THE GEOGRAPHY OF WITCHCRAFT

In the realm of Hades the spirit of the dead has the form, the rank, and the occupations which were those of the living man. But the spirit is a mere semblance or wraith. "The living heart is not in it," and it is "strengthless." When Odysseus seeks to call up the spirits of the dead he digs a pit, a cubit square, into which flows the blood of the sheep that he sacrifices to Hades and Proserpine. A crowd of silent shadows evoked by his prayers come up and crave to taste the blood, but with drawn sword he keeps them at bay until Tiresias shall appear. Even the ghost of his mother has to be warded off from the trench. Finally the old prophet is seen hovering near, and is allowed to drink "that I may tell sooth" (the truth). He then delivers his oracle and further explains that all the shades, upon quaffing the blood, will recover some of the faculties of the living and be able to hold converse for a while. The dead mother now is enabled to talk with her son, but when they strive to embrace, all is vain; he clasps the empty air. It is interesting to observe that in this long and fully detailed scene, where we already have much of the ritual of medieval and modern witchcraft, lines 368–641 have been regarded as an "Orphic interpolation," for Orpheus was said to be the composer of various incantations and rhythmic charms, and fragments of the Orphic poetry which was known to Plato still remain.

The Greek goddess of necromancy and all witchcraft was the mysterious Hecate. The name at least seems to be Greek, and it may be an epithet denoting "the far-off one" or "the one who stands aloof," but while no explanation that has yet been suggested is very significant, an even greater obscurity covers the origin and character of this deity. There is no mention of her in the Homeric epics; she has no legend, she has no genealogy—facts which are surely not without deep meaning when we consider the mysterious and secret cult of this awful power. The two earliest references in literature are the quotation in Pausanias from the Catalogue of Women attributed to Hesiod, which connects Hecate with Artemis and Iphigenia, and the well-known passage in the Theogony, probably the first reference in known Greek literature. At Aegina, where she was specially honored, her mysteries were established at least in the fifth century, and the tradition was locally ascribed to the Thracian...