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Ghosts and magic in ancient time

by Eugenia Salza Prina Ricotti

The life to come

Do you think that it is possible to find a man who never heard - and maybe enjoyed - some wild tale of witchcraft? And do you know someone else who, all alone in a black and stormy night, did not fear wandering ghosts. Even when a black cat crossed his way this man woulkd have felt uneasy and protected himself holding tight in his hand some amulets like a red coral horn or, at least, a more economic plastic flaming one. If such a man who never heard or was interested of magic exist please will he be so kind to raise his hand. There won’t be many of them
Yes, since the world began apart of trying to provide for his living, man has been obliged to confront with a mysterious universe created in his morbid imagination by the ascertainment of death, the most frightening fact of all his existence and it was on death that he began to concentrate and let his imagination drive madly to build explanations, but in a certain sense this also helped him to rise. As at his time writing did not exist and millenia had to elapse before it appeared we don’t have any records on those days so far away from us and we don’t know what he made out of his friend’s death. In their caverns we find only some heavy rocks laboriously and coarsely shaped; few rests of their fire stones; some of their bones; traces of red paint on some dry skull and nothing else.
We can only try to imagine the moment in which the brain of this primitive man began to try to explain this mystery and how he began to ponder on a thing that exceeded his mind. We must ask us if still more alike to apes than to human gender our very, very ancient ancestors, looking at his companion laying still on the ground and inventing the first sepulture rites, persuaded himself that everything could not end in this way. We can see him while he was asking to himself if there could not exist another place where his friend had found himself: A world for the life to come and a place that could not be on our world surface because if it was there during his long wanderings in search of food he would have found him.
Little by little in his mind an idea was formed: He was pretty sure that this place existed and imagined it as a long stretch of dark and subterranean caverns where the shades of his dead friends were mixed with monstrous and disquieting being: A parallel universe that still reaches us from the mists of time and that never would leave the human imagination: A supernatural world of which we read the description in classic literature: Those Inferi of the ancient Romans whose doors only very seldom opened to admit some live being, some hero who went down to accomplish his super human missions. Once Orfeo did it and went there to save his wife Euridice and once Ulysses did it to satisfy his immense curiosity. Then came also Heracles who was obliged to obey the orders of his cousin Euristeus and capture Cerberus. Surely while he was chaining the three headed monster, the sinewy son of Zeus was already savouring the moment when, arriving at his relative’s house with the impressive and ferocious looking dog he would enjoy the spectacle of a terrified Euristeus jumping in a bronze dolium.
But the fantasy of the primitive man could not imagine only nightmarish places and certainly his hope pushed him to dream happy pastures and shining hunting places set high over the clouds, the ones which later would become the happy reign of Osiris or the Elysian fields of the Greeks. What is sure is that while the dread represented to him this other world like the foggy depth of the subterranean gods, his hope presented to him splendid and happy paradises in which he would wake up after the terrifying experience of death, but above all gardens where he would never again die.
As a matter of fact death was certainly the natural fact that more frightened the prehistoric man. However there was something else that worried him: For instance he wanted to know what was in stock for him in the next future and, more than this, he wanted to learn how it was possible for him to influence the happening and turn everything in his favor. He thought that maybe he could guess the future looking at the signs of nature like when, in the evening of the day before a very lucky hunt, he was sitting in front of his cavern and a flight of birds had passed shrieking over his head From this moment such a thing was by him considered a lucky prophecy and mean that the following day the game would be plentiful and food would be abundant.
Of course the moment he began to believe in those premonitory signs, he also began to invent complicated ceremonies to propitiate the happenings and influence by art the finding of abundant game. Thus the first spells were born, spells that could tie the game up drawing it with a bit of coal and some natural colors on the cavern walls, pictures that peopled those dark places with beauty and very fine animals; antelopes, buffalos, giraffes. Near those, to strengthen the effect of the spell, there were other propitiatory symbols as the feminine organ or the male one, and the mysterious sign of the outline of their own hands, a sign that for those prehistoric ancestors must have had a very strong magic influence
Who assumed those charges? Very special beings, of course. In each groups of prehistoric men some of them stood out and undertook those tasks: Men and women to whom the people of their tribes ascribed magic powers, the ones who invented the first spells. It was the task of the first kings and magicians who took care of the first rites and ceremonies and they were also the persons to transmit their lore to the youngs. They certainly were the oldest and the sagest and were also the ones that had studied and learned the power of some herbs, the ones who cured their small tribes’ illness and who succeeded in cicatrize their wounds: to sum up they were the first wizards, the first magicians of the supernatural and the guardians of the traditions. And it was in such way that magic and medicine rose together and from this moment they always went on arm in arm.
Millennia elapsed before the first historic civilizations appeared in this world and let on it their substantial traces - monuments, documents, writings and complicated religions that developed from those first muddled beliefs - the first convoluted Pantheon of the antiquity full of god and semigods tied with nature’s phenomena and followed by a procession of other legendary figures. They formed cults that lasted centuries and centuries and nearly all were pantheist. They were certainly very human those gods: they loved, betrayed, deceived and fornicated exactly as common men. They felt sympathy and dislikes, warred among them and fought on the side of men and taking the part of the different peoples that they protected. Everything considered they were a cheerful and bright company and filled the antiquity of splendid fantasies, perfect statues, and legendary heroes we always meet in their literature.
By then civilization was well advanced, but after all man was always the same - a poor individual terrified by death and desperately strained in the attempt to exorcise it. An anxious creature wishing to know the future and to be told by a god what he had to do. Of course he tried with all his strength to impose himself on his future and for this he did complicated magic ceremonies. Poor little man who tried to protect himself by the evil powers and decked himself with precious amulets while, thank to his fears, the world was more and more peopled by seers, mediums, magicians and soothsayers.