Divination received from the
spirits of the dead. The historian
Strabo mentions that
Persia's main form of divination was through necromancy, marking Persians as the first recorded to practice this art. In
Babylon, necromancers were called
Manzazuu or
Sha'etemmu and the raised spirits were called
Etemmu. Necromancy is from the Greek word, nekos (dead), and manteria (divination). Subsequently the word in its
Latin form became nigromancia (black art).
Israelites probably learned the art from Persians or Babylonians and practiced it extensively, to the point where the Bible explicitly forbids it repeatedly. Three classes of necromancy were known to Israelites as
ob,
yidde'oni, and
doresh el ha-metim (questioner of dead). Ob is said to denote the
soothsaying spirit. Jewish tradition says, "Ob is the python, who speaks from his armpits, yidde'oni is he who speaks with his mouth". Warnings against necromancy were not heeded, for instance, King
Saul asked the
Witch of Endor to summon
Samuel.
In
Odyssey,
Ulysses travels to
Hades, and summons the dead using spells learned from
Circe, the intention was to call
Tiresias. Likewise with
Norse mythology, in
Volsupa,
Odin summons a seeress from the dead in order to predict the future. In
Grogaldr,
Syipdag summons
Groa. In the 17th century,
Robert Fludd describes
Goetic necromancy as consisting of "diabolical commerce with unclean spirits, in rites of criminal curiosity, in illicit songs and invocations and in the evocation of the souls of the dead". Necromancy is extensively practiced in
voodoo.
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Reference:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/bos/bos195.htm
http://jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=158&letter=N#463
Deuteronomy 18:11, 26:14
Isaiah 8:19, 29:4
1 Samuel 28:7-19