"Abhorred Erichtho" - Witchcraft and Necromancy from Rome to the Renaissance

In my Halloween blog-post last year, I introduced the ancient Roman witches, Canidia and Sagana, and suggested that they might well have had counterparts in Roman London. Roman literature, however, presents us with an even more terrifying witch, in the person of Erichtho, first referred to, it would seem, by Ovid, in his Heroides. Ovid places her in Thessaly, a rural province of Greece which seems to have been infamous for witchcraft long before his own time in the First Century BC.

The witch, Erichtho, by John Hamilton Mortimer (1740-79). Licensed under CCA.

Erichtho plays a much more prominent role in the work of a later poet, Marcus Annaeus Lucanus (Lucan), the nephew of the philosopher, statesman and dramatist, Seneca. Lucan's epic poem, Pharsalis, deals with the Roman Civil Wars of the First Century BC. In the poem, Sextus Pompeius, the disreputable son of the revered statesman and soldier, Pompey the Great, consults the witch on the eve of his father's defeat at the hands of Julius Caesar. She searches a battlefield for the corpse of a recently slain soldier, which she reanimates, to help her predict the future.

Denarius of Sextus Pompeius, depicting the lighthouse of Messina, and the monster, Scylla, believed to live in the straits. Photo: Classical Numismatic Group (www.cngcoins.com); licensed under CCA.

The Straits of Messina, between Italy and Sicily, where Sextus Pompeius had his naval base. The tidal flows are thought to have given rise to the legends of Scylla and Charybdis. Photo: NASA (image is in the Public Domain). 

"Sextus, unworthy son of worthy sire,
Who soon upon the waves that Scylla guards,
Sicilian pirate, exile from his home,
Stained by his deeds of shame the fights he won
Could bear delay no more; his feeble soul,
Sick of uncertain fate, by fear compelled,
Forecast the future: yet consulted not
The shrine of Delos, nor the Pythian caves ...
Abhorred Erichtho, fiercest of the race,
Spurned for their piety, and yet viler art
Practiced in novel form ...
She burned the fruitful growth, and with her breath
Poisoned the air else pure ...
 ... At length the witch
Picks out her victim with pierced throat agape
Fit for her purpose. Gripped by pitiless hook
O'er rocks she drags him to the mountain cave
Accursed by her fell rites that shall restore
The dead man's life ...

 ... Then the blood
Grew warm and liquid, and with softening touch
Cherished the stiffened wounds and filled the veins,
Till throbbed once more the slow returning pulse
And every fibre trembled, as with death
Life was commingled. Then, not limb by limb,
With toil and strain, but rising at a bound
Leaped from the earth erect the living man."

Erichtho reanimating the corpse. British Museum (image is in the Public Domain).

Erichtho is mentioned by Dante, in his Inferno, from which it is reasonably clear that he has read Lucan, as well as Ovid, but it was with the rise of printing in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries that the works of these classical authors found a wider readership, both in the original Latin, and in translation. Erichtho, together with Canidia and Sagana, is a lineal ancestress of the "weird sisters" of Shakespeare's Macbeth. The circulation of these texts is accompanied by a renewed interest in necromancy and witchcraft: the Oxford English Dictionary first records the word "necromancy" in 1456, and "Halloween" in 1556.

Lucan's Pharsalis, a Latin edition of 1592 (image is in the Public Domain).

Lucan's Pharsalis, frontispiece to a French edition of 1657 (image is in the Public Domain).

Shakespeare's contemporary, John Marston, includes Erichtho herself as a character in his play, Sophonisba, or The Wonder of Women, and transforms her into a sexual predator, luring young men to her bed under cover of darkness, so that they are unaware that they are copulating with a monstrous hag. Although rarely performed today Sophonisba, which premiered at Blackfriars in 1606, was as much a commercial success in its day as many plays by Shakespeare or Ben Jonson.

The image of the witch as both hag and sexual predator, a seducer of men of previously good character, became far more familiar from this time: there were many more witch trials (mostly of women) between 1580 and 1650 than there had been throughout the supposedly "superstitious" Middle Ages. In a Christian world, however, these latter day "witches" had acquired a dimension that the Classical Erichtho, Canidia and Sagana never had: as agents of the Devil in a war for Christian souls.

Witches, by Hans Baldung, 1508 (image is in the Public Domain).

Mark Patton's novels, Undreamed Shores, An Accidental King, and Omphalos, are published by Crooked Cat Publications, and can be purchased from Amazon. He is currently working on The Cheapside Tales, a London-based trilogy of historical novels.

The Wards of Old London: Cripplegate Within - Roman Fortifications and A Second Great Fire

Following the northern wall of the Roman and Medieval city in an easterly direction, a visitor to London passes from Aldersgate Ward Within into Cripplegate Ward Within, so named for one of the original gates of the city, where, it is thought, disabled people gathered to beg throughout the Middle Ages. Unlike the roads extending north from Aldersgate and Bishopsgate, that proceeding from Cripplegate was never a major road connecting London to other cities.

What would become Cripplegate was originally one of four gateways to the Roman fort that occupied the north-west corner of the post-Boudiccan city of Londinium, a fort that seems to have been established around 90 AD. It is larger than an auxiliary fort, but smaller than a legionary fort, so its garrison is likely to have comprised between a thousand and two thousand men.

The western gate of the Roman fort, as seen from the Museum Of London. Photo: Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net), licensed under CCA.

The wall of the Roman fort preserved in the garden of Saint Alphege. Photo: Bartholomeus Thoth (licensed under CCA).

Since Londinium was, by the end of the First Century AD, the capital of the Province of Britannia, around two hundred of these are likely to have been Beneficiarii Consularis, military administrators concerned with logistics and supply-chains throughout the province. There would also have been around thirty Speculatores, military policemen responsible for the custody and execution of prisoners, and the delivery of dispatches. There would, in addition, have been the Governor's bodyguard of around a thousand men.

Tombstone of a Roman soldier of the First Century AD. Since he carries writing equipment, as well as a sword, he was probably an adminstrator. Image: J.E. Price, 1881 (Public Domain).

These men would not necessarily have been "Romans" from Italy: a letter found at the Roman fort of Vindolanda, near Hadrian's Wall, refers to the secondment of troops to London from a Tungrian unit - these men would have been recruited in what is now the Netherlands or Belgium, and would have been rewarded with Roman citizenship on completion of their military service. Some, at least, are likely to have married local women and settled in London.

Tombstone of a centurion of the 3rd Century AD, Museum of London. Photo: Elliott Brown (licensed under CCA).

When Alfred the Great re-established the City of London in 886 AD, he used the crumbling Roman walls as the basis for his own, although he did not reinstate the earlier fort, instead encouraging civilians to occupy the land to the south of Cripplegate. Some of the Medieval churches of the ward may have Saxon origins, but nothing of these can be seen today. The Hospital of Saint Mary Within Cripplegate was established in 1331 by a mercer, William Elsing, for blind beggars of both sexes. The hospital was initially supervised by five secular clergy (priests who did not belong to a monastic order), but they were found to be too occupied with "concerns of this world" (possibly code for embezzling funds intended to support the inmates - something that later workhouse supervisors frequently did), and replaced by Augustinian canons, whose role continued until Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries.

Cripplegate and Moorgate, as shown on the 16th Century "Woodcut Map" - sometimes wrongly attributed to Ralph Agas (image is in the Public Domain).

Cripplegate in c 1650, by Wenceslaus Hollar, University of Toronto (image is in the Public Domain).

The Church of Saint Alban, Wood Street, in 1839, by George Godwin (image is in the Public Domain).

Like most of the City, Cripplegate Ward Within was devastated by the Great Fire of 1666, but was rebuilt, with the Medieval street patterns largely respected. London faced a "Second Great Fire," however, on the night of the 29th/30th December, 1940. In the space of around eight hours, German bombers dropped more than 24,000 high explosive, and more than 100,000 incendiary bombs, destroying nineteen churches and thirty-one livery halls.

London in the aftermath of its "Second Great Fire," looking north from the dome of Saint Paul's, by H. Mason for The Daily Mail (image is in the Public Domain). The men of Saint Paul's Watch, who directed the fire-fighting activities were, for the most part, architects, with a clear sense of priority as to which buildings should be preserved.

Most of Cripplegate (Within and Without) remained a wasteland throughout the Nineteen-Fifties and Sixties, and, when regeneration did finally come, it was in the shape of the Modernist concrete of the Barbican Estate, with its high-walks and towers, the small fragments of the earlier buildings remaining, like ghosts, to be glimpsed between its pillars.

A Roman bastion, preserved within the Barbican Estate. Photo: Ceridwen (licensed under CCA).

The remains of Saint Alphege, London Wall, originally the chapel of William Elsing's hospital. Photo: Secretlondon (licensed under CCA).

The Church of Saint Alban, Wood Street, today, only the tower remaining, as one of the most remarkable private residences in the City. Photo: Neddyseagoon (licensed under GNU).

Mark Patton's novels, Undreamed Shores, An Accidental King, and Omphalos, are published by Crooked Cat Publications, and can be purchased from Amazon. He is currently working on The Cheapside Tales, a London-based trilogy of historical novels.