Daniel Ogden (THE ANCIENT GREEK ORACLES OF THE DEAD)
In the modem age, the fame of the Acheron and Avernus nekyomanteia outstrips that of Heracleia and Tainaron, but these oracles are paradoxically much harder to define. Two difficulties complicate their investigation. The first is that from the Classical period, if not before, the two sites were confounded with each other in Greek and Latin mythological literature. The second is the misapprehension that nekyomanteia were always based in caves, natural or man-made. This fallacy has led archaeologists to locate the two nekyomanteia wrongly in local man-made caves, and to develop erroneous reconstructions of their use based upon readings of Pausanias Periegetes' account of the consultation-procedure for the oracle of Trophonius and Lucian's account of the necromancy of Menippus. In both cases these reconstructions send the consulters on minutely choreographed ritual progressions through dark tunnels. These culminate in encounters with ghosts in the form of puppets manipulated by priests who scuttle through further concealed passageways. A precursor of the fun-fair ghost-train or the Disneyland haunted house is envisaged.
Literary sources, beginning with Homer's Nekyia, locate the general area in which the Acheron nekyomanteion was located with reasonable clarity, namely at the 'Acherusian lake', the marsh into which the Acheron temporarily broadened out at its confluence with the Cocytus in Thesprotia, near Ephyra/Cichyrus. Following a suggestion of Frazer, Sotirios Dakaris identified the Acheron nekyomanteion with a Hellenistic complex beneath the monastery of St John Prodromos at Mesopotamo, which overlooks the confluence. This had been burned down in the Roman devastation of Epirus in 167 BC. His excavations of the site and his interpretations of it formed the subject of many publications between 1958 and 1993. Its most striking feature is an elaborate, subterranean, vaulted 'crypt' -the 'underworld' itself, supposedly. Above the underworld (why not in it?), in a square structure with walls over three metres thick, consulters encountered models of ghosts or underworld powers. These were swung out at them in a cauldron by priests who operated an elaborate crane from secret passageways within the hollow upper courses of the walls. The machine's ratchets, cast-iron counterweights and six statuettes of Persephone were discovered in the structure. The consulters' experience of the ghosts was enhanced by the consumption of supposedly hallucinogenic lupines and beans, the carbonized remains of which were found in jars in the comer store-rooms. The consulters had progressed to the theatre through the significantly right-winding corridors around it, making sacrifices and submitting to purifications along the way, and finally passing through a brief underworld-evoking labyrinth. But this cannot stand. The nekyomanteion hypothesis does not account for the copious quantities of other foodstuffs also found carbonized in the storerooms, or the vast amounts of crockery and agricultural and domestic tools found on the site. In 1979 Baatz proved beyond doubt that the ratchets belonged rather to dart-firing torsion catapults, and derived from ten separate weapons. Twenty-seven iron darts for them to fire have also been identified from the site. It becomes clear that the square building, with its three-metre thick wall, was a defensive keep. The labyrinth that gave admission to it protected its entrance against assault, perhaps against Roman battering rams in particular. The 'crypt' was a mere cellar or cistern. The site is an elaborate example of the Hellenistic building-type known as a Tunngehoft. The story of its last days is easily written: as Roman troops approached, its farming occupants withdrew into the keep with their tools and as much produce as they could garner, and, making sure their cistern (if it was such) was full, prepared to withstand a siege. But their catapult defences were unable to prevent the Romans from burning their fort down. Only the Persephone statuettes, two of which wear her distinctive polos headdress, give pause for thought, but she was in any case the local goddess, and it is not to be denied that the real nekyomanteion was somewhere close. However, Dakaris' interpretation of the site has continued to be influential, and Papachatzis even reinterpreted the archaeological evidence for the Tainaron nekyomanteion cave on the basis of it.
If we return to the literary sources for the Acheron nekyomanteion, we may be surprised to discover that there is no mention of a cave in them whatsoever. Insofar as they suggest any configuration at all for the nekyomanteion, they imply that it was a lakeside precinct. Homer's Odysseus merely performs his consultation beside the river, perhaps from the rock said to stand at the confluence, whilst his scholiast refers to the lake itself at that point under the name of Nekyopompos, 'Sending-the dead'. In the beautiful illustration by the Lycaon painter of Odysseus' encounter with the ghost of Elpenor during this consultation, one can actually see the marsh reeds rising behind the ghost. Herodotus' Periander sends for his divination 'to the Acheron river, to the nekyomanteion' (see below): hendiadys? Aeschylus' Psychagogoi or 'Evocators' restaged Odysseus' consultation. In the following valuable fragment of the play, the Evocators advise Odysseus, taking on the role allotted to Circe in the Odyssey:
Come now, guest-friend, take your stand on the grassy sacred enclosure of the fearful lake. Slash the gullet of the neck, and let the blood of this sacrificial victim flow into the murky depths of the reeds, as a drink for the lifeless. Call upon primeval earth and chthonic Hermes, escort of the dead, and ask chthonic Zeus to send up the swarm of night-wanderers from the mouths of the river, from which this melancholy off-flow water, unfit for washing hands, is sent up by Stygian springs. (Aesch. Psych., Fr. 273a, TrFG) 19
Here Odysseus actually stands in a lakeside precinct and pours the blood from the neck of his sacrificial sheep directly into the lake itself, from which the ghost will arise directly. The traditional assumption that the location of this play was not Acheron but Avernus is all but groundless, whilst Hermes, mentioned in the fragment, is found in association with the former but not the latter. In the Frogs, Aristophanes makes brief mention of three underworld rivers: 'the black-hearted rock of the Styx and the crag (σκόπελος) of the Acheron, dripping with blood, and the dogs that run around the Cocytus ... ' The 'crag of the Acheron' is most easily read as denoting a rocky outcrop over the river on which or from which blood offerings are made into it.
As with Heracleia and Tainaron, a single supposedly historical report of a consultation attaches to the Acheron nekyomanteion, the well known tale of Periander and Melissa:
On one day he stripped all the women of Corinth on account of his wife Melissa. For he sent messengers to her, to Thesprotia, to the Acheron river, to the nekyomanteion, on the question of the deposit of a guest-friend. Melissa appeared and said that she would neither indicate nor declare where the deposit lay, for she was cold and naked. The clothes that had been buried with her were of no use to her because they had not been burned. As witness to the truth of these assertions stood the fact that Periander had thrown his loaves into a cold oven. The token was proof: he had had sex with Melissa's corpse. When these utterances were reported back to Periander, he at once issued an edict that all the women of Corinth should go out to the Heraion. So they came out as to a festival in their finest adornments, but he posted his bodyguards in ambush and stripped them all alike, free and slave, piled their clothing up into a trench and burned it with a prayer to Melissa. After doing this he sent to Melissa a second time and she told him where she had put the guest-friend's deposit. (Hdt. 5.92)
The traditional nature of this tale has been demonstrated by a number of comparative studies. In view of Tainaron's Cicada, it is of particular interest that Melissa's name means 'bee', another insect with strong chthonic associations. Once again the theme of ghost-placation features strongly here. No indication of the means by which the ghost was encountered is given.
***This blog doesn't necessarily agree with everything written in this article. Historical accounts make references to the necromancers seeing ghosts or shades. Skeptic archaeologists and historians argue that these were "simply hallucinations caused by ritual food or drink with psychotropic properties", but that doesn't mean that this rational opinion is true.
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