capital. He lives in Ann Arbor with his wife, Professor of English Karla Taylor, five cats, and two Corgis.
Enrico Benelli is a specialist in Etruscology and the archaeology of pre-Roman Italy. He worked in the Soprintendenza ai beni archeologici delle Marche from 1999 to 2001, becoming a researcher in the CNR (National Research Council), where he is currently responsible for research in Etruscan epigraphy and editor of the Thesaurus linguae Etruscae and the Corpus Inscriptionum Etruscarum. He developed a new chronological framework for the archaic cultures of inner central Italy and conducted excavations in the Sabine necropolis of Colle del Forno (Eretum) from 2003 to 2009. His research includes Etruscan epigraphy, history and society, especially the later period. A series of studies of late Etruscan inscriptions from the area of Chiusi, combining epigraphical, archaeological and antiquarian topics, has led to innovative results, especially concerning the social history of Chiusi and the whole of Etruria. He has taught Etruscology at the University of Udine since 2005.
Cécile Boëlle-Weber gained her PhD in Ancient History from the University of Nancy II, and is now a Professor of History at the Lycée Fabert in Metz, France. Having written her dissertation on Po-ti-ni-ja: The female element in the Mycenaean religion based on Linear B archives, she now specializes in Mycenaean religion, with publications including her book Po-ti-ni-ja, l’élément féminin dans la religion mycénienne (2004). Equally enamoured of cats and Crete, she divides her work between education in secondary school and the history of the religion of the Aegean Bronze Age.
Larissa Bonfante received her BA from Barnard College, her MA from the University of Cincinnati, and her PhD at Columbia University, where she studied with Otto J. Brendel, Margarete Bieber and Meyer Schapiro. She is Professor of Classics Emerita at New York University and has published on Etruscan and Roman dress, and Etruscan language and culture, particularly iconography. She recently edited The Barbarians of Ancient Europe (2011), in which she also deals with Etruscan influence in Europe, and is presently at work on the publication of an edited book on Nudity as a Costume in the Ancient Mediterranean For the last ten years she has been co-editor, with Jane Whitehead, of Etruscan News, the Bulletin of the US Section of the Istituto di Studi Etruschi. In 2007 she was awarded the Gold Medal of the Archaeological Institute of America. She is a member of the Archaeological Institute of America, the Istituto di Studi Etruschi ed Italici, the German Archaeological Institute, the Société des Etudes Latines and the American Philosophical Society. Her books Etruscan Life and Afterlife (ed.), The Etruscan Language. An Introduction (with Giuliano Bonfante), and Etruscan Dress have seen multiple editions in the US and abroad.
Maria Anna De Lucia Brolli, a student of Massimo Pallottino, graduated in 1975 with honours in Etruscology and Italic Antiquities from the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’ with a thesis on the manufacture of Archaic architectural terracottas. She joined the Ministero per
i Beni e le Attività Culturali, serving with the Naples Museo Archeologico Nazionale and the Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici del Lazio. Since 1983 she has been an official with the Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici dell’Etruria meridionale, responsible for the protection of antiquities in the Faliscan territory (Narce, Falerii, Corchiano, Vignanello). She is Director of the Museo Archeologico dell’Agro Falisco in the Forte Sangallo of Civita Castellana and has also been responsible for the reinstallation of the Faliscan galleries in the Villa Giulia Museum and for many other exhibitions. She has directed numerous excavations, including the definitive studies (and protection) of sanctuaries at Narce (Monte Li Santi-Le Rote), Falerii (Scasato II and via Gramsci sites) and the underworld shrine at Grotta Porciosa. Her publications include L’Agro Falisco (1991) and Civita Castellana. Il Museo Archeologico dell’Agro Falisco (1991), and articles such as, with M. P. Baglione, ‘Le deposizioni infantili nell’agro falisco tra vecchi e nuovi scavi’, Scienze dell’Antichità 14 (2007–2008): 869–893.
Maria Brosius is Associate Professor of Near and Middle Eastern Civilisations at the University of Toronto, Canada. As an ancient historian, her research focuses on the history of pre-Islamic Persia, especially on the Achaemenid empire, as well as on the cultural links between Greece and the eastern Mediterranean. Among her publications are Women in Ancient Persia (559–331 BC) (1996, 2000, 2002), The Persians: An Introduction (Routledge, 2006) and the edited volume Ancient Archives and Archival Traditions: Concepts of Record-Keeping in the Ancient World (2003). A book on A History of the Achaemenid Empire is currently in preparation for Blackwell’s History of the Ancient World.
Trevor R. Bryce is Emeritus Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Queensland, Australia. He has previously taught at the University of New England, Australia, and is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
Stephanie Lynn Budin holds a PhD in Ancient History from the University of Pennsylvania, with concentrations in Greece and the Near East. She is the adoring mother of the bunny Peanut Butter Cup.
Brendan Burke is an Associate Professor in and Department Chair of the Department of Greek and Roman Studies at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. He co-directs excavations at the site of ancient Eleon in eastern Boeotia and for many years he was involved in the excavations at Gordion in Turkey. His research interest range from funerary iconography and chronology in the Bronze Age Aegean, textile production in the ancient world, and the history and legend of the Phrygian King Midas. A strong supporter of study abroad experiences for his students, Brendan teaches by example and tries to spend as much time in Greece as possible.
Edward E. Cohen is Professor of Ancient History and Classical Studies (adjunct) at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. He is the author of many articles and books on the economic and social position of women, foreigners and slaves in the classical world, including Athenian Economy and Society: A Banking Perspective (1992), The Athenian Nation (2000) and, most recently, Athenian Prostitution: The Business of Sex (2015). He is presently preparing Roman Economy and Society: Slaves’ Perspective.
Billie Jean Collins (PhD, Yale University, 1989) is director of Lockwood Press and an instructor in Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies at Emory University, USA. She is
author of The Hittites and Their World (2007) and editor of A History of the Animal World in the Ancient Near East (2002). She has also authored numerous articles on Hittite society and religion.
M. Erica Couto-Ferreira is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, specialising in Asia and Europe in a global context. She has published and co-edited works on women’s healthcare, childbirth and healing practices in ancient Mesopotamia, as well as on the lexicography of the body in Sumerian and Akkadian cultures.
Rosalie David is Emerita Professor of the University of Manchester, UK and Vice-President of the Egypt Exploration Society. Formerly she was Director of the KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology and Keeper of Egyptology at the Manchester Museum. She has authored over 40 books and is a television consultant/contributor to numerous programmes on ancient Egypt and mummies. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and the Royal Society of Medicine, she was awarded OBE (Order of the British Empire) for services to Egyptology.
Peggy L. Day is a Full Professor in the Religion and Culture Department at the University of Winnipeg, where she has taught since 1989. She is very tired of snow.
Mathew Dillon is a Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of New England. His research interests include Greek and Roman history, but he specialises on Greek religion, on which he has written a number of books and articles. His current research projects include children, and women, in ancient Greek religion, and ancient healing cults. He has a charming girl Aussie bulldog puppy called Rutherford, who sleeps on his work backpack in his study, and is an immense source of inspiration to him.
Fanny Dolansky is Associate Professor of Classics at Brock University, Canada, where she teaches courses in Latin, Roman history and Roman religion. Her research focuses primarily on the history of the Roman family and childhood.
Jennie Ebeling is Associate Professor of Archaeology at the University of Evansville in Indiana, USA, and co-director of the Jezreel Expedition in Israel. She has co-edited volumes on ground stone artifacts and household archaeology in the southern Levant and is the author of Women’s Lives in Biblical Times (2010).
Ingrid E. M. Edlund-Berry is Professor Emerita in the Department of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her fil. lic. degree at the University of Lund and PhD at Bryn Mawr College and has taught at the University of Georgia, University of Minnesota, the Intercollegiate Center in Rome and the University of Texas at Austin. Her excavation experience includes Poggio Civitate (Murlo), S. Angelo Vecchio (Metaponto) and Morgantina. Her publications include The Iron Age and Etruscan Vases in the Olcott Collection at Columbia University (1980), The Gods and the Place: Location and Function of Sanctuaries in the Countryside of Etruria and Magna Graecia (700–400 B.C.) (Stockholm, 1987), The Seated and Standing Statue Akroteria from Poggio Civitate (Murlo) (1992); with Lucy Shoe Meritt, Etruscan and Republican Roman Mouldings (2000); edited papers and books: ‘Architectural theory and practice: Readings of Vitruvius’, Memoirs of the American Academy 50 (2005) 1–86; with Giovanna Greco and John Kenfield, Deliciae Fictiles III: Architectural Terracottas in Ancient Italy: New Discoveries and Interpretations (2006); with Nancy T. de Grummond,
The Archaeology of Sanctuaries and Ritual in Etruria (2011); articles, biographical essays and book reviews.
Meritxell Ferrer Martin is a Beatriu de Pinós/Marie Curie Postdoctoral Research Fellow (BP-B) at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona). Previously, she was Beatriu de Pinós/Marie Curie Postdoctoral Research Fellow (BP-A) at Stanford University, Classics Department and Center for Archaeology (2013–2015). She earned her PhD from IUHJVV-UPF (Barcelona, Spain) in 2012 with a dissertation entitled Sicilian Acropolis: Communities, Rituals and Powers (10th–5th BC). Her research specializes in the archaeology of the Mediterranean during the Iron Age, mainly Phoenician and Greek colonization in the western Mediterranean, with a particular interest in Sicily and the Iberian Peninsula. Her interests encompass themes such as post-colonial perspectives, cultural contact, ritual, gender and power relations and contemporary uses of the past. Meritxell has done fieldwork in Spain, Sicily, Portugal and Sardinia.
Erika Feucht is Professor of Egyptology at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. She contributed to the Lexikon der Ägyptologie with Eberhard Otto and Wolfgang Helck and has published on motherhood and childhood in ancient Egypt. Having retired in 2003, she remains a member of SÄK (Ständige deutschsprachige Ägyptologenkonferenz), ICOM (International Commitee of Museums), CIPEG (International Commitee for Egyptology), and was awarded the Universitätsmedaille der Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg at her home institution.
Sherry C. Fox received her Bachelor of Science degree in both anthropology and psychology from the University of Michigan, and both her Master of Arts degree (with a certificate in Forensic Anthropology) and her doctorate in anthropology from the University of Arizona. She is an Adjunct Professor at Arizona State University and currently teaching courses in biological anthropology and forensic anthropology at Eastern Michigan University. Dr Fox is a Fellow of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences.
Kathy L. Gaca is Associate Professor of Classics at Vanderbilt University, USA. Her research explores how sexual norms rooted in antiquity inform current concerns of social injustice and violence against women and girls. She is the author of The Making of Fornication: Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity (2003, winner of the CAMWS 2006 Outstanding Publication Award) and of numerous articles. She is currently at work on her second book, Rape as Sexual Warfare against Girls and Women: Ancient Society, Modern Witness.
Alhena Gadotti is an Associate Professor of History at Towson University, USA, and Director of the Ancient Mediterranean Studies Minor there. She is a Sumerologist focusing on Sumerian literary documents from the Old Babylonian period and has also published on Mesopotamian women and Mesopotamian education. Her most recent book Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld and the Sumerian Gilgamesh Cycle was published in 2014.
Allison Glazebrook is Associate Professor of Classics at Brock University, Canada. Her research focuses on women, gender and sexuality in ancient Greece. In addition to numerous articles and chapters, she is co-editor of Greek Prostitutes in the Ancient Mediterranean, 800 BCE-200 CE (2011) and Houses of Ill-Repute: The Archaeology of Brothels, Houses and Taverns in the Greek World (2016).
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forbids expressly, in Deuteronomy, [737] his people “to learn to do after the abominations of other nations.... To pass through the fire, or use divination, or be an observer of times or an enchanter, or a witch, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a necromancer.”
What difference was there then between all the above-enumerated phenomena as performed by the “other nations” and when enacted by the prophets? Evidently, there was some good reason for it; and we find it in John’s First Epistle, iv., which says: “believe not every spirit, but try the spirits, whether they are of God, because many false prophets are gone out into the world.”
The only standard within the reach of spiritualists and present-day mediums by which they can try the spirits, is to judge 1, by their actions and speech; 2, by their readiness to manifest themselves; and 3, whether the object in view is worthy of the apparition of a “disembodied” spirit, or can excuse any one for disturbing the dead. Saul was on the eve of destruction, himself and his sons, yet Samuel inquired of him: “Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up?”[738] But the “intelligences” that visit the circle-rooms, come at the beck of every trifler who would while away a tedious hour
In the number of the London Spiritualist for July 14th, we find a long article, in which the author seeks to prove that “the marvellous wonders of the present day, which belong to so-called modern spiritualism, are identical in character with the experiences of the patriarchs and apostles of old.”
We are forced to contradict, point-blank, such an assertion. They are identical only so far that the same forces and occult powers of nature produce them. But though these powers and forces may be, and most assuredly are, all directed by unseen intelligences, the latter differ more in essence, character, and purposes than mankind itself, composed, as it now stands, of white, black, brown, red, and yellow men, and numbering saints and criminals, geniuses and idiots. The writer may avail himself of the services of a tame orangoutang or a South Sea islander; but the fact alone that he has a servant makes neither the latter nor himself identical with Aristotle
and Alexander The writer compares Ezekiel “lifted up” and taken into the “east gate of the Lord’s house,”[739] with the levitations of certain mediums, and the three Hebrew youths in the “burning fiery furnace,” with other fire-proof mediums; the John King “spirit-light” is assimilated with the “burning lamp” of Abraham; and finally, after many such comparisons, the case of the Davenport Brothers, released from the jail of Oswego, is confronted with that of Peter delivered from prison by the “angel of the Lord!”
Now, except the story of Saul and Samuel, there is not a case instanced in the Bible of the “evocation of the dead.” As to being lawful, the assertion is contradicted by every prophet. Moses issues a decree of death against those who raise the spirits of the dead, the “necromancers.” Nowhere throughout the Old Testament, nor in Homer, nor Virgil is communion with the dead termed otherwise than necromancy. Philo Judæus makes Saul say, that if he banishes from the land every diviner and necromancer his name will survive him.
One of the greatest reasons for it was the doctrine of the ancients, that no soul from the “abode of the blessed” will return to earth, unless, indeed, upon rare occasions its apparition might be required to accomplish some great object in view, and so bring benefit upon humanity. In this latter instance the “soul” has no need to be evoked. It sent its portentous message either by an evanescent simulacrum of itself, or through messengers, who could appear in material form, and personate faithfully the departed. The souls that could so easily be evoked were deemed neither safe nor useful to commune with. They were the souls, or larvæ rather, from the infernal region of the limbo—the sheol, the region known by the kabalists as the eighth sphere, but far different from the orthodox Hell or Hades of the ancient mythologists. Horace describes this evocation and the ceremonial accompanying it, and Maimonides gives us particulars of the Jewish rite. Every necromantic ceremony was performed on high places and hills, and blood was used for the purpose of placating these human ghouls. [740]
“I cannot prevent the witches from picking up their bones,” says the poet. “See the blood they pour in the ditch to allure the souls that
will utter their oracles!”[741] “Cruor in fossam confusus, ut inde manes elicirent, animas responsa daturas.”
“The souls,” says Porphyry, “prefer, to everything else, freshly-spilt blood, which seems for a short time to restore to them some of the faculties of life.”[742]
As for materializations, they are many and various in the sacred records. But, were they effected under the same conditions as at modern seances? Darkness, it appears, was not required in those days of patriarchs and magic powers. The three angels who appeared to Abraham drank in the full blaze of the sun, for “he sat in the tent-door in the heat of the day,”[743] says the book of Genesis. The spirits of Elias and Moses appeared equally in daytime, as it is not probable that Christ and the Apostles would be climbing a high mountain during the night. Jesus is represented as having appeared to Mary Magdalene in the garden in the early morning; to the Apostles, at three distinct times, and generally by day; once “when the morning was come” (John xxi. 4). Even when the ass of Balaam saw the “materialized” angel, it was in the full light of noon.
We are fully prepared to agree with the writer in question, that we find in the life of Christ—and we may add in the Old Testament, too — too—“an uninterrupted record of spiritualistic manifestations,” but nothing mediumistic, of a physical character though, if we except the visit of Saul to Sedecla, the Obeah woman of En-Dor. This is a distinction of vital importance.
True, the promise of the Master was clearly stated: “Aye, and greater works than these shall ye do” works of mediatorship. According to Joel, the time would come when there would be an outpouring of the divine spirit: “Your sons and your daughters,” says he, “shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.” The time has come and they do all these things now; Spiritualism has its seers and martyrs, its prophets and healers. Like Moses, and David, and Jehoram, there are mediums who have direct writings from genuine planetary and human spirits; and the best of it brings the mediums no pecuniary recompense. The
greatest friend of the cause in France, Leymarie, now languishes in a prison-cell, and, as he says with touching pathos, is “no longer a man, but a number” on the prison register.
There are a few, a very few, orators on the spiritualistic platform who speak by inspiration, and if they know what is said at all they are in the condition described by Daniel: “And I retained no strength. Yet heard I the voice of his words: and when I heard the voice of his words, then was I in a deep sleep.”[744] And there are mediums, these whom we have spoken of, for whom the prophecy in Samuel might have been written: “The spirit of the Lord will come upon thee, thou shalt prophesy with them, and shalt be turned into another man.”[745] But where, in the long line of Bible-wonders, do we read of flying guitars, and tinkling tambourines, and jangling bells being offered in pitch-dark rooms as evidences of immortality?
When Christ was accused of casting out devils by the power of Beelzebub, he denied it, and sharply retorted by asking, “By whom do your sons or disciples cast them out?” Again, spiritualists affirm that Jesus was a medium, that he was controlled by one or many spirits; but when the charge was made to him direct he said that he was nothing of the kind. “Say we not well, that thou art a Samaritan, and hast a devil?” daimonion, an Obeah, or familiar spirit in the Hebrew text. Jesus answered, “I have not a devil.”[746]
The writer from whom we have above quoted, attempts also a parallel between the aerial flights of Philip and Ezekiel and of Mrs. Guppy and other modern mediums. He is ignorant or oblivious of the fact that while levitation occurred as an effect in both classes of cases, the producing causes were totally dissimilar. The nature of this difference we have adverted to already. Levitation may be produced consciously or unconsciously to the subject. The juggler determines beforehand that he will be levitated, for how long a time, and to what height; he regulates the occult forces accordingly. The fakir produces the same effect by the power of his aspiration and will, and, except when in the ecstatic state, keeps control over his movements. So does the priest of Siam, when, in the sacred pagoda, he mounts fifty feet in the air with taper in hand, and flits
from idol to idol, lighting up the niches, self-supported, and stepping as confidently as though he were upon solid ground. This, persons have seen and testify to. The officers of the Russian squadron which recently circumnavigated the globe, and was stationed for a long time in Japanese waters, relate the fact that, besides many other marvels, they saw jugglers walk in mid-air from tree-top to tree-top, without the slightest support.[747] They also saw the pole and tapeclimbing feats, described by Colonel Olcott in his People from the Other World, and which have been so much called in question by certain spiritualists and mediums whose zeal is greater than their learning. The quotations from Col. Yule and other writers, elsewhere given in this work, seem to place the matter beyond doubt that these effects are produced.
Such phenomena, when occurring apart from religious rites, in India, Japan, Thibet, Siam, and other “heathen” countries, phenomena a hundred times more various and astounding than ever seen in civilized Europe or America, are never attributed to the spirits of the departed. The Pitris have naught to do with such public exhibitions. And we have but to consult the list of the principal demons or elemental spirits to find that their very names indicate their professions, or, to express it clearly, the tricks to which each variety is best adapted. So we have the Mâdan, a generic name indicating wicked elemental spirits, half brutes, half monsters, for Mâdan signifies one that looks like a cow. He is the friend of the malicious sorcerers and helps them to effect their evil purposes of revenge by striking men and cattle with sudden illness and death.
The Shudâla-Mâdan, or graveyard fiend, answers to our ghouls. He delights where crime and murder were committed, near burialspots and places of execution. He helps the juggler in all the firephenomena as well as Kutti Shâttan, the little juggling imps. Shudâla, they say, is a half-fire, half-water demon, for he received from Siva permission to assume any shape he chose, transform one thing into another; and when he is not in fire, he is in water. It is he who blinds people “to see that which they do not see.” Shûla Mâdan, is another mischievous spook. He is the furnace-demon, skilled in pottery and baking. If you keep friends with him, he will not injure
you; but woe to him who incurs his wrath. Shûla likes compliments and flattery, and as he generally keeps underground it is to him that a juggler must look to help him raise a tree from a seed in a quarter of an hour and ripen its fruit.
Kumil-Mâdan, is the undine proper. He is an elemental spirit of the water, and his name means blowing like a bubble. He is a very merry imp; and will help a friend in anything relative to his department; he will shower rain and show the future and the present to those who will resort to hydromancy or divination by water.
Poruthû Mâdan, is the “wrestling” demon; he is the strongest of all; and whenever there are feats shown in which physical force is required, such as levitations, or taming of wild animals, he will help the performer by keeping him above the soil or will overpower a wild beast before the tamer has time to utter his incantation. So, every “physical manifestation” has its own class of elemental spirits to superintend them.
Returning now to levitations of human bodies and inanimate bodies, in modern circle-rooms, we must refer the reader to the Introductory chapter of this work. (See “Æthrobasy.”) In connection with the story of Simon the Magician, we have shown the explanation of the ancients as to how the levitation and transport of heavy bodies could be produced. We will now try and suggest a hypothesis for the same in relation to mediums, i. e., persons supposed to be unconscious at the moment of the phenomena, which the believers claim to be produced by disembodied “spirits.” We need not repeat that which has been sufficiently explained before. Conscious æthrobasy under magneto-electrical conditions is possible only to adepts who can never be overpowered by an influence foreign to themselves, but remain sole masters of their will.
Thus levitation, we will say, must always occur in obedience to law —a law as inexorable as that which makes a body unaffected by it remain upon the ground. And where should we seek for that law outside of the theory of molecular attraction? It is a scientific hypothesis that the form of force which first brings nebulous or star
matter together into a whirling vortex is electricity; and modern chemistry is being totally reconstructed upon the theory of electric polarities of atoms. The waterspout, the tornado, the whirlwind, the cyclone, and the hurricane, are all doubtless the result of electrical action. This phenomenon has been studied from above as well as from below, observations having been made both upon the ground and from a balloon floating above the vortex of a thunder-storm.
Observe now, that this force, under the conditions of a dry and warm atmosphere at the earth’s surface, can accumulate a dynamic energy capable of lifting enormous bodies of water, of compressing the particles of atmosphere, and of sweeping across a country, tearing up forests, lifting rocks, and scattering buildings in fragments over the ground. Wild’s electric machine causes induced currents of magneto-electricity so enormously powerful as to produce light by which small print may be read, on a dark night, at a distance of two miles from the place where it is operating.
As long ago as the year 1600, Gilbert, in his De Magnete, enunciated the principle that the globe itself is one vast magnet, and some of our advanced electricians are now beginning to realize that man, too, possesses this property, and that the mutual attractions and repulsions of individuals toward each other may at least in part find their explanation in this fact. The experience of attendants upon spiritualistic circles corroborates this opinion. Says Professor Nicholas Wagner, of the University of St. Petersburg: “Heat, or perhaps the electricity of the investigators sitting in the circle, must concentrate itself in the table and gradually develop into motions. At the same time, or a little afterward, the psychical force unites to assist the two other powers. By psychical force, I mean that which evolves itself out of all the other forces of our organism. The combination into one general something of several separate forces, and capable, when combined, of manifesting itself in degree, according to the individuality.” The progress of the phenomena he considers to be affected by the cold or the dryness of the atmosphere. Now, remembering what has been said as to the subtler forms of energy which the Hermetists have proved to exist in nature, and accepting the hypothesis enunciated by Mr. Wagner that “the
power which calls out these manifestations is centred in the mediums,” may not the medium, by furnishing in himself a nucleus as perfect in its way as the system of permanent steel magnets in Wild’s battery, produce astral currents sufficiently strong to lift in their vortex a body even as ponderable as a human form? It is not necessary that the object lifted should assume a gyratory motion, for the phenomenon we are observing, unlike the whirlwind, is directed by an intelligence, which is capable of keeping the body to be raised within the ascending current and preventing its rotation.
Levitation in this case would be a purely mechanical phenomenon. The inert body of the passive medium is lifted by a vortex created either by the elemental spirits—possibly, in some cases, by human ones, and sometimes through purely morbific causes, as in the cases of Professor Perty’s sick somnambules. The levitation of the adept is, on the contrary, a magneto-electric effect, as we have just stated. He has made the polarity of his body opposite to that of the atmosphere, and identical with that of the earth; hence, attractable by the former, retaining his consciousness the while. A like phenomenal levitation is possible, also, when disease has changed the corporeal polarity of a patient, as disease always does in a greater or lesser degree. But, in such case, the lifted person would not be likely to remain conscious.
In one series of observations upon whirlwinds, made in 1859, in the basin of the Rocky Mountains, “a newspaper was caught up ... to a height of some two hundred feet; and there it oscillated to and fro across the track for some considerable time, whilst accompanying the onward motion.”[748] Of course scientists will say that a parallel cannot be instituted between this case and that of human levitation; that no vortex can be formed in a room by which a medium could be raised; but this is a question of astral light and spirit, which have their own peculiar dynamical laws. Those who understand the latter, affirm that a concourse of people laboring under mental excitement, which reäcts upon the physical system, throw off electro-magnetic emanations, which, when sufficiently intense, can throw the whole circumambient atmosphere into perturbation. Force enough may actually be generated to create an electrical vortex, sufficiently
powerful to produce many a strange phenomenon. With this hint, the whirling of the dervishes, and the wild dances, swayings, gesticulations, music, and shouts of devotees will be understood as all having a common object in view—namely, the creation of such astral conditions as favor psychological and physical phenomena. The rationale of religious revivals will also be better understood if this principle is borne in mind.
But there is still another point to be considered. If the medium is a nucleus of magnetism and a conductor of that force, he would be subject to the same laws as a metallic conductor, and be attracted to his magnet. If, therefore, a magnetic centre of the requisite power was formed directly over him by the unseen powers presiding over the manifestations, why should not his body be lifted toward it, despite terrestrial gravity? We know that, in the case of a medium who is unconscious of the progress of the operation, it is necessary to first admit the fact of such an intelligence, and next, the possibility of the experiment being conducted as described; but, in view of the multifarious evidences offered, not only in our own researches, which claim no authority, but also in those of Mr. Crookes, and a great number of others, in many lands and at different epochs, we shall not turn aside from the main object of offering this hypothesis in the profitless endeavor to strengthen a case which scientific men will not consider with patience, even when sanctioned by the most distinguished of their own body.
As early as 1836, the public was apprised of certain phenomena which were as extraordinary, if not more so than all the manifestations which are produced in our days. The famous correspondence between two well-known mesmerizers, Deleuze and Billot, was published in France, and the wonders discussed for a time in every society Billot firmly believed in the apparition of spirits, for, as he says, he has both seen, heard, and felt them. Deleuze was as much convinced of this truth as Billot, and declared that man’s immortality and the return of the dead, or rather of their shadows, was the best demonstrated fact in his opinion. Material objects were brought to him from distant places by invisible hands, and he communicated on most important subjects with the invisible
intelligences. “In regard to this,” he remarks, “I cannot conceive how spiritual beings are able to carry material objects.” More skeptical, less intuitional than Billot, nevertheless, he agreed with the latter that “the question of spiritualism is not one of opinions, but of facts.”
Such is precisely the conclusion to which Professor Wagner, of St. Petersburg, was finally driven. In the second pamphlet on Mediumistic Phenomena, issued by him in December, 1875, he administers the following rebuke to Mr. Shkliarevsky, one of his materialistic critics: “So long as the spiritual manifestations were weak and sporadic, we men of science could afford to deceive ourselves with theories of unconscious muscular action, or unconscious cerebrations of our brains, and tumble the rest into one heap as juggleries.... But now these wonders have grown too striking; the spirits show themselves in the shape of tangible, materialized forms, which can be touched and handled at will by any learned skeptic like yourself, and even be weighed and measured. We can struggle no longer, for every resistance becomes absurd—it threatens lunacy. Try then to realize this, and to humble yourself before the possibility of impossible facts.”
Iron is only magnetized temporarily, but steel permanently, by contact with the lodestone. Now steel is but iron which has passed through a carbonizing process, and yet that process has quite changed the nature of the metal, so far as its relations to the lodestone are concerned. In like manner, it may be said that the medium is but an ordinary person who is magnetized by influx from the astral light; and as the permanence of the magnetic property in the metal is measured by its more or less steel-like character, so may we not say that the intensity and permanency of mediumistic power is in proportion to the saturation of the medium with the magnetic or astral force?
This condition of saturation may be congenital, or brought about in any one of these ways:—by the mesmeric process; by spirit-agency; or by self-will. Moreover, the condition seems hereditable, like any other physical or mental peculiarity; many, and we may even say most great mediums having had mediumship exhibited in some form
by one or more progenitors. Mesmeric subjects easily pass into the higher forms of clairvoyance and mediumship (now so called), as Gregory, Deleuze, Puysegur, Du Potet, and other authorities inform us. As to the process of self-saturation, we have only to turn to the account of the priestly devotees of Japan, Siam, China, India, Thibet, and Egypt, as well as of European countries, to be satisfied of its reality. Long persistence in a fixed determination to subjugate matter, brings about a condition in which not only is one insensible to external impressions, but even death itself may be simulated, as we have already seen. The ecstatic so enormously reïnforces his willpower, as to draw into himself, as into a vortex, the potencies resident in the astral light to supplement his own natural store.
The phenomena of mesmerism are explicable upon no other hypothesis than the projection of a current of force from the operator into the subject. If a man can project this force by an exercise of the will, what prevents his attracting it toward himself by reversing the current? Unless, indeed, it be urged that the force is generated within his body and cannot be attracted from any supply without. But even under such an hypothesis, if he can generate a superabundant supply to saturate another person, or even an inanimate object by his will, why cannot he generate it in excess for self-saturation?
In his work on Anthropology, Professor J. R. Buchanan notes the tendency of the natural gestures to follow the direction of the phrenological organs; the attitude of combativeness being downward and backward; that of hope and spirituality upward and forward; that of firmness upward and backward; and so on. The adepts of Hermetic science know this principle so well that they explain the levitation of their own bodies, whenever it happens unawares, by saying that the thought is so intently fixed upon a point above them, that when the body is thoroughly imbued with the astral influence, it follows the mental aspiration and rises into the air as easily as a cork held beneath the water rises to the surface when its buoyancy is allowed to assert itself. The giddiness felt by certain persons when standing upon the brink of a chasm is explained upon the same principle. Young children, who have little or no active imagination, and in whom experience has not had sufficient time to develop fear,
are seldom, if ever, giddy; but the adult of a certain mental temperament, seeing the chasm and picturing in his imaginative fancy the consequences of a fall, allows himself to be drawn by the attraction of the earth, and unless the spell of fascination be broken, his body will follow his thought to the foot of the precipice.
That this giddiness is purely a temperamental affair, is shown in the fact that some persons never experience the sensation, and inquiry will probably reveal the fact that such are deficient in the imaginative faculty. We have a case in view—a gentleman who, in 1858, had so firm a nerve that he horrified the witnesses by standing upon the coping of the Arc de Triomphe, in Paris, with folded arms, and his feet half over the edge; but, having since become shortsighted, was taken with a panic upon attempting to cross a plankwalk over the courtyard of a hotel, where the footway was more than two feet and a half wide, and there was no danger. He looked at the flagging below, gave his fancy free play, and would have fallen had he not quickly sat down.
It is a dogma of science that perpetual motion is impossible; it is another dogma, that the allegation that the Hermetists discovered the elixir of life, and that certain of them, by partaking of it, prolonged their existence far beyond the usual term, is a superstitious absurdity. And the claim that the baser metals have been transmuted into gold, and that the universal solvent was discovered, excites only contemptuous derision in a century which has crowned the edifice of philosophy with a copestone of protoplasm. The first is declared a physical impossibility; as much so, according to Babinet, the astronomer, as the “levitation of an object without contact;”[749] the second, a physiological vagary begotten of a disordered mind; the third, a chemical absurdity.
Balfour Stewart says that while the man of science cannot assert that “he is intimately acquainted with all the forces of nature, and cannot prove that perpetual motion is impossible; for, in truth, he knows very little of these forces ... he does think that he has entered into the spirit and design of nature, and therefore he denies at once the possibility of such a machine.”[750] If he has discovered the
design of nature, he certainly has not the spirit, for he denies its existence in one sense; and denying spirit he prevents that perfect understanding of universal law which would redeem modern philosophy from its thousand mortifying dilemmas and mistakes. If Professor B. Stewart’s negation is founded upon no better analogy than that of his French contemporary, Babinet, he is in danger of a like humiliating catastrophe. The universe itself illustrates the actuality of perpetual motion; and the atomic theory, which has proved such a balm to the exhausted minds of our cosmic explorers, is based upon it. The telescope searching through space, and the microscope probing the mysteries of the little world in a drop of water, reveal the same law in operation; and, as everything below is like everything above, who would presume to say that when the conservation of energy is better understood, and the two additional forces of the kabalists are added to the catalogue of orthodox science, it may not be discovered how to construct a machine which shall run without friction and supply itself with energy in proportion to its wastes? “Fifty years ago,” says the venerable Mr. de Lara, “a Hamburg paper, quoting from an English one an account of the opening of the Manchester and Liverpool Railway, pronounced it a gross fabrication; capping the climax by saying, ‘even so far extends the credulity of the English;’” the moral is apparent. The recent discovery of the compound called metalline, by an American chemist, makes it appear probable that friction can, in a large degree, be overcome. One thing is certain, when a man shall have discovered the perpetual motion he will be able to understand by analogy all the secrets of nature; progress in direct ratio with resistance.
We may say the same of the elixir of life, by which is understood physical life, the soul being of course deathless only by reason of its divine immortal union with spirit. But continual or perpetual does not mean endless. The kabalists have never claimed that either an endless physical life or unending motion is possible. The Hermetic axiom maintains that only the First Cause and its direct emanations, our spirits (scintillas from the eternal central sun which will be reäbsorbed by it at the end of time) are incorruptible and eternal.
But, in possession of a knowledge of occult natural forces, yet undiscovered by the materialists, they asserted that both physical life and mechanical motion could be prolonged indefinitely. The philosophers’ stone had more than one meaning attached to its mysterious origin. Says Professor Wilder: “The study of alchemy was even more universal than the several writers upon it appear to have known, and was always the auxiliary, if not identical with, the occult sciences of magic, necromancy, and astrology; probably from the same fact that they were originally but forms of a spiritualism which was generally extant in all ages of human history.”
Our greatest wonder is, that the very men who view the human body simply as a “digesting machine,” should object to the idea that if some equivalent for metalline could be applied between its molecules, it should run without friction. Man’s body is taken from the earth, or dust, according to Genesis; which allegory bars the claims of modern analysts to original discovery of the nature of the inorganic constituents of human body. If the author of Genesis knew this, and Aristotle taught the identity between the life-principle of plants, animals, and men, our affiliation with mother earth seems to have been settled long ago.
Elie de Beaumont has recently reasserted the old doctrine of Hermes that there is a terrestrial circulation comparable to that of the blood of man. Now, since it is a doctrine as old as time, that nature is continually renewing her wasted energies by absorption from the source of energy, why should the child differ from the parent? Why may not man, by discovering the source and nature of this recuperative energy, extract from the earth herself the juice or quintessence with which to replenish his own forces? This may have been the great secret of the alchemists. Stop the circulation of the terrestrial fluids and we have stagnation, putrefaction, death; stop the circulation of the fluids in man, and stagnation, absorption, calcification from old age, and death ensue. If the alchemists had simply discovered some chemical compound capable of keeping the channels of our circulation unclogged, would not all the rest easily follow? And why, we ask, if the surface-waters of certain mineral springs have such virtue in the cure of disease and the restoration of
physical vigor, is it illogical to say that if we could get the first runnings from the alembic of nature in the bowels of the earth, we might, perhaps, find that the fountain of youth was no myth after all. Jennings asserts that the elixir was produced out of the secret chemical laboratories of nature by some adepts; and Robert Boyle, the chemist, mentions a medicated wine or cordial which Dr. Lefevre tried with wonderful effect upon an old woman.
Alchemy is as old as tradition itself. “The first authentic record on this subject,” says William Godwin, “is an edict of Diocletian, about 300 years after Christ, ordering a diligent search to be made in Egypt for all the ancient books which treated of the art of making gold and silver, that they might be consigned to the flames. This edict necessarily presumes a certain antiquity to the pursuit; and fabulous history has recorded Solomon, Pythagoras, and Hermes among its distinguished votaries.”
And this question of transmutation—this alkahest or universal solvent, which comes next after the elixir vitæ in the order of the three alchemical agents? Is the idea so absurd as to be totally unworthy of consideration in this age of chemical discovery? How shall we dispose of the historical anecdotes of men who actually made gold and gave it away, and of those who testify to having seen them do it? Libavius, Geberus, Arnoldus, Thomas Aquinas, Bernardus Comes, Joannes Penotus, Quercetanus Geber, the Arabian father of European alchemy, Eugenius Philalethes, Baptista Porta, Rubeus, Dornesius, Vogelius, Irenæus Philaletha Cosmopolita, and many mediæval alchemists and Hermetic philosophers assert the fact. Must we believe them all visionaries and lunatics, these otherwise great and learned scholars? Francesco Picus, in his work De Auro, gives eighteen instances of gold being produced in his presence by artificial means; and Thomas Vaughan,[751] going to a goldsmith to sell 1,200 marks worth of gold, when the man suspiciously remarked that the gold was too pure to have ever come out of a mine, ran away, leaving the money behind him. In a preceding chapter we have brought forward the testimony of a number of authors to this effect.
Marco Polo tells us that in some mountains of Thibet, which he calls Chingintalas, there are veins of the substance from which Salamander is made: “For the real truth is, that the salamander is no beast, as they allege in our parts of the world, but is a substance found in the earth.”[752] Then he adds that a Turk of the name of Zurficar, told him that he had been procuring salamanders for the Great Khan, in those regions, for the space of three years. “He said that the way they got them was by digging in that mountain till they found a certain vein. The substance of this vein was then taken and crushed, and, when so treated, it divides, as it were, into fibres of wool, which they set forth to dry. When dry, these fibres were pounded and washed, so as to leave only the fibres, like fibres of wool. These were then spun.... When first made, these napkins are not very white, but, by putting them into the fire for a while, they come out as white as snow.”
Therefore, as several authorities testify, this mineral substance is the famous Asbestos, [753] which the Rev. A. Williamson says is found in Shantung. But, it is not only incombustible thread which is made from it. An oil, having several most extraordinary properties, is extracted from it, and the secret of its virtues remains with certain lamas and Hindu adepts. When rubbed into the body, it leaves no external stain or mark, but, nevertheless, after having been so rubbed, the part can be scrubbed with soap and hot or cold water, without the virtue of the ointment being affected in the least. The person so rubbed may boldly step into the hottest fire; unless suffocated, he will remain uninjured. Another property of the oil is that, when combined with another substance, that we are not at liberty to name, and left stagnant under the rays of the moon, on certain nights indicated by native astrologers, it will breed strange creatures. Infusoria we may call them in one sense, but then these grow and develop. Speaking of Kashmere, Marco Polo observes that they have an astonishing acquaintance with the devilries of enchantment, insomuch that they make their idols to speak.
To this day, the greatest magian mystics of these regions may be found in Kashmere. The various religious sects of this country were
always credited with preternatural powers, and were the resort of adepts and sages. As Colonel Yule remarks, “Vambery tells us that even in our day, the Kasmiri dervishes are preëminent among their Mahometan brethren for cunning, secret arts, skill in exorcisms and magic.”[754]
But, all modern chemists are not equally dogmatic in their negation of the possibility of such a transmutation. Dr. Peisse, Desprez, and even the all-denying Louis Figuier, of Paris, seem to be far from rejecting the idea. Dr. Wilder says: “The possibility of reducing the elements to their primal form, as they are supposed to have existed in the igneous mass from which the earth-crust is believed to have been formed, is not considered by physicists to be so absurd an idea as has been intimated. There is a relationship between metals, often so close as to indicate an original identity. Persons called alchemists may, therefore, have devoted their energies to investigations into these matters, as Lavoisier, Davy, Faraday, and others of our day have explained the mysteries of chemistry.”[755] A learned Theosophist, a practicing physician of this country, one who has studied the occult sciences and alchemy for over thirty years, has succeeded in reducing the elements to their primal form, and made what is termed “the pre-Adamite earth.” It appears in the form of an earthy precipitate from pure water, which, on being disturbed, presents the most opalescent and vivid colors.
“The secret,” say the alchemists, as if enjoying the ignorance of the uninitiated, “is an amalgamation of the salt, sulphur, and mercury combined three times in Azoth, by a triple sublimation and a triple fixation.”
“How ridiculously absurd!” will exclaim a learned modern chemist. Well, the disciples of the great Hermes understand the above as well as a graduate of Harvard University comprehends the meaning of his Professor of Chemistry, when the latter says: “With one hydroxyl group we can only produce monatomic compounds; use two hydroxyl groups, and we can form around the same skeleton a number of diatomic compounds. ... Attach to the nucleus three
hydroxyl groups, and there result triatomic compounds, among which is a very familiar substance—
“Attach thyself,” says the alchemist, “to the four letters of the tetragram disposed in the following manner: The letters of the ineffable name are there, although thou mayest not discern them at
Glycerine
first. The incommunicable axiom is kabalistically contained therein, and this is what is called the magic arcanum by the masters.” The arcanum—the fourth emanation of the Akâsa, the principle of L , which is represented in its third transmutation by the fiery sun, the eye of the world, or of Osiris, as the Egyptians termed it. An eye tenderly watching its youngest daughter, wife, and sister—Isis, our mother earth. See what Hermes, the thrice-great master, says of her: “Her father is the sun, her mother is the moon.” It attracts and caresses, and then repulses her by a projectile power. It is for the Hermetic student to watch its motions, to catch its subtile currents, to guide and direct them with the help of the athanor, the Archimedean lever of the alchemist. What is this mysterious athanor? Can the physicist tell us—he who sees and examines it daily? Aye, he sees; but does he comprehend the secret-ciphered characters traced by the divine finger on every sea-shell in the ocean’s deep; on every leaf that trembles in the breeze; in the bright star, whose stellar lines are in his sight but so many more or less luminous lines of hydrogen?
“God geometrizes,” said Plato.[756] “The laws of nature are the thoughts of God;” exclaimed Oërsted, 2,000 years later. “His thoughts are immutable,” repeated the solitary student of Hermetic lore, “therefore it is in the perfect harmony and equilibrium of all things that we must seek the truth.” And thus, proceeding from the indivisible unity, he found emanating from it two contrary forces, each acting through the other and producing equilibrium, and the three were but one, the Pythagorean Eternal Monad. The primordial point is a circle; the circle squaring itself from the four cardinal points becomes a quaternary, the perfect square, having at each of its four angles a letter of the mirific name, the sacred tetragram. It is the four Buddhas who came and have passed away; the Pythagorean tetractys—absorbed and resolved by the one eternal no-BEING.
Tradition declares that on the dead body of Hermes, at Hebron, was found by an Isarim, an initiate, the tablet known as the Smaragdine. It contains, in a few sentences, the essence of the Hermetic wisdom. To those who read but with their bodily eyes, the precepts will suggest nothing new or extraordinary, for it merely
begins by saying that it speaks not fictitious things, but that which is true and most certain.
“What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is similar to that which is below to accomplish the wonders of one thing.
“As all things were produced by the mediation of one being, so all things were produced from this one by adaptation.
“Its father is the sun, its mother is the moon.
“It is the cause of all perfection throughout the whole earth.
“Its power is perfect if it is changed into earth.
“Separate the earth from the fire, the subtile from the gross, acting prudently and with judgment.
“Ascend with the greatest sagacity from the earth to heaven, and then descend again to earth, and unite together the power of things inferior and superior; thus you will possess the light of the whole world, and all obscurity will fly away from you.
“This thing has more fortitude than fortitude itself, because it will overcome every subtile thing and penetrate every solid thing.
“By it the world was formed.”
This mysterious thing is the universal, magical agent, the astral light, which in the correlations of its forces furnishes the alkahest, the philosopher’s stone, and the elixir of life. Hermetic philosophy names it Azoth, the soul of the world, the celestial virgin, the great Magnes, etc., etc. Physical science knows it as “heat, light, electricity, and magnetism;” but ignoring its spiritual properties and the occult potency contained in ether, rejects everything it ignores. It explains and depicts the crystalline forms of the snow-flakes, their modifications of an hexagonal prism which shoot out an infinity of delicate needles. It has studied them so perfectly that it has even calculated, with the most wondrous mathematical precision, that all these needles diverge from each other at an angle of 60°. Can it tell
