Ghosts – Gods for the ordinary person?

Elm Street. Photo by Ticklebug.

There was in Athens a house, spacious and open, but with an infamous reputation, as if filled with pestilence. For in the dead of night, a noise like the clashing of iron could be heard. And if one listened carefully, it sounded like the rattling of chains. At first the noise seemed to be at a distance, but then it would approach, nearer, nearer, nearer. Suddenly a phantom would appear, an old man, pale and emaciated, with a long beard, and hair that appeared driven by the wind. The fetters on his feet and hands rattled as he moved them.

Any dwellers in the house passed sleepless nights under the most dismal terrors imaginable. The nights without rest led them to a kind of madness, and as the horrors in their minds increased, onto a path toward death. Even in the daytime–when the phantom did not appear–the memory of the nightmare was so strong that it still passed before their eyes. The terror remained when the cause of it was gone.

Damned as uninhabitable, the house was at last deserted, left to the spectral monster. But in hope that some tenant might be found who was unaware of the malevolence within it, the house was posted for rent or sale.

It happened that a philosopher named Athenodorus came to Athens at that time. Reading the posted bill, he discovered the dwelling’s price. The extraordinary cheapness raised his suspicion, yet when he heard the whole story, he was not in the least put off. Indeed, he was eager to take the place. And did so immediately.

As evening drew near, Athenodorus had a couch prepared for him in the front section of the house. He asked for a light and his writing materials, then dismissed his retainers. To keep his mind from being distracted by vain terrors of imaginary noises and apparitions, he directed all his energy toward his writing.

For a time the night was silent. Then came the rattling of fetters. Athenodorus neither lifted up his eyes, nor laid down his pen. Instead he closed his ears by concentrating on his work. But the noise increased and advanced closer till it seemed to be at the door, and at last in the very chamber. Athenodorus looked round and saw the apparition exactly as it had been described to him. It stood before him, beckoning with one finger.

Athenodorus made a sign with his hand that the visitor should wait a little, and bent over his work. The ghost, however, shook the chains over the philosopher’s head, beckoning as before. Athenodorus now took up his lamp and followed. The ghost moved slowly, as if held back by his chains. Once it reached the courtyard, it suddenly vanished.

Athenodorus, now deserted, carefully marked the spot with a handful of grass and leaves. The next day he asked the magistrate to have the spot dug up. There they found–intertwined with chains–the bones that were all that remained of a body that had long lain in the ground. Carefully, the skeletal relics were collected and given proper burial, at public expense. The tortured ancient was at rest. And the house in Athens was haunted no more.

Ghost story from Pliny’s Letters

The ghost story is one of many ancient tales that survives to this day. These days they’re entertainment. They play with our ambiguous relationship with the supernatural and the unknown. The daemons from the netherworld might be purely imaginary monsters, but that doesn’t mean they’re not lying in wait for you when you go home tonight. However, our daemons are different to those faced by people in the past.

To some extent we have tamed the night. That’s why when people go on a camping holiday in Romania, their car has to break down as they drive through the Transylvanian forest. It’s rare that the car breaks down in a arable part of Transylvania, or fails to start in the morning due to a flat battery. The by placing modern people on foot in forest you remove them from safety and place them in the wilds. Even in early-modern times night-time travel was a more arduous affair and not something undertaken lightly. Science has to a large extent banished the night.

A more scientific outlook has also to an extent limited the reach of the spirit world. Atheism is now a plausible choice. Even in the recent past this was not the case. In the ancient past it was accepted that action by spirits was a part of the mechanics of the world. Rivers had their attendant spirits, homes were watched over by the Lares, the household gods. The ancients didn’t have a choice about interacting with spirits, the world was full of spirits. One of the advantages of studying historical documents is that it becomes possible to access this ephemeral world. There’s a lot of literature on how religious activity is partly an embodiment of social memory. This is a very formal activity usually with actions directed by an authority. If we take the loose definition of religion as an attempt to communicate with the weather, then can we see the relation between people and spirits as a vernacular religion, built from the bottom up?

If the comparison is to stand then perhaps its worth thinking about “Why Ghosts?”. The roles of religion are many and would take up a thesis or career, let alone a short section of a seminar, so I’ll produce a somewhat ham-fisted summary.

Religion provides a base for social rules. The Vikings had hairy sky-god Woden as God of Justice. The Greeks had hairy sky-god Zeus as God of Justice. The Romans personified Justice as a rather attractive woman wearing a blindfold and wielding a sword, though the highest legal power was Jupiter, a hairy sky-god. There is a need for social rules to create a viable community, “thou shalt not lop of they neighbour’s head for a bet” is a useful one. There’s also a need to have arbitrary rules for creating community by submission to authority. In both cases the ultimate sanction for these rules is the presence of a powerful figure who may be hiding around the next cloud with a thunderbolt.

Religion explains how parts of the world work. The Norse had fertility goddess Freya who ensured the growth of the crops. In Hellenic mythology it was Demeter, and in Rome, Ceres who were goddesses of fertility. In this instance it was a matter of making the right sacrifices to ensure the goddess would be pacified and the crops would grow.

There’s also a role in providing protection. The Greeks had Athena, known to the Romans as Minerva who was a defensive god of war, and frequently a civic protector. The Vikings had Thor, though there isn’t a direct correlation. Thor protected humanity and being pleasant, didn’t demand human sacrifice. However Thor is an embodiment of a different set of believes and needs that Athena. Religion can be used as an insight into the social fabric of a society.

The gods of formal religion appear to have specific roles. They fulfil these in an undefined but mystic way. They aren’t subject to the usual laws of the universe, for instance mortality is different for Gods. They can be killed, but rarely die of old age. In fact while they endure eternity their personal ages seem to remain static. Could it be said that ghosts also perform godly roles, if in a less formal way, being vernacular religion? Would the ghosts of a society also reflect their social concerns?

The earliest appearance of a ghost in Greek literature is that of Patroklos, the companion of Achilles in the Iliad. Rather like the tale of the ghost story Patroklos appears to ensure that he is buried properly so that he may enter the afterlife. This is repeated in the Odyssey. Elpenor fell to his death on the island of Circe, but Odysseus left the body unburied. When Odysseus visits the land of the dead, the shade of Elpenor approaches Odysseus to request a proper burial so that he may move on.

Odysseus visited the land of the dead to speak with Tiresias, a powerful seer. In later times many of the dead were seen as having hidden knowledge. The earliest surviving history, by Herodotus tells the tale of Periander consulting a ghost oracle.

…when he had sent messengers to the Thesprotians on the river Acheron to ask the Oracle of the dead about a deposit made with him by a guest-friend, Melissa appeared and said she would not tell in what place the deposit was laid, for she was cold and had no clothes, since those which he had buried with her were of no use to her, not having been burnt; and this, she said, would be an evidence to him that she was speaking the truth, namely that when the oven was cold, Periander had put his loaves into it.

When the report of this was brought back to Periander, the token made him believe, because he had had commerce with Melissa after she was dead; and straightway after receiving the message he caused proclamation to be made that all the wives of the Corinthians should come out to the temple of Hera. They accordingly went as to a festival in their fairest adornment; and he having set the spearmen of his guard in ambush, stripped them all alike, both the free women and their attendant; and having gathered together all their clothes in a place dug out, he set fire to them, praying at the same time to Melissa. Then after he had done this and had sent a second time, the apparition of Melissa told him in what spot he had laid the deposit entrusted to him by his guest-friend.

Not all ghosts were helpful. Armpitting was the practice of mutilating a corpse to render he spirit impotent. It would appear that deliberate and considered desecration would be a way for the living to combat the dead, though if you were planning to do this then it was probably a good idea to take no chances and ensure you did it properly. Hence the references to chopping more or less all choppable bits of the body off to ensure the spirit couldn’t take any action.

Ghosts certainly could be dangerous. Pausanias records a ghost at Temesa who indiscriminately killed citizens until the fairest woman was offered each year as a wife to the ghost. Given the ghost was dead, “till death do us part” probably wasn’t an option. That would appear to be a particularly wicked ghost as the spirits at Marathon were a little more forgiving.

At Marathon every night you can hear horses neighing and men fighting. No one who has expressly set himself to behold this vision has ever got any good from it, but the spirits are not wroth with such as in ignorance chance to be spectators.

Ghosts do appear to be generally tied to places. Lucian Philopseudes 29 suggests that only people who died by violence were capable of walking.

Ghosts in antiquity seem to be localised reminders of the importance of paying respects to the supernatural. It might be a little hard to persuade someone that Zeus, king of the Gods, would visit a small village in the middle of nowhere to strike an impious man, however it would be perfectly feasible that the bitter old man next door would hang around to interfere with your goats. Much ancient religion was simply about pacifying the ghosts. Just as major gods needed to be pacified to avoid major problems such as famine, perhaps ghosts performed a function as relatively minor forces that needed to sated to deflect minor irritations. —–