Another book I picked up while in London: The First Ghosts (Hodder & Stoughton, 2022) by Irving Finkel, a curator at The British Museum and specialist in Mesopotamia and, from that region, cuneiform (clay tablet) deciphering.
Four millennia ago everyone accepted ghosts as part of everyday existence.
Furthermore, illness was attributed to malevolent ghosts. (Way back then, if you were “possessed,” it was by a deceased human being, not a demon.) Consequently, ghost exorcisms were commonplace. And fairly simple.
For instance, these were the words inscribed, in cuneiform language, upon an almond-shaped pebble for dispensing a nuisance spook: Ghost! Do not keep coming in!
It was believed that a ghost could enter through the ear while asleep.
Writes Finkel: “The most unwelcome consequence of aural penetration was a kind of madness known as ‘changing of reason.’”
An example, as deciphered from a tablet:
If a man has been attacked by an alteration of mind so that his personality has changed, his words contradict themselves, his intelligence is affected [and] he talks excessively, in order to restore him to his senses you put a human bone, a bone of a male pig, and a fox bone around his neck. You fumigate him over the fire, anoint him with fat of wild animals and he will recover.
(Two questions: Did a ghost sneak into Joe Biden’s ear? And: Might this treatment help?)
If you chose to be more proactive about preventing ghost penetration, you would invoke the name Marduk, chief god of the Babylonian state pantheon, and inscribe on your amulet: Among living things, do ye not come up! Raise thy head, ye corpse!
And if the ghost persisted, this would be your last ditch incantation:
Dead people! Why do you keep appearing to me?
You, why do you always walk behind me?
You are abjured by Abate the Queen, by Ereshkigal the Queen, by Ningeshtinnanna, scribe of the gods, Whose stylus is of lapis and carnelian!
I wish I’d known these remedies when I saw a ghost—a pair of them—when I was about seven years old.
I shared a bedroom with my two brothers in a modest 1920s ranch house in a neighborhood of Beverly Hills known as “The Flats.”
My elder brother slept in a single bed on one side of the room. On the other side were bunkbeds, with me on top.
I awoke in the middle of the night, sat up… and was astonished to look down upon a pair of grey, child-sized figures horsing around. They must have been wearing pyjamas because I distinctly remember butt-flap buttons. I was not dreaming but fully awake and, dismayed by their audacious presence, I spoke up, telling them they shouldn’t be here; that they should leave immediately or my parents would come in and they’d be in big trouble. The faceless figures (I thought they were real, not ghosts) completely ignored me and continued their silent play. But when I persisted, one of the two ran to the ladder at the foot of the bunkbeds, scaled it and (I can still see this vividly in my mind’s eye) crested my bed. Terrified, I dove beneath the covers—and must have thereafter fallen back to sleep because I did not resurface until morn. (At least my ears were protected… .)
With hindsight, I now suspect those twins met a tragic end in the house decades earlier—and were thereafter held hostage to it.