The Necromancer Witch and Other Tales
Erichtho, Savannah's dead, H.D., and a Jean Valentine poem for Adrienne Rich
I’ve been reading about an ancient Roman necromancer witch this week. I initially found her last year when I was researching ancient witches who used herbs. Her name is Erichtho. She shows up in very few places. Most prominently, she is featured in Lucan’s Pharsalia, where Sextus Pompeius seeks her out to discover the outcome of the Battle of Pharsalia during the Roman Civil War. She re-animates a dead soldier who still has good lungs, and he cryptically speaks the future. I have not yet read the actual Lucan (that’s in the mail), but I did read in this great Substack post about how much Erichtho loved the jellied eyeballs of the newly dead. I’m not totally excited about reading the entire epic, though I read somewhere yesterday that Lucan fucks with the epic form by caring less about the narrative and more about description. If Lucan’s descriptions of Erichtho are any indication, I’d say this is true.
The other place Erichtho is mentioned is in Dante’s Inferno. When Dante and Virgil first try to get into Dis and are denied entrance, Dante looks at Virgil and basically says, Um, have you actually done this before? Virgil replies that yes, in fact, he went down to the lowest level of hell to grab a soul for Erichtho for one of her spells.
I’m thinking about about her as a misunderstood monster, of course.
I’ve decided to set my horror story in Savannah, sort of in a tongue-in-cheek way, so I’ve got all its ugly history and beautiful squares and ghosts and live oaks and Spanish moss on the brain. Did you know the live oak is evergreen?
There’s a legend that during a yellow fever outbreak some time in the 1870s, the dead bodies from Candler Hospital were secreted across the street to Forsyth Park via tunnel so that people wouldn’t panic seeing the numbers of the dead. The truth is a little (but only a little) less macabre: There was a tunnel that led to an autopsy room. Nothing very sensational there. Dead people nonetheless.
What I’m thinking most about is this: You’ve got this city known for its ghosts, to the point where haunting situations are sort of quotidian. Last time I was there, for a wedding, my AirBnB was 100 percent haunted. For example, the TV in the kitchen, one we never used because there was a big one in the bedroom, kept popping on in the middle of the night. But, like, nobody who lives there bats an eye! So what is truly scary in a city full of ghosts?
I found this short video where Coleman Domingo walks around Savannah and talks to a few people. I don’t know if it’s a promo video for Fear the Walking Dead (which was filmed in Savannah and he stars in) or what, but he does a nice, if kinda surface, job of going beneath the surface (ha!) to Savannah’s history of slavery. In one shot of the old Cotton Exchange, Domingo says, “When I’m here, the past feels, well, always present.”
We had to leave Savannah for other reasons, but if I’m being totally honest, I became overwhelmed by that past. It hangs in the air. Sometimes the palpable fog of it makes it hard to breathe. It’s a city that, for me, simultaneously felt deeply like home and horribly suffocating. And I miss it all the time. Friends tell me it’s not the same city anymore, with all the transplants from up North and tourists, but I can’t imagine those two competing feelings would have changed much. It’s the only place I’ve ever lived that I have felt so conflicted about.
I’m still reading H.D.’s Bid Me to Live because I’ve decided it needs to be read aloud! The rhythm of this book is strange and captivating. There are moments that rip you right out of the third person narration and throw you into the first person without warning.
“She was crying on the pillow. He didn’t see me crying. She heard the front door thud, like the front door thudded when there was a thick fog.”
See what’s happening there? No warning, no change of font. The “she” and the “me” are the same person. This is autofiction, so it makes sense, right? The she and the I are one in the same. But it’s so jarring. At first I thought it was a mistake, but then it kept happening, and I was like, oh, she is fucking with me-slash-reality. I feel like the speaker-H.D. is dissociated from herself after the tragedy of losing a child, and this is just one indicator of that. Sort of whiplashy, too, trying to be the watcher and the watched.
I love this poem by Jean Valentine from her last book, Shirt in Heaven (2015). Here it is at Poets.org.
Friend,
You came in a dream, yesterday
—The first day we met
you showed me your dark workroom
off the kitchen, your books, your notebooks.
Reading our last, knowing-last letters
—the years of our friendship
reading our poems to each other,
I would start breathing again.
Yesterday, in the afternoon,
more than a year since you died,
some words came into the air.
I looked away a second,
and they were gone,
six lines, just passing through.
for Adrienne Rich
Thanks for reading! My latest book of poems is Agatha. My memoir-in-essays, Head Case. You can pre-order my upcoming book, A Melancholy Herbal from Microcosm Publishing.If you enjoy my tiny, meandering essays, think about a paid subscription? I’m about to introduce a new paid subscriber perk: the monthly snail mail newsletter. Or, feel free to visit the tip jar!
