Beyond the Veil: Afterlife Beliefs and Ghosts in Antiquity With Joshua Mark

Michelle: Welcome to Haunted History Chronicles, the podcast where we unravel the mysteries of the past one ghostly tale at a time. I'm your host, Michelle, and I'm thrilled to be your guide on this eerie journey through the pages of history. Picture this a realm where the supernatural intertwines with the annals of time, where the echoes of the past reverberate through haunted corridors and forgotten landscapes. That's the realm we invite you to explore with us. Each episode will unearth stories, long buried secrets, dark folklore, tales of the macabre, and discuss parapsychology topics from ancient legends to more recent enigmas. We're delving deep into locations and accounts all around the globe, with guests joining me along the way. But this podcast is also about building a community of curious minds like you. Join the podcast on social media, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to share your own ghostly encounters, theories, and historical curiosities. Feel free to share with friends and family. The links are conveniently placed in the description for easy access. So whether you're a history buff with a taste for the supernatural or a paranormal enthusiast with a thirst for knowledge, haunted history chronicles is your passport to the other side. Get ready for a ride through the corridors of time where history and the supernatural converge, because every ghost has a story, and every story has a history. And now let's introduce today's podcast or guest. Welcome to another episode of Haunted History Chronicles, the podcast where we unravel the mysteries and spectral tales from our past. Today, we're journeying deep into the ancient world to explore the ghostly beliefs and afterlife traditions that shape some of the earliest civilizations. Joining me is a very special guest, the co founder and content director of World History Encyclopedia. Joshua's vast experience and extensive travel through Greece, Germany, and Egypt, coupled with his academic background in teaching history and literature, make him the perfect guide for this captivating exploration into ancient ghost lore. In ancient civilizations, the belief in the afterlife profoundly influenced daily lives and cultural practices. These societies often viewed the afterlife not merely as a continuation of existence, but as a critical component that dictated moral and ethical behaviors, legal systems, and social structures. For instance, in Mesopotamia, elaborate burial practices were designed to prevent the dead returning as malevolent spirits. This culture's concept of spirits of the deceased also intertwined with their understanding of health and illness, attributing certain sicknesses to the displeasure of these spirits. The ancient Greeks, on the other hand, had a nuanced view of the afterlife, with different realms determining a soul's final destination. Ghosts seeking justice played a significant role in their legal and moral narratives influencing social norms and laws. Stories of ghosts intervening in the living world to complete unfinished business were not uncommon, highlighting the belief in the active role of the dead in the realm of the living. In Rome, the perception of ghosts varied significantly compared to Mesopotamia. Roman literature and philosophical writings often rationalized the existence of ghosts, blending superstition with emerging philosophical thought. These tales were not just entertainment, but served as moral and philosophical commentaries of the time. The ancient Egyptians had their unique practices to communicate with or placate ghosts, ensuring proper funerary rites to avoid any repercussions from the spirit world. The consequences of neglecting these rites could be severe, influencing the cultural importance placed on honoring the dead and maintaining societal harmony. Beliefs in ghosts also permeated other ancient cultures. In China, ancestor worships significantly shaped their ghostly lore, influencing festivals like the ghost festival, which shares intriguing similarities with the mesoamerican Day of the Dead. The ancient Indians, with their practices such as cremation, aimed to protect the living from the return of restless spirits, showcasing a different approach to managing the relationship between the living and the dead. Throughout these diverse civilizations, common themes emerge in ghost stories reflecting universal human concerns about death, the afterlife, and the influence of the supernatural and the living. The gods in mesopotamian and egyptian beliefs often controlled or influenced ghostly actions, demonstrating a divine connection to the afterlife. In mesoamerican cultures, the concept of spirit dogs played a role in managing ghostly encounters, while in ancient China, the legend of a soup highlighted beliefs about memory and rebirth. Join us as we embark on this captivating journey through time with Joshua Mark, uncovering how these ancient beliefs in ghosts and the afterlife not only shaped their societies, but also left a lasting legacy that continues to fascinate us today. Stay tuned for an episode filled with eerie tales and enlightening insights that you won't want to miss.

Michelle: Hi Josh.

Michelle: Thank you so much for joining me this evening.

Joshua Mark : Hello Michelle. It's wonderful to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Michelle: So would you like to just start by introducing yourself and sharing a little bit about your background with the listeners?

Joshua Mark : Well, I am Joshua Mark. I am the content director for World History Encyclopedia. World History Encyclopedia was started by Jan von der Krabben in 2009 as an accurate and comprehensive, and most importantly for many listeners, a free resource on ancient and modern history. So we started that in 2009. I was one of the first writers that Jan brought in, and I've been doing that ever since. I used to teach college. I taught history and philosophy, writing and literature for various universities and colleges. The most recent one was Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York.

Michelle: I think it's incredible that there is this offering that, like you mentioned, is completely free. As someone who is an educator but also a lover of history, I think it's fantastic that there is something out there that people can access without it being behind a paywall.

Joshua Mark : Oh, yes, absolutely, yes.

Michelle: So what would you say were kind.

Michelle: Of the key missions of world history encyclopedia?

Joshua Mark : Well, Jan realized that there wasnt a reliable, accurate and free history resource online, that many sites had a nationalistic agenda or some other sort of agenda. And so we wanted to create something that would be a reliable resource for students, history lovers, educators, anyone who could just drop in and find out about the past. Because history, history, the way I think of the understanding of history is that it's just like your own personal life story. We go through life and we make these choices based upon our experiences. And I think this is the same thing with communal history, with the national history, with global history, that if you're able to look back and see what has gone on and what other people have done, you can learn from that and hopefully make better choices in the present.

Michelle: And you mentioned that, you know, you have the role of not only contributing in terms of the writing, but you are the co founder of it. You have an enormous amount of different hats as part of what you do. Do you want to just elaborate and explain exactly what your roles are and how you then begin to come together and formulate ideas for content that you want to include as part of World History Encyclopedia?

Joshua Mark : Well, I see myself primarily as a writer and editor. As far as working out the content, I collaborate with Jan Bundekrabben and also with the other writer and senior editor, Mark Cartwright. Mark Cartwright is an amazing writer and he is also an incredible organizer. And so we have a meeting and we work out what we want to try to cover for a year and within that year, how much of a certain type of content we want. And then we talk to the other people on the team. It's an absolutely fantastic international team. We have people from all over the world working for us, working with us, and then we come to our conclusions and we implement these things.

Michelle: And we're going to be talking about some aspects of ancient civilizations which has been featured on World History Encyclopedia. So all the things that we're going to be talking about tonight are articles that form part of the content. So again, anybody who listens to the podcast, who enjoys the discussion, I really do very much encourage people to follow that up by going and looking at these in more detail on the website itself. And of course then looking around to see what else is there, because it really is a bit of a treasure trove in terms of content. You start looking at one thing, then you realize there's five or six associated articles that you can follow up from that. And then of course you, then your mind goes down the other rabbit holes and the other pathways that you can see on there. And suddenly you realize you've been on there for 3 hours and you're just thinking, well, that was a lovely evening.

Joshua Mark : Or maybe that's entirely true, that happens to me also. I begin to look at some piece that I want to revise and then I find myself hopping from that piece to another piece to another piece. Yes, it pulls you right in.

Michelle: And again, I think that's the beauty of history. It should be engaging, it should draw us in because it's about stories, it's about our connections with stories in the past and finding those similarities and those differences and just trying to understand human nature. And I think there's something very immersive and engaging about that. And again, this is where having such a comprehensive site like world history Encyclopedia is just a fantastic resource to engage people with history, to engage people with critical thinking around the past and how that shapes the present. So it's very well done.

Joshua Mark : That's wonderful. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Michelle: And like I said, we're going to be talking about ancient civilizations this evening, in particular, ancient civilizations, their belief systems around death, the afterlife and ghosts. And just to help set the scene and to kind of begin to paint the picture for that, do you want to just start by going into how beliefs in the afterlife shaped the daily lives and the cultural practices of ancient civilizations?

Joshua Mark : Cultural practices differed, of course, but it's safe to say that all ancient civilizations believed in an afterlife and in supernatural entities, in gods. And gods are really the beginning of this whole thing. Once you say that gods exist, well then they have to exist somewhere. And so they exist in a realm that is apart from the mortal realm. And if gods exist there, so can other entities. So religious belief was fully integrated into the lives of the people. In ancient Mesopotamia, for example, you might get up in the morning and you would worship at a private shrine in your home. And then later perhaps you would go to the temple complex and you would drop off a gift offering, a thank offering, or perhaps you would make a request of the priests or the priestesses that were there, and then you would go to a few, attend festivals. This is exactly the same thing. In Egypt, there weren't religious services the way we would understand them now. Your religious devotion was entirely your responsibility. And people took it very seriously. Based upon the archaeological evidence that we have of shrines that we found in homes of Ostraca, this is a piece of pottery with engravings on it. And that's the beginning of this. People were keenly aware of the reality of the spirit world, that they took measures not to offend the gods or spirits, because if you did something wrong, then something bad would happen to you, would happen to a loved one. So you didn't just show up for religious services once a week and then go your way. You tried to honor the gods and the spirits, the spirits of your ancestors, the spirits of those who had departed in your daily life, whether this was through ritual or just how you lived your life. In Rome, for example, religion on the state sponsored. So the health of the state was understood to depend on keeping the gods happy, and that was through participation in festivals, or through private rituals, or through personal conduct. And all of these things, all of these concerned both the gods and the spirits of the dead.

Michelle: And you mentioned Mesopotamia there. Just if we start at that point, how did burial practices in Mesopotamia ensure that the dead would not return as ghosts?

Joshua Mark : Well, you're going to be hearing a lot about proper funerary practices. This is across the board, not just in ancient Mesopotamia. This is the same thing in China, it's the same thing in Greece and Rome, Egypt. So in ancient Mesopotamia, following proper funerary rites, showing respect for and honoring the dead settled the soul in the afterlife. The living were expected to follow traditional rituals, and these included providing grave goods, anything the spirit would need in the afterlife. And if these were withheld, the spirit was given leave by the gods to return as a ghost and punish the living. And you would be haunted until you made things right, until you put those grave goods where they belonged, with the remains of the deceased. It also seems to be the case that if you did not honor a request that your family member, that your loved one made before they died, you could also be haunted. So if I said I wanted a certain bull to go to my nephew and my family decided they were going to keep that bowl, well, they would wind up getting haunted. So it's really proper funerary rights. That was the main thing. If the ghost did then show up, there were other measures that had to be taken. But by that time, something had gone wrong again.

Michelle: Still thinking about ancient Mesopotamia, how did the concept of the giddim, I hope I'm saying that right. The giddim kind of influence their understanding of sickness and health. Do you want to kind of go into that and explain that a little bit further?

Joshua Mark : Right. So. Yes, you got that exactly right. The ghettom, it was the. A spiritual entity that was created at the moment of death. It would be comparable to what we think of today as the soul one's personal identity. And this entity would, under normal circumstances, all of the grave goods were taken care of. The funerary rites were all performed perfectly. The giddham would then toddle on into the afterlife, and that would be that. But if something had gone wrong, the giddham was given leave to come back from the afterlife, to come back from the underworld of Irkala and haunt the living and bring bad luck, perhaps destroy relationships that you have, perhaps ruined business opportunities that you were about to engage in, and especially to make you sick. Sickness was seen as a physical manifestation of a spiritual problem. So whether in Mesopotamia or elsewhere, if you were sick, the first approach of the doctor was to address whether you had sinned against the gods or against the spirit. And they would address that before they asked you, did you eat some bad fish or anything else. They would find out what you perhaps had done wrong, and then they would have you confess your sins. So the mesopotamian doctor, and there were two types, the ASU and the Asupu, would first have the patient confess, and then they would recite spells addressing the GHDM directly. And hopefully that would take care of your problem. There's a specific spell called the evil demon's tablet eleven. We know it that way. We have given it that name in the modern day. Originally, it did not have a name. Irving Finkel calls it the ghost spell. And this tablet addresses every kind of ghettom there could be, as well as any kind of evil spirit, since perhaps it was not a giddom, perhaps it was an evil spirit that was afflicting you and making you sick. But the ghost spell goes through all sorts of possibilities, where the speaker would be holding it and would be saying, you who creep across the floor, you who sit at the foot of the sick person, you who stand at the head of the sick person, you have no mother or father to care for you, you have no kith or kin. And so that's the ghettom addressed. But also any kind of evil spirit also would be included in that. And then, hopefully, once the spells were recited and everything had been taken care of according to proper ritual, the ghettom would go on its way and you would be healed.

Michelle: So what kind of practices did the Mesopotamians use to prevent ghosts from returning to haunt the living then?

Joshua Mark : Well, the first, of course, is proper funerary rights, including food and drink offering for the dead. The dead. And this is also true in ancient China. The dead were thought to be always hungry and thirsty. They needed food and drink, just like the living did. And so the first practice was funerary rites, food and drink offerings, respecting the wishes of the deceased. The Mesopotamians also wore amulets, and they placed protective figures and charms in their homes, especially in openings. It was believed that spirits entered through doorways and windows, any kind of opening in a home. So they would hang these amulets and charms there. And one of the most popular was the demon Pazuzu. Now, Pazuzu is famous in the modern day, from the 1970 film, 1973 film the Exorcist. That's the image that you see there of the evil demon that possesses the girl. But in ancient Mesopotamia, demon did not mean what we understand it to mean today. A demon was an eternal entity. It was not necessarily evil, it just wasn't good, it wasn't a God. It was a supernatural creature who could do pretty much whatever it wanted to. And so, in Pazuzu's case, since he was a very powerful demon, he became a popular amulet, a popular charm, because since he was so powerful in doing the bad things that he did, it was thought that he could just as easily defeat those bad forces and be a force of protection. So there was the charms, there was the funerary rights. There were also dogs. Dogs were considered to be especially potent protection against evil spirits and against ghosts. And so we have a number of figurines from ancient Mesopotamia along the lines of the famous nimrod dogs that the little figurines found in the ruins of the city that they called nimrodental. And these would be placed under thresholds or in doorways or in windowsills. The dog was associated with the sumerian goddess of healing, Gula. Gula is often depicted standing next to her dog. And the dog was associated then with healing. This was because when a dog was injured, people would see it licking itself and then the wound would heal. So dogs had a power of healing. And that idea of healing came to inform the concept of protection from evil spirits and from ghosts. And so it was a good idea to have a dog. Back then, a dog was a fine thing. And if you didn't have a dog, you probably had a dog figurine sitting somewhere in your house.

Michelle: So every dog lover now is feeling rather glad that we have pets and our home. I always knew they were special.

Joshua Mark : You would have safe from ghosts? Yes. The dog will alert you. This is true also in Greece. This is true in many cultures. The dog knew when the spirits were around.

Michelle: And I was going to say, coming round to ancient Greece, is that something that you see translating into this other ancient civilization? Are there similarities and overlap between Mesopotamia and ancient Greece in terms of belief?

Joshua Mark : Well, yes. I mean, I would say especially in terms of their afterlife. The mesopotamian afterlife, Yirkala, was a dark and dreary place where the souls ate dust and drank from mud puddles. And the afterlife for the ancient Greeks was Hades. And although Hades had different realms to it, and some were better than others, overall, it was also a dark and dreary place. The land of gloom, Greece also had the same concept of the importance of funerary practices. You're going to get haunted if you did not follow proper procedure of grave goods. Exactly the same sort of thing as in Mesopotamia. Respect for the dead, respect for the wishes of the person before they died, all of that was actually quite, quite similar.

Michelle: And I think you touch on something that's really important, which is the concept of the afterlife in terms of the various different realms. Do you want to just elaborate and go into that in a little bit more detail in terms of the different realms within the afterlife itself and wherever it was determined amongst all of that, that the soul made its final destination too.

Joshua Mark : Well, with this, of course, it differs from culture to culture. In ancient Greece. In ancient Greece, here's what would happen. You would die and your spirit would leave your body. You would then be met by the boatman Charon at the river Styx, and you would be ferried across, and there you would meet the three judges of the underworld. And you would have to give an account of yourself, or sometimes according to different eras, you didn't. But either way, the judges knew what you had been up to. And so while they were conferring about where you were going to wind up, you would be given a cup from the river al Lethe, and you would drink the cup and you would forget about your past life. That was all erased. And then the judges would pronounce sentence, I suppose I would say, but not really. It would give you direction. So most people in ancient Greece who died went to the fields of asphodel. You know, you were good, but you were great. The heroes and warriors who died bravely in battle would go to the Elysium fields, and that was a nicer area than the fields of Asphodel. There was also the isles of the blessed for the especially pure in heart who had lived exemplary lives. And then there was Tartarus, the darkest realm of hades. And that's where you went if you were not so good or if you were wicked. But as Plato talks about in Phaedo, just because you wound up in Tartarus didn't mean that you had to stay there. The afterlife in ancient Greece was understood to be informed by how often, how kindly, how diligently the living remembered you. You would have a better afterlife if you had people on earth who were going to tend to your grave, who were going to leave some sort of gift, offering food, offering, drink offering on your grave, just like in Mesopotamia. So even if you were in Tartarus, you were still going to have a better time there. If you had people that were watching over you from the land of the living taking care of you, remembering you. Remembrance is the big threat. Remembrance. And in other cultures, it was a different sort of thing. In ancient Persia, you died. And here, once again, we have dogs playing an important role. If you were on your deathbed in ancient Persia, they were concerned that your soul might be taken by an evil spirit or a ghost might be led astray. And so they would lead a dog into the room. They would lead it in once. And if the dog growled, it meant there was a spirit in the room. All right. Now they had to recite more spells. They had to be more careful. Then they would bring the dog in a second time, a third time, however many times, until the dog did not growl at some invisible presence in the room. So now you were okay. If the, the dog didn't growl, you were good to go. You died. You left your body. And again, this changes in different eras in ancient Persia, but basically you died. You appeared at the Shinbat bridge. And again on the Shinbat bridge, there are two dogs. If you have lived a good life, then the dogs greet you happily, wagging their tails and standing in between them is the maiden, and she welcomes you and everything is nice. And you go across the bridge, and at the other end of the Shinba bridge, you meet Mitra. And Mitra judges you and says, okay, you did well, you did poorly. If you've done badly, then you dropped down into three levels of hell. If you did well, you went up to three levels of paradise, but you did not stay in any one of the hells for eternal, for eternity. The God Uhuramazda eventually would bring all of his children to him. So eventually everyone wound up in paradise. It's just that you had to spend a certain amount of time atoning for your sins. Very much like the catholic idea of purgatory. Probably, though, the most comforting vision of the afterlife comes from ancient Egypt. In ancient Egypt, they knew the afterlife as the field of Reeds. And what would happen here is you would die. You leave your body and you wind up basically standing in a queue. And the queue revolves around. And there are goddesses like Kebbet. They bring you cooling water while you're standing there waiting. And then you enter the hall of truth, and you stand before the God Osiris, and next to him is Thoth. And Thoth is taking down what we've done in your life, showing it to Osiris. And there are the 42 judges who they're going to be conferring with. And your heart is weighed, your spiritual heart is weighed in the balance against the white feather of truth, the feather of mat. And if the balance is even, then you're fine, you're great. If your heart is as light as a feather, you can go on to the field of breeds. If your heart is heavier than the feather, then it is dropped onto the ground and it's eaten by this monster, amout, and you cease to exist. And non existence was terrifying to the Egyptians. They would rather have had someplace like hell than non existence. So you disappeared and you were gone. But if you had made it through the hall of truth and you got the green light, you were good to go. Then on you went, and the field of reeds was a mirror image of your life on earth. There you found everything that you thought you had lost. All of the people who had gone before you were there to greet you. Your dog is there to greet you, your favorite dog, your favorite cat, your favorite pet. I mean, the Egyptians had many different kinds of pets, including alligators and ostrich. So whatever it was that you thought you had lost is right there, and so is your home, and so is the stream that you like to sit beside. And there you live eternally with the gods, in the presence of the gods.

Michelle: I mean, it's just incredible, really, when you start to compare and contrast these different ancient civilizations, to see just how embedded and deeply rooted they were in every aspect of living, really, in terms of ritual and practice and belief systems. And, you know, coming back to ancient Greece, I think one of the really interesting aspects is just this connection with seeking justice and legal and, you know, moral issues coming through. And I just, you know, I just wanted to kind of ask you, if there was any particular stories that, you know, helped to highlight that relevance of a ghost seeking out justice and how that influenced and played out in terms of legal proceedings and moral practices, how they lived their lives, basically, to help illustrate that point.

Joshua Mark : Well, probably the most famous story, easily the most famous story actually, from ancient Greece about this would be pliny the younger's ghost story about the philosopher Athenodorus. So that goes like this. Athenodorus is a philosopher who comes to Athens and he hears of a haunted house. No one wants to rent this place, it's so haunted, people are afraid of it. But he rents it. And that night, he's confronted by this ghost in chains. Clanking chains. It's the classic ghost image. And the ghost leads him from his bed to a spot in the courtyard, points to the spot, and then it vanishes. The next day, Athenodorus has the magistrate come, and he has him break open the spot, digging up. And there is the. There are the remains of the ghost that he saw the night before. So he has the ghosts remains exhumed. He has them given proper burial, and then the ghost is no longer haunted, but the house is no longer haunted. The ghost has gone away. The ghost is laid to rest because the proper rites have now been observed. So that's justice in the afterlife, you know, justice from the afterlife. There are stories in every civilization that are related to this. In ancient Greece, as far as ghosts and legal proceedings, it's rather sketchy. You know, the greek playwright Aeschylus made great use of ghosts, and in his works, you have Agamemnon coming back from the dead. He was murdered, and he wants justice. But did this actually happen in courts? In other words, you know, did litigants in ancient greek courts actually call on ghosts? Well, we don't really know. It's, again, it's rather sketchy, but it's possible, because in ancient Greece, and again, this is true in other civilizations as well, in ancient Greece, when the dead, when the person died, they became supernatural beings. They now knew everything. They knew all of the things that you had hidden in your life. And so it would not have been uncommon for someone in a court case to have called upon a ghost to bear witness to what was going on. I'm not saying that did happen. I'm just saying it could have happened, or it would not have been unlikely, because the dead would have known what went on. And I'm not saying that they would call a ghost to the witness stand and grill them, but one might say, yes, you know I am speaking the truth. And this person who is now existing, who exists on the other side, can bear witness to that. This person knows what happened. This is the same exact sort of thing in ancient Rome where they understood that the dead. Okay, you weren't going to see that person at dinner, and they didn't have a body anymore, but they still existed. They still existed. And not only that, they were aware. And not only that, but they could communicate what they knew to the living. And there's actually excellent story about this from ancient Rome about Thrasyllus and Polemis, who were friends, and they were good friends. And Thrasyllus falls in love with thalamus wife and murders him one day when they're out on a hunt. And then he tries to court the wife. Well, Ptolemus returns to his wife in a dream, and he tells her what happened. So the wife then invites Thrasyllus over to the house. She gives him some wine that's heavily drugged. He falls into a stupor, and she blinds him. She then tells him that she knows what he did, and so she runs out of the house, goes to her husband's tomb, and tells the entire story to the people that are there. And then she kills herself. And then Thrasyllus, in his grief and guilt, has himself walled up in Polymus tomb. The end. And what message did that give to an audience? Whether in ancient Greece or ancient Rome, it was that the dead still existed and that they could let the living know what you had done. So along the lines of a moral or a legal practice. I'm not saying that everyone in ancient Greece or ancient Rome feared ghosts. They thought, well, I won't do this bad thing, because then this ghost might come back and out me for my crimes. But I would only say that it was a consideration, it was a cultural consideration. People were aware of the fact that these entities existed and that they could pop up at any time. Well, within reason, they could pop up in a dream where they could pop up between the torches, as they would say, and tell what you had done.

Michelle: I think the practice of cruentation kind of came out of ancient Greece and ancient Rome, if I'm correct, whereby there was this belief that the. The spirit of the deceased could call out, could reach out to the living and. And share, share news of the crime that had happened to them in. In their moment of death, with the blood calling out to signal the person who had committed the crime. So the idea of the court bleeding in close proximity to the person who had committed the crime. I think that's something that you saw beginning around this time and then obviously was something then that perpetuated over the next few centuries across many different countries all over the world. We kind of see that very superstitious practice coming through in various different courts and in various different means. And I say, I think that began there, if I'm correct.

Joshua Mark : But, yes, I am telling you that's correct. Yes.

Michelle: It's fascinating, though, to see how these very early, again, superstitions and beliefs perpetuated not just in those regions, but how they circulated elsewhere. And, yeah, it's intriguing when you start to dive deeper into these subject matters, to see that.

Joshua Mark : No, it really is. Absolutely, yes.

Michelle: And just thinking, again, still about ancient Greece, do you have any examples of stories where, I mean, you referenced earlier how there was this need to finish tasks to complete unfinished business. Are there other examples of stories that kind of help to illustrate how that comes through in terms of the ghost stories from ancient Greece?

Joshua Mark : Well, not so much ghost stories, I would say, although I suppose so. I mean, there are stories, of course, there's a famous scene in the Odyssey, I think it's book eleven, when Odysseus has to go to the underworld and there are people asking him questions and asking him, Achilles, telling him what it's like to be in the underworld and how he'd rather be a dog among the living or a poor person than be the king of the underworld. Things like that. There are many stories which, which today we might classify as myths, but which would have been understood back then as illustrations of what the afterlife was like. Plato in republic talks about how we create myths and we make them as believable as we can in order to make ourselves feel better. This is a paraphrase, of course, but in book two, he says, we don't really know where we came from or how we all got here, and so we create myths and these things help to explain us to ourselves. And I would say it's the same sort of thing. The ghost stories, the stories like Homer's tales or the references that he makes or anyone else have to do with trying to explain where you go when you die and the fact that you don't cease to exist. You're still there. And if the living are attuned to you, if they recognize that you still exist, then they can hear from you and they will hear from you.

Michelle: So we've obviously just been thinking there about ancient Greece and touching upon Rome. Would you say there are any key similarities or differences that are kind of the notable ones for those two particular ancient civilizations?

Joshua Mark : Well, you know, the Romans. The Romans are renowned for order, and their afterlife was examining this exact same sort of chorus. Ghosts in ancient Rome, just like everywhere else, were understood as an absolute reality, but they behaved in very specific ways. In ancient Greece, perhaps, like with the Athenodora story, the ghost would show up at night and the ghost would do whatever it wanted to do. But perhaps a ghost would show up during the day. That would be the same sort of thing. In Mesopotamia, you might have a ghost show up during the day and make you sick. But in ancient Rome, a ghost could appear between the torches, which meant between the time the torches were lighted at night and the time that they were put out at dawn, or they would appear in dreams. If you were walking along the street and you ran into a ghost in daylight, something had gone terribly wrong. But this kind of fit even with that, it kind of fit into what the Romans described as marble or wonders. There were aspects of the world, there were aspects of human life that the Romans felt they couldn't explain. And these were wonders. Like someone would report an 18 foot tall woman walking out of the woods, or what we would call today a spaceship. They would say, well, there was this thing in the sky, and it was doing this. And so these were wonders, these miraculous things, these mirablia, they didn't always apply to ghosts. And so you only had really these two things. A ghost appearing in your room. That would be a complete apparition, as we would say today, showing up in the room and saying whatever it is that he was going to say, or the ghost of a loved one or a relative who appear in dreams. And the similarities are really, really very close. The two cultures are very close. The afterlife is similar in Greece, similar in Rome, but the way the ghosts behaved, I've always thought it was interesting that the Romans even applied their sense of order to the afterlife, that even with ghosts, no, you can't just do whatever you want. You're going to appear in this way and at these times, and these are the accepted times that you can do this, and these are the ways in which you can do this. And this was understood by the Romans as just a completely natural thing. It's not something like. I mean, I'm not saying everyone in ancient Rome believed in ghosts, or everyone had this complete, absolute understanding. But culturally speaking, they all recognize that ghosts do behave in these ways. First of all, that ghosts exist, and secondly, that they behave in these ways and they do not behave in other ways.

Michelle: And is that something that, you know, you would say is something that you see coming through in terms of philosophical writing and in the literature, that there's this very ordered kind of structure and routine to the observation of ghosts in terms of how it's seen in writing.

Joshua Mark : Oh, absolutely. Whether it's in Aeschylus in ancient Greece, or whether it's in Plausus in ancient Rome, it follows the same pattern of the playwright recognizing how ghosts are understood and how they work and then making use of that. There's this Excellent Play by PlAutus, the haunted House. Now, in this story, the basic form of this story follows the format of a modern day sitcom. There's a Wealthy merchant named TheoproPodes, and he's going on a trip, and he leaves his son in charge of the House. This is the first time his son has had real responsibility in Life. But, you know, the son isn't up to it. So the very first thing he does, he borrows a huge sum of money. He throws a big party for his friends. He buys the freedom of this slave girl that he's in love with, and he's having a great time. And then suddenly, his slave, Tranio, comes running up and says, I have bad news for you. Your dad's coming home early. He's, like, walking up the street right now, and the kid doesn't know what to do. And so Tranio says, okay, here's what we'll do. I'm going to lock you in the house, and I'm going to save the place. Haunted, which he then does. He meets the properties on the street, and he says, you can't go into the house because here's what happened. Your son had a dream, and in this dream, a ghost appeared to him between the torches, and the ghost told him that he was murdered many years ago in the house for his money, and his body has been sealed in the walls, and he's going to be haunting this place. And so it's very dangerous for you to go in there right now, because the ghost is going to do you harm. Thea property instantly agrees with this and says, oh, okay, well, I won't go into the house, though. Well, to a roman audience. And the story goes on from there. I mean, eventually, of course, it all comes out. It's this bizarre and comical ending. But theopropodes agrees with him. And a roman audience would have found this hilarious, because Tranio is confusing the two ways in which a ghost would appear. The ghost of a murdered man in your home would appear between the torches, but not in a dream, only people to appear in dreams would have been your close relatives, loved ones, someone that you had a personal relationship with, not the ghost of a murdered man. So, first of all, they would have thought it was funny because Trania was obviously confusing these things. Secondly, it touches upon the very popular trope of the wise slave or the wise servant and the foolish master. Trania was obviously this clever fellow who's coming up with this plan. Theopropodies are so silly, so ignorant, that he doesn't recognize that what he's hearing has to be a lie because of the way in which the ghost is being presented. So the audience would have felt better about themselves. Well, at least I'm not as silly as this human being who can't even tell the difference between a real story about a ghost and an obvious fable. And also that it would have been hilarious that, like, oh, look, you know, this is what Tranio's doing. He's like, he's in such a hurry to come up with some kind of a story that he's mixing things up. But it's all based upon the reality of ghosts, the way in which romans understood this is how ghosts work, how they appear. This is what they do, and they don't do it in another way.

Michelle: Yeah. It's very much rationalizing the existence of ghosts and creating those ideas and those patterns to them. And, of course, then seeing how that then plays out in story and through all these other types of material, like you said, almost to then have the audience sit back and. And view themselves as having that deep understanding, that connection and recognizing, well, I have more knowledge here to bring to this, and again, to bring that rational thought and expertise, for want of a better word.

Joshua Mark : But knowledge, it would be like any movie that you would see today where someone makes an allusion to something where not everyone in the audience is going to get that, and you kind of feel like, oh, I know what he's talking about. Yes. Right. That's a Hemingway quote. You don't have to say that. Right. I got that. So, yeah, it makes you feel better about yourself. But in this case, it would have been. I think pledis would be counting on the fact that almost everyone in his audience would have known the way ghosts work. And so it's kind of like a huge ego, ego boost for the audience.

Michelle: If you've been enraptured by the chilling tales and enigmas unveiled throughout our podcast spectral journey, now's your chance to become an integral part of our ghostly congregation. You see, as we delve deeper into the mysteries of the past. We need your support now more than ever. But fear not, for there are a myriad of ways you can help keep the supernatural flames burning. Brighten. Firstly, have you ever considered treating our podcast to a virtual coffee? Picture it a humble offering to fuel our relentless pursuit of haunted histories. Just head over to Ko fi.com hauntedhistorychronicles and join us for a caffeine infused seance. But that's merely the beginning of our spectral soiree. For those intrepid souls yearning for deeper communion with the paranormal, consider joining our exclusive Patreon family. From march onwards, our Patreon page will be a haven of clandestine content with weekly podcasts and daily long and short form offerings. Yes, you heard it right. Daily doses of the supernatural, a veritable paranormal advent calendar for your soul. So why hesitate? Journey forth to patreon.com forward slash haunted history chronicles and become a patron today. But wait, the spirit of generosity lingers still. If you seek to flaunt your allegiance to the haunted history chronicles in more tangible ways, venture into our newly unearthed merchandise crypt. From mugs that whisper their secrets to clothing that echoes with ghostly laughter, our shop is a sanctuary for the discerning paranormal aficionado. Just visit teepublic.com and traverse to the Haunted History Chronicles shop page to adorn yourself with our spectral regalia. Whether it's bestowing a virtual coffee, joining our spectral society on Patreon, or donning haunted history chronicles apparel, your support keeps the ethereal flames alight. Remember, every spectral contribution fuels our pursuit of unearthly truths, propelling us ever deeper into the realms of shadows and whispers. So heed the call, dear listeners. The links to our spectral sanctuaries await in the shadows of the podcast description notes as well as our haunted haunts on social media. Dare to embrace the unknown, to journey deeper into the veiled corridors of history. For only together can we keep the ghostly embers glowing, illuminating the darkness with tales untold. Now let us return to the mysteries that beckon from beyond the veil. What spectres await? What secrets lie dormant, waiting to be unearthed? Let us venture forth, for the journey into the unknown has only just begun.

Michelle: So how would you say that perceptions of ghosts in ancient Rome again compare to Mesopotamia, for example, or ancient Egypt?

Joshua Mark : Well, okay, so in Rome you have this very predictable course of a ghost. It's going to do this, it's going to do that. The similarities between Egypt and Mesopotamia are that ghosts could appear however they wanted, they could pop up anytime and do whatever they wanted ghosts were almost always seen as very bad news. In Mesopotamia and Egypt. It meant something had gone wrong. This was the case all over the place. It's not just those two places, but specifically in ancient India with the ghosts on his boots, or in these places, it was never a good thing. It was almost never a good thing. It's very rare that you hear anything like, yes, I saw this ghost and then I found where the artifact was hidden or where the will was hidden underneath the floorboards or anything like that. The ghosts always represented sickness, bad luck, breakdown in business, breakdown in your relationships, and always had to do, or frequently, most usually had to do with improper funerary rites. So if you, in ancient Egypt, if you were being haunted and all of a sudden your crops failed and your cat died and you were miserable, what you would do is write a letter to the dead. The first thing you would have to figure out is what did you do wrong? And once you had feared your conscience and you were confident that you were all right, that you had not sinned before the gods, that you had not cheated anyone out of their funerary rites, what you would do is you would write a letter to the dead. And it's just exactly what it sounds like. You would write a letter to the deceased and you would bring it to their tomb and you would leave it there. And it was absolutely understood that the deceased's spirit was going to read that letter and they would in some way respond. Now, if they thought that you had done something wrong, well, your bad luck would continue and you would have to figure out something else to do. The something else you would do would be to contact a wise woman or a priest or a priestess and have them intervene. And this would kind of be comparable to a modern day exorcist. They would have to figure out what's going on here, like what spiritual forces are at work that's causing this to happen. Now that, you know, once they were convinced that you were in fact guiltless. But based upon the number of letters that we have found and the references to them, it seems that once the person wrote a letter to the dead and explained, okay, here's my side of the story. I don't know what your problem is with me or why you're allowing this to happen to me, that the bad luck went away and you were cured. In Mesopotamia, of course, it would take the form of what I was talking about before with the ghost spell, where someone, not you, someone in authority, some doctor, some potently spiritual person, would recite the spells would recite something like the ghost spell, and that would take care of the problem.

Michelle: And, you know, you just touched upon how the different forms, some of the key messages and key ways that people communicated with the dead or placated ghosts, you know, thinking about ancient Egypt and writing letters, so writing on papyri and so on. Were there other ways in ancient Egypt for communicating with the deceased in terms of ritual or other practices?

Joshua Mark : Well, if you couldn't take care of your dead person's tomb, you would hire someone and the chem priest would go there and they would recite the prayers and the offerings for you, and they would give the food and drink offering for you. And that was really that. Either you writing your own letters to the dead or you calling upon the intervention of a priest, usually known as the chem priest. And, you know, it wasn't only a failure to do funerary rites properly that could have gotten you into trouble in ancient Egypt. It might also have been that you could have done better and chose not to. So even if you had performed all of the rights correctly, if you could have done more and if you knew that the deceased would want you to do more, that might also get you in trouble. There were three levels of embalming and rituals that went along with the embalming in ancient Egypt. And there was a top shelf where the nobility, pharaoh, and then mid range. If you were a wealthy merchant, let's say a scribe, and then the lowest tier, everybody else. So if you were a person who could have afforded the top shelf and decided not to, you were going to save some money and go with the mid range, that might have upset a ghost. Even though you hadn't actually done anything improper. You had, you know, tried to be frugal. You were trying to think about your family, and, well, you know, we could actually use this money to live on you still, the ghost could still have gotten a upset with you because you hadn't done all you could do. And so, again, as far as communication with the dead, you would then have to go back and redo that. You would have to do what you should have done in the first place.

Michelle: So what were some of the consequences in ancient Egypt if proper, you know, if proper funerary rites were not observed, for example.

Joshua Mark : Haunting. And the haunting takes the form of any kind of bad thing. It's either physical sickness, it's a mental distress. Suddenly you're hallucinating, suddenly you're having mental problems, failure of your business, failure of your crops, failure of your marriage, an inability to marry your son or daughter off a good match, anything, any form of what we would call bad luck, that would be a haunting.

Michelle: Again, just kind of thinking about across these different ancient civilizations. So ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, etcetera. Were there common themes across the various different ghost stories and accounts that we have and we're able to kind of examine today?

Joshua Mark : I say the most, the most common theme would be improper burial rites, improper funerary practices. This is in absolutely every culture. This is in the norse culture. This is ancient China. This is in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Rome, Greece. It's everywhere that if the dead are not properly honored at their funeral, they're going to come back and they're going to cause you major problems. The other theme which is linked to this is upkeep of the tomb. If you fail to make sure that the deceased's tomb wasn't properly weeded, wasn't properly cleaned, then the spirit could come back and demand that you do something about this. There's a famous ghost story from ancient Egypt, which is sometimes just translated as the ghost story, but usually known as Khansamab and the Ghost. And in this story, the high priest of Amun Khansamab, meets up with this ghost, and the ghost is very upset because he was a great man in life and he had a great tomb. But the tomb, the land has fallen away around his tomb, and no one has come to repair it, so he has no home. And so the ghost is just wandering around, just trying to find a place that he can rest. And since he cant find a place to restore, he's going to be causing wailings and problems. So Khansamam tells him, I will take care of your problem. I will find your graves, and I will repair it, and you will have a nice place to live. So we don't know how the story ends. Unfortunately, the rest of the manuscript is lost. But based upon the progression of the tale, it seems that Hans was as good as his word, and he fixes the tomb, and the ghost now has a house, and the ghost will rest in peace. So it's really that I see these are the common themes. It's respect for the dead. And from the standpoint of cultural value, this would just go to a respect for tradition, a respect for one's culture, respect for one's family. And so we encourage cultural values, traditional cultural values, as one likes to say today.

Michelle: And I think this respect for the dead is something that you see, again, just echoed across other cultures and civilizations. I mean, if we think about ancient China and the practice of ancestor worship, you see it coming through there as well. Do you want to just explain more about that in terms of what ancestor worship was in ancient China and how that influenced the belief in ghosts there?

Joshua Mark : Well, the ancestor worship begins in the Shang dynasty, circa 1600 to 1046 BCE. And it again comes from that same understanding that I talked about before of the gods. If the gods exist, they exist in a realm. And if they exist in a realm, other entities can exist in that realm. And since in China, a cultural value that was highly respected was reverence for one's ancestors, for elderly people, where you would seek advice from those who were older than you, it was believed that the ancestors lived on. And that again, just like in ancient Greece, they now knew things that they did not know when they were on earth. They also had the ear of the gods. And so ancestor worship in China develops from this belief. And the idea that the spirits of your ancestors are now supernatural entities who can help you to arrange the marriage of your son or daughter, or can help you in business, or can help you in all kinds of other ways. It can help you if you're sick, can help you ward off evil spirits, all sorts of things. They were now, they were now supernatural entities. And the Chinese, just again, like the Mesopotamians, also believed that their ancestors blessed them with various natural gifts. And one of those gifts, again, was dogs. In ancient China, dogs were again seen as very poor, potent guardians against evil spirits. And it's nothing like your ancestor would come back in the form of a dog and protect you in the form of a dog, but they would send you things that would protect you in your life. And one of those was dogs. And an interesting aspect of that is bells. The Chinese believe that ghosts were afraid of the sound of bells attached to dogs because they were afraid of dogs. So they put the bells on the dog. The dog runs around, dog makes jangling sounds, the ghost is afraid, the ghost runs away. They would then take the bells off the dog and put them on their child, and then the child would run around, and then the child would be free from a fear of ghosts because, well, the ghost would interpret that as the sound of a dog. So things like this were thought small. Things like this or large things like marriage or like a new house or general prosperity or victory in war were all attributed to the ancestors, because the ancestors were thought to still exist, still be aware of you, and to be looking out for you in the company of the gods.

Michelle: And one of the really fascinating festivals that I think is just really interesting to find out and discover more about from ancient China is the. The chinese ghost festival. Do you want to go into that in a little bit more detail and explain more about what the chinese ghost festival involved?

Joshua Mark : Oh, that is a fascinating festival. The Chinese Ghost festival, the celtic festival of Suen, and the Mexican Festival of the Day of the Dead are all quite similar in that they all maintain that there is a time of the year when the veil between the living and the dead is at its thinnest, and the spirits of the dead can come back and walk amongst the living. So with the chinese ghost festival, which is also sometimes referred to as the Hungry Ghost festival, but there actually is a significant difference. Hungry ghosts in ancient China and in modern China are a certain type of ghost. A hungry ghost is the spirit of someone who was never satisfied with anything in their life. They were always ravenous. They were always looking for more, and they're usually depicted as immensely fat, with small mouths and small throats. There's no way that they could ever get anything into their mouths and down to their stomach that's going to satisfy them. And these ghosts are always hungry, and they're always angry, and they're always bad news. They're very similar to the same type of ghost in Japan, who are also referred to as hungry ghosts. But the ghost festival, on the whole, also understands that ghosts generally are hungry. They want attention, they want to be fed. They want to have nice things to eat and to drink, and they want to be noticed. And so during the ghost festival, which usually happens in August, mid August, you have this enormous celebration where you prepare food for your loved ones, and you create altars, and you put the food on the altar, and the dead people are thought to come and derive joy, sustenance, but also actual joy from the food that you've left out. And there's incense, and there are fireworks, and there's a general celebration for a number of days. And at the end of this time, the people, the participants, will light candles and put them in boats and set them adrift on waterways. And as the boats float away and the candles go out, that's supposed to signify the dead returning to their realm. And now the living will go on with their lives. There are many similarities between all these sorts of rituals, but it's a very interesting aspect of the ghost festival, of what we would call today superstitions, but what they would have referred to as simple common sense. For example, living people enjoy going to the theater, enjoy going to a concert or some sporting event, and having the best seats up front. Well, the same is thought to be true of the dead. And so during the ghost festival, you're not supposed to sit in the best seats up front at any public event because you're going to wind up sitting on a ghost's lap, and the ghost is going to be annoyed, and then the ghost is going to haunt you, and you will have bad luck. Along these same lines, you are not supposed to urinate outside at any time during the ghost festival because you don't know what invisible person might be standing there. And so you might wind up peeing on someone's foot. And this will also greatly annoy them. So you have to be observe normal, basic common sense hygiene and use a normal bathroom. And don't go wandering around in public doing whatever you want to do, but also things like not leaving an umbrella on your front porch during the ghost festival, because all of the ghosts are now here and they're all roaming about. If you have an umbrella on your front porch, especially one that's brightly colored, some very pretty parasol, it might attract the attention of a ghost, and the ghost might wander up and say, wow, that is really nice. And then having noticed that, might look at your house and say, hmm, this is also a pretty cool place, and then move in. And now you're being haunted only because you left this umbrella out. So there's attention to detail, attention to all kinds of detail during the ghost festival, which is different from the day of the dead, for example, where the day of the dead is more of this explosion, this welcoming explosion of joy, of like, hi, welcome back. Here's the food that you like to eat, and we're going to decorate your grave, and we're going to put marigolds on this, and we're going to have bright flowers, and we're going to have drinks that we're going to be sharing with you. There's not as much caution involved in the day of the dead observances as there are, are in the ghost festival observances.

Michelle: It interests me, though, how coming through some of that and referencing some of what you just said that, you know, food and drink is something, again, that you see having that crossover. And again, I know in ancient China, there is this particular soup, isn't it, that has significance in terms of chinese, chinese afterlife beliefs. Do you want to go into some of that aspect in terms of that particular soup? And maybe, again, just highlighting how important food and drink was across some of these other cultural festivals when thinking about the afterlife.

Joshua Mark : Right. That would be Mengpo soup. And Mengpo soup is comparable to the cup of Lethe in ancient Greece. In the chinese afterlife, what would happen? And again, you'll notice this is very similar to Persia. It has a little touch of the persian element to it and the greek element to it. In ancient China, you would die and your soul would have to cross a bridge. And on the other side of the bridge, you were met by the gods or aegon or a spirit, and they would hand you meng po soup in a cup, and you would drink it and you would forget about your life, because it was thought that you couldn't enjoy your afterlife, which, you know, could be very nice in chinese paradise. If you were carrying around the burden of what you had left behind, if you were always remembering your life on earth, you would compare your life in the afterlife to that, and it would bring you down, and so it would erase your memory, and you would move on from there and you would enjoy eternity because you didn't have to think about your past. So with ghosts, I mean, a ghost who had had their cup of Meng po soup and moved on to paradise, well, they just became a spirit. They just went on their way and no one had to think about them anymore. But if you were judged as being an unpleasant person who had not lived well and you were given the cup, well, there's different traditions concerning this, but I. Perhaps you didn't drink the cup. Perhaps you drank the cup and it didn't work. Perhaps you drank the cup and then you did whatever it was that you were about to do. But however, this, however, whatever went wrong there at the end, you were dropped off the bridge down into one of the hells. Now, once you got down into one of the hells, you found you didn't like it there. That's when you could come back. And you went aloud to come back. It wasn't one of these things like in Mesopotamia, where the gods might give a special dispensation for you to return to write a wrong in chinese understanding of ghosts, you slipped out. You just escaped, and you came back to haunt the living because you were upset, you didn't like the way things turned out for you. This is actually also true in native american belief, in Cheyenne belief. If you lived a life in the harmony with your people, with an understanding of your relationship to others and your relationship to God Maheu, then when you died, you traveled the long road to the Milky Way, and you wound up in a place quite comparable to the vision of ancient Egypt with the field of raids. In the Cheyenne afterlife, you would go to what people have referred to as the happy hunting grounds. It's, again, it's a mirror image of what you had left behind on earth. And you would fish and you would hunt, and you would hang out with the same sorts of people that you had in your life, but if you had forgotten your duty to others, if you had forgotten the gifts of Maheu, if you had forgotten how to treat Mother earth and all of the creatures that were around you, and if you had only lived for yourself, then when you died, your soul couldn't find its way back home to Maheu. It couldn't find its way to the happy hunting grounds, and it followed a darker path and a shorter path and became very upset when it discovered this is where it was going to wind up. And so again, he was not given any leave by a higher power. The spirit would then return to earth. And the idea was, well, if I can't have paradise, nobody's going to. And this is why the Cheyenne and many other native american nations warned in story after story after story about the dangers of interacting with ghosts. Because ghosts, however agreeable they might seem when you first meet up with them, are often there only to trap you. They're going to try to trick you into behaving in a certain way that will cut you off from an afterlife.

Michelle: And, you know, just kind of thinking about, again, touching on the civilizations that we thought about, and we kind of compare that to ancient India, for example. Are there, again, common notion, common themes, common ideas that come through in terms of beliefs in ancient India that tracks what we've been talking about.

Joshua Mark : Primarily, it's the idea that the appearance of a ghost is never a good thing, even if it's a ghost. I mean, even if it's someone that is a loved one who is appearing to you in a dream, well, that still usually means that something went wrong. They were murdered, or you can't find their body, their body is lost somewhere, or you can't find their will, or you can't find something else. So that there's, I don't think there's any such thing as a ghost coming back. And it's like, yay, that's a really great thing. But in ancient India, it's always, it was always a bad thing. The ghost was known as a boot, b h o o t, a boot. And they would appear with backwards feet. And the backwards feet thing was a sign of their disorder, the fact that they were unnatural, they were not supposed to be there. Not every ghost was a boot. A boot was the spirit of somebody who had died before their time. So they were supposed to live, let's say, 40 years, according to the will of the gods. They only lived 20 years. So they're very angry, and they come back to earth and they decide they're going to reanimate a body. They're going to either possess a body or they're going to reanimate a corpse. And so they go and they try to find a living person that they can possess. And perhaps the person is wearing amulets, or perhaps the person is especially blessed, and they can't get into that person's body. So they go find a corpse, and they slip into that thing, they bring it back to life. Now they're going to live out their days, they say, but the gods don't want this to happen. And so once people were aware that there was a boot among them, then again, just like in Mesopotamia, certain spells would have to be recited or rituals enacted that would send that thing back into the afterlife. And this encouraged, according to some scholars, the practice of cremation. By cremating a corpse, you deprived a boot of a future home, and you took care of problems before they happened.

Michelle: Yeah. You're effectively protecting the living from the ghost by denying it the body, aren't you?

Joshua Mark : Correct. Right.

Michelle: Again, just thinking about various other. Various other civilizations and kind of intriguing and unusual aspects in the mayan culture, there is the role of the day keeper. Do you want to just explain what the role of the daykeeper was and the significance of that in terms of regards to the afterlife and ghostly encounters?

Joshua Mark : Yes. Daykeepers are what we would call shamans. And daykeepers still exist today among the Maya. The Maya are still right where they always were in Mexico and Central America and daycare is a shaman who is in touch with the spirit world, is aware of ghosts, is aware of spiritual energies. And because they're connected to this world that they would consider to be the real world, they are able to serve as mediators, intermediaries between the living and the dead. So, in my understanding, every day has a certain energy to it. This energy is moving in a given direction. Some days are more suitable for recreation. Some days are more suitable for work. Some days are more suitable for doing absolutely nothing, watching Netflix, whatever it is you want to do. And the trick here is to recognize the energy of the day and to go with it. So if you're at work and you're having a bad day, that could mean that the energy of the day is not conducive to work. Now, this doesn't mean that you should stay home. It just means that if you recognize that you're operating against the flow of the energy of the day, you won't be so frustrated when things don't turn out the way you want them to go. All right, well, following this same line of thought, the same kind of idea of energies, the day keeper is also aware of the times of the year or the times in a month or in a week when there are spirits at work, when there are ghosts at work, when there are ghosts that are going to be showing up and saying hi. And so they would use amulets again, charms and rituals that would address the concerns that the ghosts had, if this was something like improper funerary rites or whatever the other problem was. And again, they would serve as a translator of sorts between the spirit world and the land of the living to take care of the issue. And they still do this today. This still goes on today. I've spoken with daykeepers down at Chichen Itza, peace day. Other spots that are down there, when I was. When I was wandering around down there years ago, they're fascinating. It's a fascinating mindset. It's a belief in the invisible world as being more real than this world. This world is constantly in flux. The world of the living is a world of constant change, whereas the other world, the afterlife, is a world of permanence. It's unchanging. Once you're over there, you're over there. There may be aspects of it that might shift because of who you are as a spirit, but the thing itself is an unchanging realm.

Michelle: So what would you say are some.

Michelle: Of the key messages that are conveyed in chinese ghost stories, or mayan ghost legends and other ghostly accounts from ancient India? For example?

Joshua Mark : I'd say the principal messages would be kindness and respect. Whatever culture one is dealing with and whatever aspect of the afterlife one is touching on, like with funerary rights, that would be respect for the dead. And there are many ghost stories where this, of course, is highlighted, but also the importance of kindness. Kindness, just being a nice person, being thoughtful, being considerate. There's a really interesting story from ancient China called Ning and ni, and it goes like this. So once upon a time, there was this traveler, Ning, who was a virtuous young man, and he stops at a temple and he goes to sleep. And in the night, the ghost of this maiden comes to him and tries to seduce him. And this is Ni. But Ning says no, because he is committed to a virtuous life, and he does not want to be mean to this ghost. He doesn't want to take advantage of her, and so he refuses her, and she goes away, and she winds up murdering two of the other travelers who are there that same night in the temple. So Ning is disturbed by this, and he asks her why she's doing what she's doing. And Ning replies that she was a young girl there. She was 18 years old, and she died at the temple, and she was buried there. And the ground in which she was interred was owned by an evil demon. And this evil demon, because it had possession of her, her remains, was able to control her soul. So she was a slave of this demon who fed on the blood of travelers who stopped at the temple. All right, so Ning is disturbed by this, and he searches the grounds, and he finds Nis remains, and he digs her up, and he brings her remains back to his home, and he gives her proper funerary rites. And after he has done so, he turns away from the grave, and he's about to walk away, and she comes back to life, and there she is, young again, just as she always was. And the two marry, and they live happily ever after. Well, the story has many different messages and can be interpreted in many different ways, but at its core, it's a story of kindness. By committing himself to a virtuous life, Ning refuses to take advantage of the young girl, whether she's a ghost or whether she's an actual girl. And so he's rewarded by having the girl come back to life and having a happy life with her afterwards. There's another story also from China, having to do with not just the ghosts of humans that come back and can cause what a problem, but ghosts of animals. So the ghost of a dog can come back from the afterlife, the ghost of a cat, the ghost of anything else. And so there was a particularly brutal fellow named Coffin Head. Lee. And coffin head used to go around killing cats and dogs for no reason, just because that's what he liked to do. And then one day, he's approached by two ghosts. Now, these are ghosts in human form, and these ghosts come up to him and say, hi, we've been sent from the afterlife. There are a about 460 dogs and cats that have charged you with cruelty because you killed them. And we've looked at your life, and we have decided that they are right. So now you're coming with us. And so coffin head is taken away to the afterlife, where he's punished again. That encourages kindness toward animals. In the chinese ghost stories, about the. The spirits of women who had been abused in life and had been murdered, who come back, the new Gui. They encourage proper respect for women, kindness toward women, treating women the way one is expected to treat human beings, just not being evil. And this is the same thing in Maya stories. This is the same thing in many ghost stories. Ghost stories have been serving to teach people cultural values and basic human decency for thousands and thousands of years. And in the MAya, the one that comes to mind is the story of the Ishtabe. And the IshTabe is a flower, and this is its origin tale. And this story goes like this. There were two women. One was a poor woman who was shunned by the upper class because she had had sex outside of marriage, and she was considered riff raff on a low life. But she was very kind and caring to everyone. And then there was a powerful upper class woman who appeared to be kind. She made a great show of kindness, but she was actually cold, and she only cared about herself. So when the poor woman dies, she comes back to life as a beautiful, sweet smelling flower, and she covers the fields, and she makes everything beautiful. But when the rich woman dies, she comes back as a flower that has no scent at all, and it's gross and it's unattractive. Well, this makes the rich woman's spirit very angry. And so she speaks to the lords of Xibalba, the lords of the Maya underworld, and says, I want to make a deal with you, and I want to go back. And if you let me go back as this other sort of flower, well, I can cause all sorts of problems. And they're delighted by this, because the lords of Shebalba are not all princes. They're not all the nicest people. So they send her back as the ishtabe, which is a flower sort of cactus that can assume human form, and it seduces men and kills them, or it drives women insane. And there she is. This is how the Ishtape came about living on earth as a sort of plant demonization, because she was not kind, even in the afterlife, even when she arrives in the afterlife and she realizes, like, all right, I'm not going. This has not ended well for me. I'm not going to get the sort of thing that I wanted. Instead of repenting, instead of apologizing, instead of accepting her faith. No, she makes the deal with the lords of Xibalba to come back and cause more problems for other people. And so I'd say it's those two things, kindness and respect. This appears all over the place. This is a very, very common things.

Michelle: Are dogs something that also appear in mesoamerican cultures in the way that we've kind of noticed across these various different locations and civilizations? Are spirit dogs and dogs of significance there as well?

Joshua Mark : Absolutely, yes. Among the Maya, among the aztec, the dog is considered to be one of the earliest creatures. The aztec dog is one of the creating gods. And among the tarascan, which are another group, they believe in the spirit dogs. And the spirit dogs play a very important role in mesoamerican cultures. A ghost is, as with others, a dissatisfied entity, but usually the cause of this. Again, funerary rights. Yes, but if your body is lost, so it's not improper. Funerary rights only. It's no funerary rights at all. Let's say you were out hunting by yourself and you were killed, or you were out boating, you were out fishing, and you drowned, and your body was never found. Well, you would come back as a ghost, because since you didn't receive the proper rites, you couldn't find your way to Shibalba. You couldn't find your way to the afterlife. And the way the afterlife would work for the Maya is you went down into the dark underworld, and then you had to navigate your way to the tree of Life, and then you would crawl up the tree of Life to paradise. Well, you were never going to get there if you couldn't get underground in the first place. And so what the Tarascon came up with was the idea of a spirit dog. And that spirit dog would go in search of these wandering ghosts, and they would lead them to Shibalba, and then they would lead them through, into the afterlife, so they took care of it. If you were a person who was upset because your dad or your mom or your brother or sister had become lost, and you were afraid that their spirit was going to be wandering endlessly, what? You were consoled by this concept of the spirit dog. The spirit dog would find your missing person and they would lead them to the afterlife, and all would be well.

Michelle: I mean, it's just been such a magical journey across these various civilizations and cultures to really begin to go into the understanding of the belief systems and the stories and what they have in common, but also some of the differences. I mean, it's just been magical to explore this with you, just to kind of bring it together. You know, you mentioned right at the very beginning some of the archaeological evidence that we have that supports what we know about these ancient beliefs in ghosts and the afterlife. What would you say, across the various locations and cultures that we, we've spoken of are some of the key evidence that supports exactly what we've been talking about today.

Joshua Mark : Oh, there are many things. Grave goods, primarily grave goods are the first indicator that people believed that the corpse they were burying was going to need things in an afterlife, that they were going to need certain items. So one of the earliest graves we have along these lines is the naphthene grave. It's 12,000 BCE, where an older man was buried with a puppy. And from then on, throughout ancient Egypt, throughout Mesopotamia, we find these tombs, these graves in which they have placed the objects that were close, obviously close to the person when they were living. How would we know that? Well, because there would be a certain type of jewelry that the person had on and sometimes in abundance, like in some mesopotamian graves, where it's not a huge leap to recognize that this is something that person would have wanted. There are things that are found in graves that would have the person's name on them. You consider the famous tomb of king Tutankhamun, where you even have his sandals. You even have the beer that he enjoyed drinking, honey beer that he liked, that was placed with him. And so the understanding is that these things were put into the graves, into the tombs, so that they could be used, so that you could have them in the afterlife. So you have grave goods, number one, the same thing with graves, amulets and charms, but that's not necessarily restricted to a grave. I mean, we have found amulets and charms, cuneiform tablets that have spells on them, like the ghost spell, in the ruins of residences, in the ruins of palaces. There's an egyptian papyri, there's the egyptian book of the Dead that talk about. The Egyptian Book of the Dead is basically a handbook for the soul. I've heard the egyptian book of the Dead referred to as ancient Egypt's Bible, and it's nothing of the kind. It's a step by step guide to what the soul is supposed to do once they reach the other side. And these things that come from Egypt's new kingdom, primarily, and they were written by a scribe for a family. You would pay the scribes a certain amount of money, would write you up a book of the dead, that there are individual manuals for each person. The Book of the Dead for a scribe wouldn't be the same as one for a soldier. But what they all have in common is you recite these certain spells at certain points in order to move past certain dangers. Now, this would have happened in between the time that you were in the hall of truth and the time that you're on your way toward field of reeds, there are various dangers that you could encounter, various pitfalls, and you would want to be prepared for them. And even if that. Even if there's a certain book of the dead that doesn't support that vision, it would still be provided to let you know, okay, I'm waking up in this other realm. I am now going to be walking out of my tomb. I'm now going to be entering the hall of truth. This is what I can expect there. This is what I should say there. This is how I should behave there. So the book of the Dead, that's a very important piece of evidence for the afterlife. There's also this greek and roman writings on. Well, on the stories that I've told before, but also on how the corpse was supposed to be taken care of, on funerary rituals and also the roman concept of. Of the society that would take over your funerary operation. They would, you know, you paid a certain amount, amount of dues into this, and then when you died, that they would make sure that you were buried properly, because if not, you were going to come back and you were going to haunt them. So anything like that, chinese spells, reliefs that are carved on walls, images carved or painted on ceramics like ostricha, many different artifacts support the ancient belief in ghosts and an afterlife.

Michelle: And how would you say that modern beliefs in ghosts compared to those of ancient civilizations?

Joshua Mark : In any of these ancient civilizations, it would be rare to find someone who did not believe in an afterlife, who did not believe in ghosts in some way. Yes. That is speculative. I can't really speak for the entire population of ancient Mesopotamia, but based upon the evidence we have, this is a widespread belief. Well, ghosts today are regarded basically as fiction. And this shift really begins with the rise of Christianity in the fourth century, when souls were understood at death to go to a certain place, you went to heaven, where you went to hell. So if you showed up on Earth as a ghost, you were probably a demon. Christianity, of course, was trying to distance itself in many ways from pagan belief systems. So they weren't really going to, you know, sign on for the idea that the ghosts were in fact the spirits of people who had lived. If your mother's ghost showed up, that was not your mother's spirit. It was most likely a demon trying to pretend to be your mother to lead you astray in your faith. And this idea of this concept, this belief about ghosts continued up through the Middle Ages, in the early Middle Ages, around 476 to 1000, ghosts are understood as demons. And then during the high Middle Ages, that'd be about between 1000 and 1300, the concept of purgatory develops. And now with purgatory, there's another place the soul can go after death, but here it's a temporary stop. It's a way station. You're not going to spend eternity in purgatory. And so the church encouraged the understanding during the high Middle Ages that the spirit you see could in fact be the spirit of your mother. And by helping that person find rest, you are participating in God's plan for redemption. You are a co worker with God. Now, this works well. I mean, there were good intentions here, but this finally devolves into the selling of indulgences and the other things that Martin Luther criticizes. In 1517, when we have the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, and after the Reformation, purgatory is rejected, and so ghosts are rejected. And so then you once again have the idea of the ghost, quote, unquote, is actually a demon, right back to where we were before. So now the demons are trying to trick you into believing this so that you will be led astray. Well, then comes the enlightenment, 17th and the 18th century. And of course, you already had the Renaissance and a move away from older concepts. But after the enlightenment, and then with the further secularization of society during the 19th century and the development of technology, ghosts gradually are relegated to the realm of fiction. They're relics of ancient beliefs that no one really has to pay attention to anymore. And so today, that's what you have. I mean, people think that ghosts are entertaining. They're the stuff of ghost stories and scary movies, but they're not a reality. No one thinks about them today as a reality. And a very interesting aspect of this is that I said at the beginning that the belief in ghosts is encouraged by the recognition of a realm that is beyond this one, where the gods are. But when I was teaching, I would ask my students, sometimes when we were going over this in the world views and values class, especially, how many people believed in God. And many people in the class would raise their hand about the majority of the students, and then I would ask how many people believed in ghosts, and almost nobody did. Well, now, part of this, of course, is because people don't want to look foolish and superstitious in front of others. But even in their private writings, even in the papers, that they would submit, they didn't believe in ghosts, but they did believe in God. And I just think that's very interesting, because in the ancient world, a belief in God and a belief in ghosts went hand in hand. The ghosts were just as natural and as integral a part of daily life as sunshine or rain or trees. But in the modern world, that's not. So there's a break, there's a shift that God has nothing to do with ghosts.

Michelle: Honestly, Josh, it's been just so incredible to talk to you. It's been a real privilege to chat with you and to hear and be able to engage in the various cultures and civilizations that we've talked about. Just a fascinating discussion overall. And like I said right at the very beginning, for anybody who finds this fascinating and interesting, I would very much recommend going to World History Encyclopedia, of which I will make sure all of the links are very readily available on the website, as well as in the podcast description notes, so that you can go away and find out more about ancient Egypt, ancient India, you know, the various touching points that we've reach today. But at the same time, as I said at the start, the website is just this treasure check, you know, a treasure trove where you, you step in and you suddenly are there for hours and hours and hours. I mean, it's such an engaging site. It's an incredible resource, just packed full of information. And I, and I'm sure people listening will take that away. Having heard the, the various things that, that you've brought to this discussion today. I mean, it's just, it's just wonderful to hear someone being able to converse and share this knowledge with others. So thank you so much for your time. And like I said, I hope people find their way over to the website, if they haven't already, because it's an amazing website.

Joshua Mark : Thank you for the very kind words. That's excellent. Thank you.

Michelle: And I'll say goodbye to everybody listening. Bye, everybody.