The Necromancers' Cave

You never know what you might find, exploring a cave in the Judaean hills. As you can see from the map above, the Te’omim Cave is a large, complex cave; the central chamber measures about 50 by 70 meters.

The first modern scholars to explore the place came in 1873, part of the Survey of Western Palestine.

It was then named Mŭghâret Umm et Tûeimîn—“the cave of the mother of twins”—by local residents, who attributed healing properties to the spring water that flowed in the cave.

Archaeologists explored the cave in the 1920s and again in the 1970s. They found a mix of objects dating to all periods form the Neolithic to the Byzantine. A number of human and animal bones were also found. One of the most interesting discoveries was a rock cut pit 2 meters across, which collected water flowing from the spring into a pool.

There is a natural shaft at the back of the cave, 23 meters deep.

All of that is just background to the latest study, carried out by a team of archaeologists and geologists from  Bar-Ilan University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem under the direction of Eitan Klein and Boaz Zissu. Their article is quite fascinating if you are into this sort of thing.

Their main discovery was a large number of oil lamps dating to between 135 and 400 AD. Many are well preserved because they had been shoved deep into narrow crevices in the rock; some had to be extracted with long metal rods. In these deep cracks they found three human skulls and several artifacts, including Bronze Age spear points.

They believe that the cave was used for necromancy, that is, attempts to communicate with the dead. The evidence is quite strong. For one thing there was a lot of necromancy in the ancient world; some of our oldest magical texts from both Mesopotamia and Egypt concern rites for summoning and questioning the dead. In the Odyssey, Circe summons the seer Tiresias to answer questions from Oddyseus. Shrines where one could speak with the dead were common across the Roman world.

Necromancers loved skulls. Getting a skull to speak may have been the most common kind of necromancy. We have many such spells from all across the Middle East; in fact from Assyria we have a spell that is supposed to block a skull that might know your secrets from revealing them. On Lesbos there was a shrine where you could put questions to the skull of Orpheus. The early Christian writer Hippolytus of Rome wrote a whole book on how these shrines caused voices to seem to come from the skull.

William Blake, The Ghost of Samuel Appears to Saul and the Witch of Endor

Plus, we have very little indication that skulls were ever used in Middle Eastern ritual or magic for any other purpose than communicated with the dead. So the presence of skulls in what appear to be ritual contexts is pretty good evidence for necromancy. There are also texts that describe necromancers working in caves.

The lamps are intriguing. Obviously ancient magic often involved lighting a lamp, because you could hardly see without one. But lighting effects of various kinds are commonly part of magic and religious ritual worldwide, and they do appear in classical and older magical texts. This article mentions classical shrines where thousands of lamps were found, presumably because worshippers purchased and lit them just as modern Catholics sometimes purchase and light candles. Magical texts tell us that spirits could be summoned into flames, and one either heard their voices or interpreted the flickerings of the flame to learn their messages.

Plus, somebody seems to have done quite a bit of work to place these lamps in unusual places. These archaeologists think they were intended to do something other than illuminate the caverns – attract spirits from the deep? – but it strikes me that they might also have created weird effects in the main chamber.

I think there is a very good chance that these authors are right, and the cave was used for necromantic rites in late Roman times. As to what that means, I refer back to my recent post on Greek and Roman magic. People believed that hidden powers governed much of what happens in the world, whether that was gods, spirits, dead souls, or simply fate, and they were always looking for ways to influence those powers or employ them for their own ends. The ways they chose to do this are rarely surprising: to contact the dead you went to graveyards, or down into the earth. To speak to the dead you used a skulll, the speaking part of the body. You lured spirits to you with fire, because the underworld was dark and dead souls might come toward light and warmth. 

One point worth mentioning is that people sometimes summoned the dead for their power, but more often they sought their wisdom. After one summoned a dead soul, you asked it questions. You asked it questions about things the soul knew in life, like, where did you bury the family silver? Who is my real mother? You were a great warrior; how should I fight this battle? Other times one trusted that the dead, who were somehow closer to fate and the gods than the living, might know things no living human could. Who can I trust? Who are my enemies? What does the future hold for me? Will I be happy or sad, rich or poor?

People have long sought guidance in a world they cannot understand, full of random disaster and sudden death, riches for some and ruin for others, and there has always been an economic niche for people who trade in underworldly explanations of the mystery that is our world.