Of all the witches of ancient literature, none is more terrible than Erictho. Her figure dominates the sixth book of the Pharsalia, the epic poem in which Lucan, nephew of the philosopher Seneca, tells the story of the civil war between Caesar and Pompey. In a work that deliberately does without the intervention of the traditional gods, Erictho's black magic becomes the only supernatural force able to tear the veil of the future.
The context: the eve of Pharsalus
The episode is set in Thessaly, on the eve of the battle of Pharsalus, which will decide the outcome of the war. Sextus Pompey, the younger son of Pompey the Great, is tormented by anxiety about the result of the clash. He does not want to question the oracles of Delphi or Dodona, nor the seers who read entrails and the flight of birds: he seeks forbidden knowledge.
Lucan presents him with contempt as a young man unworthy of his father, who prefers the dark arts to legitimate religion. Taking advantage of the region's reputation, he decides to turn to the most powerful of the Thessalian witches.
Portrait of the witch
Before introducing Erictho, Lucan devotes a long section to the witches of Thessaly in general: their spells stop rivers, bend the winds, reverse the course of the stars, force the gods to obey. Then he describes Erictho, who surpasses them all.
She lives among abandoned tombs, shuns the houses of men, has a pale, gaunt face and a voice that makes the infernal gods tremble. For her rites she uses human remains stolen from pyres and graves, and her mere presence pollutes the air. She is a figure built to arouse horror, the exact opposite of the inspired priestess.
The rite on the corpse
At Sextus' request, Erictho agrees to make a dead man speak. From among those fallen in a recent skirmish she chooses the corpse of a soldier whose lungs and throat are still intact, so that the voice may come out clearly. She drags it with a hook to a dark cave, close, according to the poet, to the borders of the underworld.
The rite unfolds in several stages:
- Erictho opens the corpse's chest and fills it with warm blood and a potion;
- into the potion she mixes monstrous ingredients, taken from wild and rare animals, which Lucan lists in a long catalogue;
- she utters an incantation in a voice made of animal cries, the howling of wolves, the hissing of snakes, the crash of waves;
- she invokes the Furies, Hecate, Persephone, Chaos and the powers of the underworld;
- when the soul hesitates to return to the body, the witch threatens the infernal gods, declaring that she knows secret names that will compel them to obey.
The return and the prophecy
At last the soul re-enters the body. The corpse comes back to life with stiff, unnatural movements, opens its eyes and weeps, because it does not want to return to life. Erictho orders it to speak, promising in return that no magic will ever disturb it again.
The dead man then tells what he has seen in the underworld: the shades of the great Romans of the past are in turmoil over the civil war. The heroes of the republic weep, while the great rebels of Roman history, such as Catiline, rejoice. The fate of Pompey's family is sealed, and the dead man hints that the protagonists of the war too will meet their end far from their homeland.
When the response is over, Erictho builds a pyre and lays the corpse on it, so that it may die again and find rest.
Its meaning in the poem
The Erictho episode is not just a piece of macabre virtuosity. It has a precise function in the work:
- it replaces the divine prophecies typical of traditional epic, which Lucan rejects;
- it expresses the idea that civil war is an impiety so great that it disturbs even the dead;
- it shows a world in which the natural order is overturned, where the laws of the cosmos obey a witch.
Erictho after Lucan
The power of this figure crossed the centuries. Dante, in the ninth canto of the Inferno, has Virgil relate that he had once before descended to the deepest circle of the abyss, compelled by the spells of "cruel" Erictho to bring back a spirit. It is a detail the medieval poet invents, but it shows how famous Lucan's witch still was.
Much later Goethe, in the second part of Faust, opens the scene of the Classical Walpurgis Night with a monologue by Erictho, wandering over the field of Pharsalus. The Thessalian witch thus becomes a bridge between antiquity and modern culture.
Necromancy and the ancient imagination
Compared with the Homeric Nekyia, where Odysseus summons the dead with a sober and respectful rite, Erictho represents the most extreme face of necromancy: violence on the body of the dead, coercion of the divine powers, the breaking of every limit. Through her Lucan builds a symbol of the moral chaos of civil war, and later literature makes her the archetype of the dark witch.
In short
- Erictho is the Thessalian witch who dominates the sixth book of Lucan's Pharsalia.
- Sextus Pompey consults her on the eve of Pharsalus to learn the outcome of the war.
- The witch revives a soldier's corpse with a terrible rite and threats against the infernal gods.
- The dead man reveals the turmoil of the Roman shades and the fate of Pompey's family.
- Dante and Goethe took up the figure of Erictho, making her an archetype of the dark witch.
