Dr. Irving Finkel (22:11)
Fantastic thing. You have to have a skull. So this itself raises a question because do you have to have the skull of the person whom you want to interrogate or would any old skull do. And this we don't know. But among the upper echelons of society, when they lived in big houses, it is the case that very often when people died, they were buried in the courtyard, sometimes in a special grave with steps or something like that, and they were on the premises. So it would mean that, say, for example, you thought your great grandfather or your grandfather would know you could procure the skull of the great grandfather or the grandfather for the ritual. So this is a funny matter because it doesn't say that you have to have the person, but it kind of is. If you could get it, it seems like likely that you would. And the, the skull, of course, which is. Hasn't got horrible things on it like worms coming out of the eye sockets or anything like that. Nothing of that kind at all. The nice clean picked skull, skull. The exorcist who's done all the preparations, what he does is this. He, the remnant is full of incense, for one thing, and the skull is put in the middle, wherever it is. And he anoints this skull with a special oily preparation for which the components are listed. And the, the, the components are a bit like the witches in Macbeth, you know, the eye of newt and leg of toad and all that sort of stuff. They're all that. They're all components that you don't. Example medical prescriptions with oily things, they're not like that. So must have been a secret recipe in the mounts of them. But they make this oily preparation and they anoint the skull. And then the exorcist, who has special possession, has this job. He has to call upon the sun God, who's of course either in heaven or of course, if it's nighttime, he's underneath. Because they go round and round and round, of course, like good sons do. So you have to call up the sun God and request him to bring up a spirit of the dead person in order to enter into the skull. And the skull then becomes the medium of communication. And the ritual concludes that when this happens, that it says whatever you ask him, that's to say the dead person, he will tell you. So whatever you ask him, he will tell you. So Shamash, who's in charge of the dead in the underworld, gets the message from the Babylonian and says, okay, where is this guy? Let me think. I know, 116C or something goes down, gets him, and I don't know how he brings him up. It doesn't tell you, but this figure or the part of the figure, or the essence of the figure passes in such a way that it can articulate the message using the skull. So I published this thing, I found this tablet, wrote a lot about it in more than one place. It's a very interesting thing to me. But what, what is most interesting is the sweeping and cleaning up of the place and getting everything ready and which takes a lot of time. And they have to have a notice with an arrow pointing down, stuck in the ground and all sorts of funny things like that. When it comes to it, you've got the household owner, probably the wife, wouldn't go anywhere near it, I imagine maybe the oldest son, maybe not. Maybe everyone was very frightened. The person who was curious enough to do this or driven enough, I think probably under extreme conditions to take recourse to this, this would be sitting there and waiting and it would be dark, there'd be incense swirling about. And I always imagine that the exorcists who do this kind of work, they didn't wear like three piece suits and an umbrella and bowler hat that you might see on the underground. Being John Cleese, they were undoubtedly dressed for the point with long straggly hair, I imagine, and probably ancient tattoos and God knows what's hanging from the rope around their wakes. Probably wearing a dressing gown affair, all that kind stuff, for sure. They must address the part, see, with all the mystique about it and all that. So you do this call upon this, the loud voice and then there's silence and then you wait. So it occurred to me that if you'd done all this, paid all the money up front, taken out insurance, all the rest of it, and you were actually in there and something happened that made a noise like the guy banged it with his knees, the skull went like that or you'd have a heart attack. You'd have a heart attack, you'd never be able to say, oh good, and can I you what time it will be or something. The whole thing must have been wreathed around in so much tension that I don't know how it worked now, but we know it happened. There's more than one reference and we know lots of other things about it. One interesting thing is this, that we have necromancy of a kind in the Old Testament. Yes, yes, it is meaty because the praxis of calling up somebody with a skull passed into Jewish magic of the post biblical period into the Middle Ages. And they also used a skull in the same kind of way because they were in Babylon, they had all Those years of captivity, as they call it in Babylon. And the people among them, the doctors and the thinkers, they knew all about the Babylonian things, and somehow this survived on into the Middle Ages. And there is a rabbi called Rashi in about the 14th century who wrote about divining by a skull and asking questions of it. And he says in this commentary, the thing does the voice really come or does the person imagine it? So in the 14th century, he's appraising this inherited dogma, this treatise, how they do that, and asks himself, because, you know, if you're a 14th century rabbi, you don't have a closed mind about anything to do with the spiritual or psychological world. I mean, it's all bread and butter. So you wouldn't have said any of it's impossible, possible, because who can say this? But he asks himself, did it really happen or did a person imagine? It is ringed around quite a lot of episodes to do with necromancy that come down to us, especially the one in the Bible.
