State of the Author, Spoopmonth Edition · 10:55pm Oct 26th, 2020
Happy impending Nightmare Night, everybody!
It’s been an exhausting fall, but I’m doing my best here to try to keep at it. I’ve been working on the next chapter of The Crown of Night, and hopefully it won’t be a repeat of last time 
So far the chapter is around 7500 words long. Which is a very respectable length, I think. But there are certainly challenges. While the scenes all work individually I am having a hard time getting them to play nice with each other. Which gives me dire reminiscences to the Five Year Chapter, where that was also an issue 
And well, this wants to be a detective story. And honestly I don’t know how to write one of those.
I’m also taking my first tentative steps to learn to code in C#, because I have a game idea I want to tinker with. I have never done anything like it before and it is extremely difficult.
But with Halloween soon upon us, there’s one big thing I want to talk about. A few months back I picked up this book on a whim: The Penguin Book of the Undead, a collection of historical texts about encounters with ghosts and ghouls. Some of them are interesting, some are boring, some are bizarre, and some are just really good. But there’s one in particular that I want to share, my favorite in the whole book.
This is an excerpt from a 1st century Roman epic poem, Civil War, aka the Pharsalia, by the poet Lucan. It’s about the war between Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great, leading up to the Battle of Pharsalus, where Caesar defeated Pompey. The excerpt tells the story where before the battle Pompey’s son seeks out a witch to foretell the future.
But not just any witch. The excerpt describes Erictho, the greatest and most terrible of all the witches, raising a slain soldier from the dead to reveal secrets from beyond the grave. And the whole thing is just gothic as all hell, and so vividly monstrous that she makes Baba Yaga look warm and fluffy by comparison. And I just have to share it here.
The excerpt begins quite suddenly, after describing the more mundane magic spells used by other witches. And there are more good bits after this but I had to end it on my favorite line of the whole thing. So here it is. In honor of Samhain allow me to introduce you all to the ultimate archetypal witch, who surely deserves to be a more popular literary monster than she is today. From a poem written almost two thousand years ago, say hello to Erictho:
These wicked rites and crimes of a dire race would be damned as still too pious by savage Erictho, who had applied her polluted art to novel rites. To submit her funereal head to a city’s roof or to household gods is an unthinkable deed. She haunts deserted graves and lurks in sepulchers from which ghosts have been driven, a welcome friend to the gods of Erebus. To hear the gatherings of the silent dead and know the Stygian halls and buried secrets of Dis, neither the gods above nor being alive prevents her. Her ill-omened face is thin and filthy from neglect, her features frighten with Stygian pallor, never knowing the light of day; her head droops heavy with matted, knotted hair.
Whenever black storm clouds conceal the stars, Thessaly’s witch emerges from her empty tombs and hunts down the nightly bolts of lightning. Her tread has burned up seeds of fertile grain and her breath alone has turned fresh air deadly. She doesn’t pray to gods above, or know the ways to offer entrails and receive auspicious omens. She loves to light altars with funereal flames and burn incense she’s snatched from blazing pyres. At the merest hint of her praying voice, the gods grant her any outrage, afraid to hear her second song. She has buried souls alive, still in control of their bodies, against their will death comes with fate still owing them years. In a backwards march she has brought the dead back from the grave and lifeless corpses have fled death. The smoking cinders and burning bones of youths she’ll take straight from the pyre, along with the torch, ripped from their parents’ grip, and the fragments of the funereal couch with smoke still wafting black, and the robes turning to ashes and the coals that reek of their limbs.
But when dead bodies are preserved in stone, which absorbs their inner moisture, and they stiffen as the decaying marrow is drawn off, then she hungrily ravages every single joint, sinks her fingers in the eyes and relishes it as she digs the frozen orbs out, and gnaws the pallid, wasting nails from desiccated hands. With her own mouth she cuts the fatal knotted noose, plucks down hanging bodies, and scours crosses ripping at guts the rains have pounded and innards exposed to the sun and cooked. She takes the nails piercing the hands and the black decaying poison and coagulated slime oozing through the joints. If a tendon resists her bite, she throws her weight into it. Whatever corpses lie out on the naked ground she seizes before the beasts and birds; not wanting to pick the bones with iron or her own hands, she waits and snatches pieces from the thirsty jaws of wolves.
Her hands don’t flinch from slaughter either, if she needs fresh blood, first gushing from an opened throat, if her graveyard feasts demand still-throbbing entrails. So, too, from a belly’s wound, not as nature would do it, a fetus is removed and placed on blazing altars. And every time she needs forceful savage shades, she makes the ghost herself. She finds a use for the death of every man.
And there you have it. The gods always grant her prayers, because they are afraid to hear her ask twice. And she finds a use for the death of every man.
Damn, Lucan.
In fact, I was so impressed with this excerpt that I had to find the whole book and read it. That’s Civil War, by Lucan, translated from the Latin by Matthew Fox. And while there are other good parts, and some excellent one-liners, this was certainly the best bit of the whole book for me.
There’s plenty more to say about the other stories in The Penguin Book of the Undead as well, and maybe I’ll get around to talking about them in the comments. But I think that’s a good place to stop for now.
Happy Halloween, everybody. Pleasant nightmares.
Literally, every time you post something, my day gets better.
Hello Erictho!
That description though... Sounds like something Sepultura would write a song about.
(Sepultura - Ratamahatta)
This has me curious now. Has there ever been an instance where someone went to a being of Erictho's ilk for assistance/advice and it turned out well for them? If the solution to your problem is "go get counsel from Erictho", then you have made some staggeringly poor life choices previously, akin to going to your no-so-friendly ISIS chieftain for relationship advice.
And some people say history is boring!
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I think this was Gnaeus Pompeius, so yeah that's a fair assessment.
5386766
Or Pinkie Pie?
Thanks for sharing that nightmare from the end of the Roman Republic, which seems curiously relevant in 2020.
There are many texts in the book, like I said, spanning more than two thousand years of both fiction and, um, things which were not intentionally written to be read as fiction
The earliest is the story of Odysseus's journey to the underworld from the Odyssey, and the latest is Hamlet meeting his father's ghost.
Another one of the early texts in the book is a letter from Pliny the Younger to a friend where he discusses haunted houses (which were clearly common in ancient Rome), and wonders whether a haunted house is good or bad for the rental market. The more things change...
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Glad to hear it. Stars know we need some enjoyment
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The (sadly too thin) wikipedia article on Erictho (or Erichtho) suggests that Lucan used her as a counterpoint to Virgil's Cumaean Sibyl in the Aeneid, an altogether more pious and benevolent oracle. And well, earlier in the poem they seek the counsel of the more conventional Delphic Oracle instead only to be disappointed.
And on that note...
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You don't know the half of it
Because yes, wonderful gothic horror elements aside, as I discovered when I read the whole book the main theme of Civil War is the death of the Republic, the old rules and ideas and virtues and beliefs collapsing in the face of raw might-makes-right brutality.
...So yes, the above description of an excellent monstrous witch is in a lot of ways the one part of the poem that's less scary than 2020
Dang. It is a shame that modern fantasy hasn't done more with her. Goodness knows there's plenty to work with. Thanks for the recommendation.
Interesting! Thanks.
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It really is.