Yes of course, I would like to see a ghost, I've never seen one, it's very annoying to me.
When a person died in Mesopotamia as far as we understand it -
they had to be laid in the ground with a kind of ritual
so they were jolly well locked in and wouldn't come back
and cause trouble.
Somebody who died
on the battlefield or, overseas -
never seen again, or died in childbirth;
all those sorts of things...
who was never properly laid to rest would come back
and visit the living in the world,
and there's a very great deal of evidence all about this,
and on the whole, we can deduce one or two interesting facts.
The first thing is that everybody in Mesopotamia
as far as I understand it,
believed in ghosts.
So you never had a conversation with someone saying:
"Oh, you know I was talking to my neighbour and she said she saw a ghost in the laundry and she must be
stupid to believe all that kind of stuff, everybody knows that there aren't ghosts"
and all that, that didn't happen in Mesopotamia,
it was a day-to-day thing that everybody took for granted,
but also they weren't on the whole frightened of them,
but rather, sympathetic.
Because they thought they were troubled and they couldn't rest
and they needed to be looked after.
So there was a whole school
of specialist magic,
which was to appease ghosts
and to send them back where they belong without any further trouble.
So we have in The British Museum a rather splendid tablet of this kind,
with a drawing on it where you can really see what happens.
Because there is a rather portly aunt-like woman
shown - in profile on this tablet - walking to the right,
and she I think is the ghost; it's probably somebody's great aunt
and she was the trouble.
So what they decided she needed, this ghost,
was a young lover.
So,
the exorcist makes a model of this
portly lady,
and a model of a lithe - bearded of course -
energetic and sexy lover.
The effigies - the clay models of them - are buried in a pit,
together with other things they might need,
and covered over. I think it's probably done
at dawn, or something like that. They are buried safely in this pit
and the idea was that they would then
subside down into the underworld and not come back and be troublesome.
And in the drawing, which is depicted on the clay,
this woman is pulling him along on a lead
so there's no chance of him escaping.
There was also a 'kind-of' ghost who was very dangerous,
and, I think these are ones who
probably were nasty people when they were alive
because there are human beings who go round
causing trouble for everyone else for no reason whatsoever:
kind-of gratuitous schmucks
and I imagine that really malevolent ghosts in Mesopotamia
had something to do with that idea - they weren't nice in the first place.
So they can cause a lot of trouble,
and they had a kind-of habit of sliding in through the ear when someone was asleep
and driving them mad:
upsetting their
psychological state and causing other difficulties.
And it's clear
that people thought that 'migraine' -
they had a word for migraine, it wasn't just headache - a really, really terrible headache
was caused by this entity going in through the ear which had to be driven out.
And one of the other tablets shows
two other things which an exorcist has to make,
and these are very remarkable; they're drawn in great detail on the tablet
and you will see that there is a figure who looks like a king,
sitting on a throne holding the appurtenances of royalty
with a royal cap on,
and his name is written down the side of the drawing,
and he's a man called *Abbak Nanaya*,
and we don't know who he was,
but he must have been one of those sages from remote times who was very intelligent
and next to him -
drawn next to him - is his court vizier;
who is shown on a pole
standing / sitting / squatting on top of a pole like this
with his hands out in both directions
looking straight at the camera.
Very interesting figure...
And this complicated ritual of which we have these drawings,
work like this,
'cause you made this king, put him at the head of the bed, and he was so...
powerful spiritually that no trouble would ever come near,
and also, when you made the vizier,
it was on this pole and you...
flicked it like this and it went round
and the fluttering of it obviously disturbed
anything that was floating around in the atmosphere
and it would be driven away rather like a scarecrow in a cornfield.
This, is obviously not
a kind of thing that would be available in villages and small towns -
this is the top of the exorcist profession
where you call in the best person; the wisest person with the greatest amount of knowledge
who would go: "Mmm, this is case for, hmm, this...
very special ritual which will cost
rather a lot of silver because we have to do all these things and someone has to be..."
and all that kind of stuff, so...
it's rather interesting to have a window on
the top level of this kind of idea
and how to deal with it with physical apparatus
because you can imagine farmers and
people who worked on the estates in the countryside
and boatmen and all the normal people in the world; they didn't have anything to do with that,
they probably didn't have time to see ghosts - or if they did they probably just waved at them.
So, we have
two ends of a spectrum and
almost all the writing about these things is for;
what Tom Lehrer - that brilliant and intelligent person -
once described as 'the diseases of the rich'.