The Shocking Ancient Pagan Origins of Halloween Monsters

I’ve written an awful lot about how, contrary to popular belief, there is extremely little about the way people celebrate holidays in the United States in the twenty-first century that can actually be historically traced back to ancient “paganism.” (See for, instance, this article I wrote in April 2017 about how there’s very little about modern Easter that is legitimately “pagan,” this article I wrote in December 2019 about how there’s very little about modern Christmas that is legitimately “pagan,” this article I wrote about the history of Santa Claus, this article I wrote in February 2020 about how there’s nothing “pagan” about Groundhog Day whatsoever, and this article I wrote in April 2020 about how Easter has nothing to do with the ancient Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar.)

Until now, I have not published any articles about whether Halloween has any connections to “paganism.” This is partly because I think Halloween’s connections to ancient pre-Christian belief systems are much more substantial and complex than Christmas or Easter’s (which are extremely minimal). Although Halloween itself is nominally a holiday of Christian origin, there is an awful lot about how we celebrate Halloween today that is demonstrably influenced by genuine, ancient “pagan” ideas.

In particular, the most famous monsters that are most closely associated with Halloween today—including ghosts, werewolves, revenants, and reanimated mummies—have real and well-attested origins in ancient, pre-Christian belief systems. The association of these monsters with Halloween is a relatively recent development, but the monsters themselves have origins that go way back. In this article, I will explore the ancient origins of the monsters I have just named, using ancient historical sources as evidence.

Ghosts

Of all the folkloric beings that are now associated with Halloween, ghosts have probably the clearest “pagan” pedigree. Indeed, belief in ghosts is at least as old as the oldest surviving written sources. In the late third millennium BCE, many Sumerian people believed that certain locations were haunted by spirits of the dead known as “gidim.”

Like many people today, the ancient Sumerians believed that people who died especially sudden, gruesome, or notorious deaths and people who were not given proper burials were especially likely to come back as ghosts. They believed that magical practices and religious sacrifices could be used to keep gidim at bay.

The oldest surviving depiction of a ghost may be a drawing on a Babylonian clay tablet dating to sometime around the middle of the second millennium BCE that is currently held in the collection of the British Museum in London. The drawing is only visible when viewed from above in a specific lighting and has only recently been identified by Irving Finkel, the Assistant Keeper of the Mesopotamian artifacts collection in the Department of the Middle East in the British Museum.

The drawing depicts a female figure leading away a male ghost with a rope that is tied around his wrists. The tablet bears accompanying text describing the proper ritual to dispel a ghost to the underworld. You can read more about it in this article published in The Guardian on 16 October 2021.

ABOVE: Image of the ancient Babylonian clay tablet with the oldest known drawing of a ghost, reproduced from this article in The Guardian

Stories about ghosts are widely attested in ancient Greek and Roman sources. What is most remarkable about these stories is just how incredibly little beliefs about ghosts have changed over the past two and a half thousand years. Again, like the ancient Sumerians and like many people today, the Greeks and Romans thought that those who had died particularly sudden, gruesome, or notorious deaths or were not given proper burials were the ones who were most likely to return as ghosts.

Ghosts appear in many works of ancient Greek literature. The Odyssey is an ancient Greek epic poem in dactylic hexameter verse that was most likely originally composed orally in around the early seventh century BCE. In the Odyssey, Book Ten, there is an episode known as the nekyia, in which Odysseus, the hero of the epic, travels to the edge of the earth. There, he sacrifices a ram and an ewe and summons up the spirits of the dead in order to speak to the ghost of the Theban prophet Teiresias, who, as I discuss in this article I wrote back in August 2020, is quite an unusual and fascinating figure in his own right.

Many ghosts come forth out of the darkness and drink the blood of the ram and the ewe that Odysseus has poured out. First Odysseus sees one of his crewmates, a man named Elpenor who got drunk and fell off the roof on the island of the sorceress Kirke and has been left without the proper funerary rites. Odysseus promises to give him a proper funeral.

Then Odysseus speaks to Teiresias, who advises him on how he should return home and prophesies to him how he will die. (As I discuss in this article I wrote in July 2019, the full story of Odysseus’s death was told in another epic poem known as the Telegoneia. This poem itself has not survived, but several ancient summaries of it have.)

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Lucanian red-figure krater dating to c. 380 BCE or thereabouts depicting Odysseus making his sacrifice of a ram and an ewe to summon up the spirits of the dead

Odysseus sees the ghost of his own mother Antikleia, who was still alive when he left his home on the island of Ithaka many years before. He tries to embrace her, but she floats away from him. She explains that she has died in his absence and passed on to the world below.

Next Odysseus sees the ghosts of famous women of the distant past. He then meets the ghosts of his fallen comrades who fought with him at Troy, including the ghost of Agamemnon, the king of Mykenai, who describes how he was murdered by his wife Klytaimnestra upon returning home, and the ghost of Achilleus, who resents being dead and says to Odysseus:

“μὴ δή μοι θάνατόν γε παραύδα, φαίδιμ᾽ Ὀδυσσεῦ.
βουλοίμην κ᾽ ἐπάρουρος ἐὼν θητευέμεν ἄλλῳ,
ἀνδρὶ παρ᾽ ἀκλήρῳ, ᾧ μὴ βίοτος πολὺς εἴη,
ἢ πᾶσιν νεκύεσσι καταφθιμένοισιν ἀνάσσειν.”

This means, in my own translation:

“Do not give console to me about death, shining Odysseus.
I would rather be on earth and live as a serf for another,
for a man without allotted land and not much livelihood,
than be a king to all the lifeless dead.”

Odysseus, however, consoles Achilleus by telling him about his still-living son Neoptolemos, who he says is a fine young man. (The New Zealand-based classicist Peter Gainsford has an excellent blog post analyzing this scene in depth, in which he explains why it is not accurate to assume that the opinion of death expressed by Achilleus in the famous passage I have just quoted reflects the mainstream Greek view of death.)

After speaking to his deceased comrades, Odysseus sees the ghosts of famous heroes and villains of the past. He sees the ghost of Herakles and he sees the notorious malefactors Sisyphos and Tantalos being punished for their crimes. He says that he would have liked to have stayed longer and seen more heroes, such as Theseus and Peirithous, but he sees so many ghosts of all nations charging toward him with such commotion that he fears what else Persephoneia, the queen of the underworld, might send. He says, in lines 632–635:

“ἀλλὰ πρὶν ἐπὶ ἔθνε᾽ ἀγείρετο μυρία νεκρῶν
ἠχῇ θεσπεσίῃ: ἐμὲ δὲ χλωρὸν δέος ᾕρει,
μή μοι Γοργείην κεφαλὴν δεινοῖο πελώρου
ἐξ Ἀίδεω πέμψειεν ἀγαυὴ Περσεφόνεια.”

This means, in English:

“But before that, countless nations of the dead came thronging
with an otherworldly sound: and pale fear seized me
that august Persephoneia might send to me
out from Haides the head of the Gorgon, that formidable monster.”

Thus, Odysseus swiftly returns to his ship and orders his men to sail away immediately.

ABOVE: Illustration by the Polish illustrator Jan Styka depicting Odysseus attempting to embrace the ghost of his mother Antikleia

Ghosts also appear in works of Greek drama. The oldest work of ancient Greek drama that has survived to the present day complete is the tragedy The Persians, which was composed by the ancient Greek tragic playwright Aischylos (lived c. 525 – c. 456 BCE) and first performed at the City Dionysia in Athens in 472 BCE.

In the play, Atossa, the mother of Xerxes, the king of the Achaemenid Empire, calls upon the chorus of Persians to summon up the ghost of her deceased husband, the former Achaemenid king Dareios I. The ghost of Dareios explains his arrival, saying, as translated by James Romm:

“And you who stand beside my tomb, you chant
your spirit-drawing spells, in high, clear voices,
wretchedly summoning me. But my arrival
has not been easy; the gods below the earth
are better at seizing than at letting go.
Yet I, a king among them, have prevailed.
Be quick, lest I be blamed for tardiness.
What new and weighty evil ails the Persians?”

Atossa explains the catastrophic defeat that Dareios’s son Xerxes has just suffered at the hands of the Greeks and Dareios is shocked by his son’s actions and failures.

ABOVE: Illustration by the English artist George Romney (lived 1734 – 1802), depicting the scene in Aischylos’s Persians in which the ghost of King Dareios I appears to Atossa

Although The Persians is Aischylos’s earliest tragedy that has survived to the present day complete, he is best known today for his trilogy of tragedies known today as the Oresteia. This trilogy also includes a famous ghost. In the first play in the trilogy, Agamemnon, Klytaimnestra, the queen of Mykenai, murders her husband Agamemnon, the king, shortly after he returns home from Troy. In the second play in the trilogy, The Libation Bearers, Orestes, the son of Agamemnon and Klytaimnestra, murders his own mother and her lover Aigisthos, who aided in Agamemnon’s murder, in order to avenge his father’s death.

The third tragedy in the trilogy is The Eumenides. Near the beginning of the play, the ghost of Klytaimnestra awakens the Erinyes, the chthonic goddesses who are responsible for punishing people who murder their own family members, and urges them to seek vengeance against her son Orestes for having murdered her.

ABOVE: Detail from Wikimedia Commons showing Side A of an Apulian red-figure bell-krater by the Eumenides Painter dating to between c. 380 and c. 370 BCE, now held in the Louvre Museum, depicting the ghost of Klytaimnestra awakening the Erinyes

Ghost stories are well attested in ancient Greek and Roman folklore. The Greeks and Romans believed that ghosts were not always malevolent and that, in some cases, a ghost might decide to help a living person, especially if the person in question had done something for them.

The Roman orator and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero (lived 106 – 43 BCE) tells a story in his De Divinatione 1.27 about an encounter the Greek lyric poet Simonides of Keos (lived c. 556 – c. 468 BCE) allegedly had with a helpful ghost. Cicero says that this story was found in the writings of many Greek Stoic philosophers of the Hellenistic Period, which have since been lost. He writes, as translated by William Armistead Falconer:

“The first one is about Simonides, who once saw the dead body of some unknown man lying exposed and buried it. Later, when he had it in mind to go on board a ship he was warned in a vision by the person to whom he had given burial not to do so and that if he did he would perish in a shipwreck. Therefore he turned back and all the others who sailed were lost.”

Stories about ghosts who reward living people in some manner for providing their bodies with a proper burial are common in many cultures. They are so common, in fact, that folklorists have even given these stories a name; they are stories of the “grateful dead.” (This is, in case anyone was wondering, the origin of the band name Grateful Dead.)

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a bust in the Musei Capitolini representing the Roman orator and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero, who tells the story of Simonides and the ghost in his treatise De Divinatione

The Greeks and Romans believed that specific places, including specific houses and public buildings, could be persistently haunted. They believed that ghosts haunting these places could make noises and appear as apparitions. The ancient Roman writer Pliny the Younger (lived 61 – c. 113 CE) tells an extremely famous story about a haunted house in his Epistle 83 to Sura, which bears a striking resemblance to many modern ghost stories. Pliny writes, as translated by William Melmoth:

“There was at Athens a large and roomy house, which had a bad name, so that no one could live there. In the dead of the night a noise, resembling the clashing of iron, was frequently heard, which, if you listened more attentively, sounded like the rattling of chains, distant at first, but approaching nearer by degrees: immediately afterwards a spectre appeared in the form of an old man, of extremely emaciated and squalid appearance, with a long beard and dishevelled hair, rattling the chains on his feet and hands.”

“The distressed occupants meanwhile passed their wakeful nights under the most dreadful terrors imaginable. This, as it broke their rest, ruined their health, and brought on distempers, their terror grew upon them, and death ensued. Even in the day time, though the spirit did not appear, yet the impression remained so strong upon their imaginations that it still seemed before their eyes, and kept them in perpetual alarm.”

“Consequently the house was at length deserted, as being deemed absolutely uninhabitable; so that it was now entirely abandoned to the ghost. However, in hopes that some tenant might be found who was ignorant of this very alarming circumstance, a bill was put up, giving notice that it was either to be let or sold.”

“It happened that Athenodoros the philosopher came to Athens at this time, and, reading the bill, enquired the price. The extraordinary cheapness raised his suspicion; nevertheless, when he heard the whole story, he was so far from being discouraged that he was more strongly inclined to hire it, and, in short, actually did so.”

“When it grew towards evening, he ordered a couch to be prepared for him in the front part of the house, and, after calling for a light, together with his pencil and tablets, directed all his people to retire. But that his mind might not, for want of employment, be open to the vain terrors of imaginary noises and spirits, he applied himself to writing with the utmost attention.”

“The first part of the night passed in entire silence, as usual; at length a clanking of iron and rattling of chains was heard: however, he neither lifted up his eyes nor laid down his pen, but in order to keep calm and collected tried to pass the sounds off to himself as something else.”

“The noise increased and advanced nearer, till it seemed at the door, and at last in the chamber. He looked up, saw, and recognized the ghost exactly as it had been described to him: it stood before him, beckoning with the finger, like a person who calls another. Athenodoros in reply made a sign with his hand that it should wait a little, and threw his eyes again upon his papers; the ghost then rattled its chains over the head of the philosopher, who looked up upon this, and seeing it beckoning as before, immediately arose, and, light in hand, followed it.”

“The ghost slowly stalked along, as if encumbered with its chains, and, turning into the area of the house, suddenly vanished. Athenodoros, being thus deserted, made a mark with some grass and leaves on the spot where the spirit left him. The next day he gave information to the magistrates, and advised them to order that spot to be dug up. This was accordingly done, and the skeleton of a man in chains was found there; for the body, having lain a considerable time in the ground, was putrefied and mouldered away from the fetters. The bones being collected together were publicly buried, and thus after the ghost was appeased by the proper ceremonies, the house was haunted no more.”

This story, told by Pliny the Younger nearly two thousand years ago, is the earliest ghost story I am aware of in which the ghost is described as wearing chains, which he shakes and rattles. This specific motif has remained common in western ghost stories into modern times. It most famously recurs in Charles Dickens’s 1843 novella A Christmas Carol.

ABOVE: Illustration from c. 1900 of a famous ghost story recorded by Pliny the Younger in his Epistle 83 to Sura in which the philosopher Athenodoros Kananites encounters the ghost of a chained and emaciated man

The ancient Greek biographer and Middle Platonist philosopher Ploutarchos of Chaironeia (lived c. 46 – after c. 119 CE) lived in Greece during the time of the Roman Empire. He was born and grew up in the town of Chaironeia in the region of Boiotia in central Greece. In his Life of Kimon 1.6–7, Ploutarchos retells a story about a bathhouse in his hometown that was supposedly haunted. He writes, as translated by Bernadotte Perrin for the Loeb Classical Library:

“Then Damon, who was ravaging the country with predatory forays and threatening the city, was induced by embassies and conciliatory decrees of the citizens to return, and was appointed gymnasiarch. But soon, as he was anointing himself in the vapour-bath, he was slain. And because for a long while thereafter certain phantoms appeared in the place, and groans were heard there, as our Fathers tell us, the door of the vapour-bath was walled up, and to this present time the neighbours think it the source of alarming sights and sounds. Descendants of Damon’s family (and some are still living, especially near Stiris in Phokis, Aiolians in speech) are called ‘Asbolomenoi,’ or ‘Besooted,’ because Damon smeared himself with soot before he went forth to do his deed of murder.”

The ancient Greeks and Romans also believed that famous battlefields were often haunted. In 490 BCE, the Athenians, aided by the Plataians, fought the Achaemenid Persians in the Battle of Marathon. The Greek travel writer Pausanias (lived c. 110 – c. 180 CE), who travelled throughout Greece during the time of the Roman Empire and wrote about many of the things that were there to see, records in his Guide to Greece 1.32.4 that the battlefield at Marathon was still haunted by the ghosts of the warriors who fought there. He writes, as translated by W. H. S. Jones and H. A. Ormerod:

“At Marathon every night you can hear horses neighing and men fighting. No one who has expressly set himself to behold this vision has ever got any good from it, but the spirits are not wroth with such as in ignorance chance to be spectators. The Marathonians worship both those who died in the fighting, calling them heroes, and secondly Marathon, from whom the parish derives its name, and then Herakles, saying that they were the first among the Greeks to acknowledge him as a god.”

Even today in the twenty-first century, many people tell stories similar to the one Pausanias tells about the battlefield at Marathon about battlefields from the American Civil War.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikipedia Commons showing the plain of Marathon as it looks today, with the tumulus of the Athenian soldiers who died in the Battle of Marathon in 490 BCE at center. Pausanias says that the plain is haunted by the ghosts of the warriors who died in the battle.

Christianity gradually spread throughout the Roman Empire over the course of the first, second, and third centuries CE. Over the course of the fourth century CE, Christianity gained the support of the Roman state and spread much more rapidly. By the beginning of the fifth century CE, Christians made up the majority of people in the Roman Empire. By the late fifth century CE, nearly all the people in the Roman Empire were at least nominally Christian.

Ancient Greek and Roman beliefs about ghosts, however, did not die out with the rise of Christianity. Although some early Christian theologians were skeptical of the existence of ghosts, ordinary laypeople never stopped believing in them. In fact, beliefs about ghosts remained remarkably stable.

The early Christian writer Constantius of Lugdunum, who lived in the late fifth century CE in what is now France, wrote a work titled De Vita Germani, which includes a story about a haunted house that is extremely similar to the story Pliny the Younger tells in his Epistle 83 to Sura, written nearly four hundred years earlier, only with a different protagonist. In the story, the Christian saint Germanus of Auxerre finds a house that is haunted due to the presence of improperly buried corpses. He gives the corpses a proper burial, thereby bringing an end to the haunting.

These kinds of stories and beliefs have persisted continuously over the centuries and into modern times.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a medieval statue of Germanus of Auxerre in Paris

Werewolves

Like ghosts and revenants, werewolves are clearly and unambiguously attested in ancient pre-Christian sources. Possibly the earliest known reference to a human turning into a wolf actually occurs in the standard Akkadian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is thought to have been composed by the Babylonian scribe Sîn-lēqi-unninni, relying on vast corpora of older Sumerian and Babylonian poems and stories about Gilgamesh, sometime between c. 1300 and c. 1000 BCE in what is now Iraq.

In Tablet Six of the epic, Ishtar, the Mesopotamian goddess associated with war, sex, beauty, prostitution, justice, and political power, presents herself to Gilgamesh and attempts to seduce him into becoming her lover. Gilgamesh, however, spurns Ishtar’s advances, declaring that she has mistreated her former lovers by turning them into various persecuted animals. In lines 58–63, he says, as translated by Andrew R. George:

“You loved the shepherd, the grazer, the herdsman,
who regularly piled up for you (bread baked in) embers,
slaughtering kids for you day after day.
You struck him and turned him into a wolf, so his own shepherd boys drive him away, and his dogs take bites at his thighs.”

This is not, strictly speaking, a true werewolf story, because a true werewolf is a creature that shape-shifts back and forth between a human and a wolf; the shepherd in this passage is merely a human who is turned into a wolf one time. As far as the text suggests, he never turns back into a human. Nonetheless, this story is still significant, because the first element of a true werewolf is, of course, a human turning into a wolf in the first place.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an Old Babylonian terra-cotta relief discovered at Eshnunna, dating to the early second millennium BCE, depicting the goddess Ishtar, now held in the Louvre Museum

In much later times, ancient Greek folklore closely associated stories of humans turning into wolves with the region of Arkadia in the central Peloponnesos in southern Greece, as well as with human sacrifice and cannibalism. The definitive scholarly work on ancient Greek and Roman werewolf stories is Daniel Ogden’s book The Werewolf in the Ancient World, published by Oxford University Press in March 2021.

In Greek mythology, King Lykaon of Arkadia is said to murdered his own son Nyktimos and tried to serve his flesh to Zeus, mixed with flesh from animals, to test whether Zeus was really all-knowing. Zeus is said to have transformed Lykaon into a wolf as punishment. The earliest reference to this story that I have been able to find occurs in the Hellenistic Greek poem Alexandra, which is traditionally attributed to the tragic poet Lykophron of Chalkis, who flourished in the second quarter of the third century BCE. Line 480 of the poem references the “λυκαινομόρφων Νυκτίμου κρεανόμων,” which means “wolf-shaped flesh-devourers of Nyktimos.”

Fuller versions of the story are told by later authors. The Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso (lived 43 BCE – c. 18 CE), who is commonly known in English as “Ovid,” incorporates a version of the story into his long narrative poem Metamorphoses, which he wrote in Latin in around the year 8 CE. In Metamorphoses 1.216–239, Iove, the chief god of the Roman pantheon, whom the Romans equated with Zeus, narrates the story as follows, as translated by Horace Gregory:

“Lycaon met his fate; here is my story.
I had heard evil rumours of mankind
and with the hope of proving them untrue
I stepped down from Olympus incognito,
no longer Iovian but extremely human,
a traveller walking up and down the world.
It takes too long to list the crimes I saw—
rumours were less amazing than the truth.
I crossed Maenala where every bush and cave
was hideously alive with boars, bears, and foxes,
then through Cyllene and the frost-pine forest
of Lycaeus, and as that twilight dwindled
to ever-increasing dark I stepped across
rough threshold where Lycaon, bitter tyrant
of Arcadian wilderness, lived. I raised
my hand; peasant and shepherd fell before me
to offer prayers at which insane Lycaon
looking at them and me began to roar,
‘Soon we shall know if this is god or man;
I shall have proof of its divinity.’
The proof was simple. When I had feasted
(so he had planned) and heavily asleep,
lifted to bed, he hoped to murder me.
Nor was this scheme enough; he took a Northern
hostage from a cell, slit the poor devilish monster’s
throat and tossed his warm and bleeding
vitals in a pot; the rest he roasted.
This was the dinner that he put before me.
My thunderbolt struck the king’s house to ruins,
and he, wild master, ran like beast to field
crying his terror which cannot utter words
but howls in fear, his foaming lips and jaws,
quick with the thought of blood, harry the sheep.
His cloak turned into bristling hair, his arms
were forelegs of a wolf, yet he resembled
himself, what he had been—the violent
grey hair, face, eyes, the ceaseless, restless stare
of drunken tyranny and hopeless hate.”

Ovid’s Metamorphoses is by far one of the best known and most studied of all ancient Greek or Roman texts. Consequently, Ovid’s retelling of the myth of Lykaon is by far the best known and most influential retelling today. Scholars who have sought to study the origins of werewolf stories have therefore focused heavily on this story in particular.

Ogden, however, points out in his book that the story of Lykaon is not a true werewolf story at all, but rather merely a story about a human who transforms into a wolf one time and never turns back into a human. He argues that the scholarly focus on this story is misguided, especially since there are much clearer cases of werewolf stories in antiquity.

ABOVE: Engraving by the German-Dutch printmaker Hendrik Goltzius showing Zeus transforming Lykaon into a wolf as a punishment for his crimes

The ancient Greeks were familiar with stories of foreign peoples who supposedly turned into wolves on a regular basis. The ancient Greek historian Herodotos of Halikarnassos (lived c. 484 – c. 425 BCE) records in his book The Histories 1.105 that the Neuroi, a people who supposedly inhabited the vicinity of what is now northern Ukraine, were said to transform into wolves for a few days every year before turning back into humans. Herodotos is skeptical of these stories and he explicitly says he doesn’t believe them in the slightest, but he says that he has talked to people who swear the stories are true. Here are Herodotos’s own words, as translated by A. D. Godley:

“The Neuroi follow Skythian customs; but one generation before the advent of Dareios’s army, they happened to be driven from their country by snakes; for their land produced great numbers of these, and still more came down on them out of the desolation on the north, until at last the Neuroi were so afflicted that they left their own country and lived among the Boudinoi. It may be that these people are wizards; for the Skythians, and the Greeks settled in Skythia, say that once a year every one of the Neuroi becomes a wolf for a few days and changes back again to his former shape. Those who tell this tale do not convince me; but they tell it nonetheless, and swear to its truth.”

The Neuroi in this story are clearly true werewolves in the fully modern sense, because they turn into wolves on a periodic basis and turn back into humans. In fact, they are probably the clearest example of werewolves in pre-Roman Greek folklore.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble bust of the Greek historian Herodotos, based on an earlier Greek original

The ancient Greeks also told stories that there was a nocturnal ceremony that took place at the shrine of Lykaian Zeus on top of Mount Lykaion, the tallest mountain in Arkadia. At this ceremony, the participants would supposedly sacrifice a human child. Then they would mince the child’s entrails and mix them with the entrails of sacrificed animals. Then they would all eat from the entrails that had been mixed together and whoever happened to eat the entrails of the human child would spontaneously transform into a wolf.

According to legend, if a person who was transformed into a wolf as a result of eating the human entrails in this ceremony never tasted human flesh during his time as a wolf, he would turn back into a human after nine years. If, however, he did taste human flesh, then he would never turn back into a human and he would remain a wolf forever.

The earliest source I am aware of that references this story is the ancient Athenian philosopher Plato (lived c. 429 – c. 347 BCE), who mentions the supposed ritual in his philosophical dialogue The Republic 565d-e. He writes, as translated by Paul Shorey:

“What, then, is the starting-point of the transformation of a protector into a tyrant? Is it not obviously when the protector’s acts begin to reproduce the legend that is told of the shrine of Lykaian Zeus in Arkadia?”

“What is that?” he said.

“The story goes that he who tastes of the one bit of human entrails minced up with those of other victims is inevitably transformed into a wolf. Have you not heard the tale?”

The ancient Greek travel writer Pausanias, whom I have already mentioned, gives a skeptical account of the legend of an Arkadian boxer named Damarchos, who was supposedly transformed into a wolf for nine years after eating human flesh at the festival of Lykaian Zeus. He writes in his Guide to Greece 6.8.2, as translated by W. H. S. Jones and H. A. Ormerod:

“As to the boxer, by name Damarchos, an Arkadian of Parrhasia, I cannot believe (except, of course, his Olympic victory) what romancers say about him, how he changed his shape into that of a wolf at the sacrifice of Lykaian Zeus, and how nine years after he became a man again. Nor do I think that the Arkadians either record this of him, otherwise it would have been recorded as well in the inscription at Olympia, which runs:–

‘This statue was dedicated by Damarchos, son of Dinytas,
Parrhasian by birth from Arkadia.’”

I would argue that, in the story Pausanias references here, Damarchos is a true werewolf, because he transforms into a wolf and later transforms back into a human.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing modern Neopagans lighting a flame at Mount Lykaion in August 2005

There were also ancient peoples in Italy who told stories about werewolves and werewolf-like creatures. Wolves and deities associated with wolves were very important for the Etruscans, a people who inhabited the parts of Italy that are now Tuscany, western Umbria, and northern Lazio. (People who have been reading my articles for a while may remember the Etruscans for the famous fresco depicting erotic flagellation in the Etruscan “Tomb of the Whipping,” which I discussed in this article I wrote back in September 2019.)

As it happens, the front cover of Ogden’s book uses an image of an unusual Etruscan black-figure plate discovered at Vulci dating to between c. 540 and c. 510 BCE. The plate is currently housed in the National Etruscan Museum in the Villa Giulia in Rome. The center of the plate depicts an odd wolf-man figure who appears to be kneeling, running, or maybe dancing on his hind legs as though he were a human.

There are some surviving Etruscan texts and the Etruscan language is partially understood by scholars. (The YouTube channel NativLang has a really excellent video explaining how scholars have managed to partially decipher the Etruscan language, which I do recommend watching to anyone who is curious.) Unfortunately, the surviving Etruscan writings are very few and there are no texts or other representations that might give context to the specific image of the wolf-man on this plate. It is therefore impossible to determine who or what the figure is supposed to represent.

ABOVE: Detail of the Etruscan black-figure plate dating to between c. 540 and c. 510 BCE depicting a wolf-man

We are on much firmer ground when it comes to the ancient Romans, who have, of course, left behind extensive written records. The word that is most commonly applied to werewolves in Latin is versipellis, which is derived from the verb vertō, meaning “to turn,” and the third-declension feminine noun pellis, meaning “skin.” The word therefore literally means “skin-turner” or “skin-changer.”

The Roman writer Pliny the Elder (lived c. 23 – 79 CE), who was the uncle of Pliny the Younger, whom I quoted earlier, summarizes the lore about werewolves that was known to him in his Natural History 8.80. He writes, as translated by John Bostock and H. T. Riley:

“That men have been turned into wolves, and again restored to their original form, we must confidently look upon as untrue, unless, indeed, we are ready to believe all the tales, which, for so many ages, have been found to be fabulous. But, as the belief of it has become so firmly fixed in the minds of the common people, as to have caused the term versipellis to be used as a common form of imprecation, I will here point out its origin.”

“Euanthes, a Grecian author of no mean reputation, informs us that the Arcadians assert that a member of the family of one Anthus is chosen by lot, and then taken to a certain lake in that district, where, after suspending his clothes on an oak, he swims across the water and goes away into the desert, where he is changed into a wolf and associates with other animals of the same species for a space of nine years.”

“If he has kept himself from beholding a man during the whole of that time, he returns to the same lake, and, after swimming across it, resumes his original form, only with the addition of nine years in age to his former appearance. To this Fabius adds, that he takes his former clothes as well. It is really wonderful to what a length the credulity of the Greeks will go! There is no falsehood, if ever so barefaced, to which some of them cannot be found to bear testimony.”

“So too, Agriopas, who wrote the Olympionics, informs us that Demaenetus, the Parrhasian, during a sacrifice of human victims, which the Arcadians were offering up to the Lycaean Iupiter, tasted the entrails of a boy who had been slaughtered; upon which he was turned into a wolf, but, ten years afterwards, was restored to his original shape and his calling of an athlete, and returned victorious in the pugilistic contests at the Olympic games.”

The clearest example of an ancient story about a werewolf, in which a human being turns into a wolf at night during a full moon and back into a human the next day, comes from the Roman courtier Gaius Petronius Arbiter (lived c. 27 – c. 66 CE), who, near the end of his life, wrote a novel in the Latin language titled Satyrica.

This novel was originally an extraordinarily long work that would probably span several thousand pages in a modern printed codex if the whole work had survived to the present day. Sadly, only a relatively tiny, fragmented portion of the original novel has survived, containing scenes that are usually thought to come from the fifteenth and sixteenth books. The surviving portions are divided into 141 sections or chapters.

One of the most famous scenes in the surviving portion of the novel is a lavish dinner party hosted by an ultrawealthy and wildly ostentatious freedman named Trimalchio. At this party, Trimalchio invites a guest, a freedman named Niceratos, to tell everyone a story. In sections 61–62, Niceratos tells a story about an encounter he allegedly had with a soldier who turned out to be a werewolf. Here is the story, as translated by Michael Heseltine (with some minor corrections of my own):

“While I was still a slave, we were living in a narrow street; the house now belongs to Gavilla. There it was God’s will that I should fall in love with the wife of Terentius the inn-keeper; you remember her, Melissa of Tarentum, a pretty round thing. But I swear it was no base passion; I did not care about her in that way, but rather because she had a beautiful nature.”

“If I asked her for anything it was never refused me; if she made twopence I had a penny; whatever I had I put into her pocket, and I was never taken in. Now one day her husband died on the estate. So I buckled on my shield and greaves, and schemed how to come at her: and as you know, one’s friends turn up in tight places. My master happened to have gone to Capua to look after some silly business or other.”

“I seized my opportunity, and persuaded a guest in our house to come with me as far as the fifth milestone. He was a soldier, and as brave as Hell. So we trotted off about cockcrow; the moon shone like high noon. We got among the tombstones: my man went aside to look at the epitaphs, I sat down with my heart full of song and began to count the graves.”

“Then when I looked round at my friend, he stripped himself and put all his clothes by the roadside. My heart was in my mouth, but I stood like a dead man. He made a ring of water round his clothes and suddenly turned into a wolf. Please do not think I am joking; I would not lie about this for any fortune in the world. But as I was saying, after he had turned into a wolf, he began to howl, and ran off into the woods.”

“At first I hardly knew where I was, then I went up to take his clothes; but they had all turned into stone. No one could be nearer dead with terror than I was. But I drew my sword and went slaying shadows all the way till I came to my love’s house. I went in like a corpse, and nearly gave up the ghost, the sweat ran down my legs, my eyes were dull, I could hardly be revived.”

“My dear Melissa was surprised at my being out so late, and said, ‘If you had come earlier you might at least have helped us; a wolf got into the house and worried all our sheep, and let their blood like a butcher. But he did not make fools of us, even though he got off; for our slave made a hole in his neck with a spear.’ When I heard this, I could not keep my eyes shut any longer, but at break of day I rushed back to my master Gaius’s house like a defrauded publican, and when I came to the place where the clothes were turned into stone, I found nothing but a pool of blood.”

“But when I reached home, my soldier was lying in bed like an ox, with a doctor looking after his neck. I realized that he was a skin-turner [versipellis], and I never could sit down to a meal with him afterwards, not if you had killed me first. Other people may think what they like about this; but may all your guardian spirits punish me if I am lying.”

Ogden identifies this tale in the Satyrica as the clearest and most definitive werewolf story recorded in any surviving ancient source. Consequently, he devotes the majority of his book The Werewolf in the Ancient World to an extended close reading of this story spanning multiple chapters, analyzing every detail of Petronius’s account.

Ogden argues that Petronius’s story is merely one creative retelling of an ancient folktale that must have been widely told throughout the Roman world. Although this specific folktale is not attested in any other ancient sources, it is remarkably similar to the stories about werewolves attested in medieval Europe. Petronius’s Satyrica itself was not widely read during the Middle Ages, meaning this similarity can only be a result of Petronius and later medieval European authors getting the story from the same place: oral folklore.

In the Satyrica, Niceratos mentions that the moon was full on the night when the werewolf transformed. It is, however, unclear whether this detail is included because the idea that werewolves transform during the full moon was already current in Petronius’s time, or simply because Niceratos needs to explain how he was able to see the werewolf transform at night in the dark graveyard.

ABOVE: Illustration by Mont Sudbury for the short story “The Werewolf Howls,” originally published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales (November 1941, vol. 36, no. 2, page 38), showing a werewolf in a graveyard similar to the story told by Niceratos in Petronius’s Satyrica

When the inhabitants of the Roman Empire converted to Christianity in late antiquity, they did not stop talking and telling stories about werewolves. In fact, the early Christian church father Augustinus of Hippo (lived 354 – 430 CE) discusses werewolves in his apologetic treatise The City of God 18.17, citing the statements of the much earlier Roman scholar Marcus Terentius Varro (lived 116 – 27 BCE). He writes, as translated by Marcus Dods:

“In support of this story, Varro relates others no less incredible about that most famous sorceress Circe, who changed the companions of Ulysses into beasts, and about the Arcadians, who, by lot, swam across a certain pool, and were turned into wolves there, and lived in the deserts of that region with wild beasts like themselves. But if they never fed on human flesh for nine years, they were restored to the human form on swimming back again through the same pool.”

“Finally, he expressly names one Demaenetus, who, on tasting a boy offered up in sacrifice by the Arcadians to their god Lycaeus according to their custom, was changed into a wolf, and, being restored to his proper form in the tenth year, trained himself as a pugilist, and was victorious at the Olympic games.”

“And the same historian thinks that the epithet Lycaeus was applied in Arcadia to Pan and Jupiter for no other reason than this metamorphosis of men into wolves, because it was thought it could not be wrought except by a divine power. For a wolf is called in Greek λυκὸς, from which the name Lycaeus appears to be formed. He says also that the Roman Luperci were as it were sprung of the seed of these mysteries.”

Throughout the Middle Ages, people continued to tell stories about werewolves, just like they continued to tell stories about ghosts. These kinds of stories have been continuously told all the way into modern times.

ABOVE: Sixth-century CE Roman fresco from the Lateran Palace in Rome, probably intended to represent Augustinus of Hippo

Revenants

Most people have a clear impression of what a ghost or a werewolf is, but the word revenant often lacks a clear and specific meaning. For the purposes of this article, I am defining the term very broadly to mean any human corpse that has been reanimated, either by the spirit of the deceased or by a demon inhabiting their body.

Under my definition, vampires, zombies, and ghouls are all essentially subclasses of revenant. Undead mummies may also be classified as revenants. I will, however, address undead mummies in the next section, since they have their own unique history that is quite separate from the history of revenants more generally.

The basic idea of a revenant goes all the way back to ancient Mesopotamia. Inanna’s Descent into the Underworld is a famous ancient Sumerian poem that was most likely composed during the Third Dynasty of Ur (lasted c. 2112 – c. 2004 BCE) that describes how the goddess Inanna descended into the underworld. In one scene of the poem, Inanna pounds on the gates of the underworld, demanding to be let in and a doorkeeper named Neti comes to the gates.

A later Akkadian version of the story dating to the early second millennium BCE, titled Ishtar’s Descent into the Underworld has also survived. The Akkadian version is only about a third the length of the earlier Sumerian version, it is much less detailed, and the end of it is missing. It refers to Inanna by her Akkadian name, Ishtar. It also includes an unusual passage that is not found in the older Sumerian version. In the Akkadian version, when Ishtar pounds on the gates of the underworld, a doorkeeper (who is not named in the Akkadian version) comes to the gates. Ishtar then proceeds to make threats, saying, as translated by Stephanie Dalley:

“If you do not open the gate for me to come in,
I shall smash the door and shatter the bolt,
I shall smash the doorpost and overturn the doors,
I shall raise up the dead and they shall eat the living:
And the dead shall outnumber the living!”

This is possibly the oldest mention in all of world literature of the dead rising to feed on the living.

Ishtar makes the exact same threat to raise the dead so that they will devour the living in the standard Akkadian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh, which was probably composed several centuries after the Akkadian version of Ishtar’s Descent. In the epic, after Ishtar attempts to seduce Gilgamesh and he spurns her advances, she goes to heaven to speak to her father, the god Anu, and she begs him to give her a monstrous bull known as the Bull of Heaven so she can unleash it so she can get revenge on Gilgamesh for him rejecting her. She begs Anu and she threatens, as translated by Dalley once again:

“Father, please give me the Bull of Heaven, and
let me strike Gilgamesh down!
Let me . . . Gilgamesh in his building!
If you don’t give me the Bull of Heaven,
I shall strike (?) [
I shall set my face towards the infernal regions,
I shall raise up the dead, and they will eat the living,
I shall make the dead outnumber the living!”

Unfortunately, in neither of these passages does Ishtar clarify whether the hordes of the dead she is planning to unleash are intelligent beings or mindless reanimated corpses. It is therefore impossible to tell whether Ishtar’s undead hordes are more like what we might think of as vampires or more like what we might think of as zombies.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Burney Relief, also known as the Queen of Night Relief, an Old Babylonian high relief carving dated to between c. 1800 and c. 1750 BCE, believed to most likely depict either Ishtar or Ereshkigal, the goddess of the underworld

Revenants also appear in ancient Greek and Roman folklore and literature. In Greek and Roman stories about revenants, they are usually described as looking like young, sexually attractive women and using their sexual allure to seduce living men. The Greek writer Phlegon of Tralleis, who lived in the second century CE, when Greece was ruled by the Roman Empire, quotes at length a letter in his On Marvels 2.1 which tells a very strange love story about a revenant woman and a living man.

Unfortunately, this portion of Phlegon of Tralleis’s On Marvels has only survived in one manuscript and the beginning of the letter is missing from the manuscript. We do, however, know how the story begins, because the Greek Neoplatonist philosopher Proklos the Successor (lived c. 412 – 485 CE) gives a summary of the complete story in his Commentary on Plato’s Republic 2, relying on sources older than Phlegon. The sources are much too long to quote both of them here, but I will summarize what we know of the story from these two sources combined.

The story is set in the city of Amphipolis in the kingdom of Makedonia in northern Greece during the reign of King Philippos II. A young woman named Philinnion, who is probably still in her teenaged years, dies shortly after her marriage to a man named Krateros. Her parents Demostratos and Charito seal her corpse inside the family tomb and convert her former bedroom into a guest bedroom.

Six months after her death, they let a young man named Machates from the city of Pella stay as a guest in the same bedroom that once belonged to her. At night, when Machates is alone in the bedroom, Philinnion herself, risen from the dead as a revenant, comes to him, hot with lust. She tells him that she has come to him without her parents knowing. They exchange gifts as a sign of affection; he gives her an iron ring and a gilded cup and she gives him a gold ring. She continues to visit him every night at the same time for many nights.

Then, one night, the nurse happens to peer into the bedroom Machates is staying in and she sees him consorting with Philinnion by the light of a burning oil lamp. She immediately runs to wake up Philinnion’s parents, telling them to come to the guest bedroom to see their daughter, who has somehow returned from the dead. After about two hours, she gets Charito, Philinnion’s mother, to come to the bedroom. Charito sees her daughter sound asleep with Machates in his bed, wearing the same clothes in which they buried her.

Charito decides not to trouble them while they sleep and to instead confront Philinnion in the morning. By the time Charito returns to the bedroom in the morning, however, Philinnion has already disappeared, so she confronts Machates instead, castigating him for keeping this secret from her, and ordering him to tell her everything.

Machates tells her that the girl’s name is Philinnion and, as proof of his story, he shows Charito the golden ring that Philinnion gave to him and the strophion, or breast band, that she has left behind. Charito breaks down into tears, crying uncontrollably, and Machates promises that, if Philinnion returns, he will let her and Demostratos see her.

Night comes and Philinnion sneaks into Machates’s bedroom at the same time as always and sits on his bed. He pretends as though nothing is different from before, but he secretly sends his slaves to tell Charito and Demostratos to come to his room. They arrive and see their daughter, who they thought was dead, standing there alive. At first, they are shocked and awestruck, but then they run to embrace her. Philinnion, however, tells them, in William Hansen’s translation:

“Mother and father, how unfairly you have grudged my being with the guest for three days in my father’s house, since I have caused no one any pain. For this reason, on account of your meddling, you shall grieve all over again, and I shall return to the place appointed for me. For it was not without divine will that I came here.”

Immediately after saying these words, she falls over dead—a lifeless corpse. Her parents break down crying over her body, mourning the loss of their daughter yet a second time.

Word of Philinnion’s astounding reappearance and her second death quickly spreads throughout the city. By dawn, the whole city has gathered for an assembly meeting. The people resolve to open Philinnion’s tomb and see whether it is empty. They open it to find that the biers of all the other family members are completely undisturbed, with their bodies and gave goods completely intact, but the bier on which Philinnion had been laid to rest is empty, except for the iron ring and the gilded cup which Machates gave to her on the first night when she came to him.

The townsfolk then go to Charito and Demostratos’s house and find Philinnion’s fresh corpse with all her clothing lying on the ground. A seer and augur named Hyllos, who is well known for his skill, proposes that they should cremate Philinnion’s corpse outside the city limits and perform a sacrifice to Hermes Chthonios and the Eumenides for protection.

Then he says that everyone in the city should perform complete ritual purifications, that they should ritually purify all the temples, and that they should perform rites for the deities of the underworld. Everyone follows his instructions, except Machates, who becomes depressed over Philinnion’s second death and kills himself in order to be with her.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the façade of the probable tomb of King Philippos II of Makedonia at Vergina. This is probably similar to the sort of tomb Philinnion might have been buried in if the legend were true.

The Greek sophist Philostratos of Athens (lived c. 170 – c. 245 CE) wrote a biography in the Greek language of the Kappadokian Neopythagorean philosopher Apollonios of Tyana (lived c. 15 – c. 100 CE), titled The Life of Apollonios of Tyana. In book four, chapter 25, of this work, Philostratos tells what is possibly the most famous story of a vampire-type creature from the ancient Greek and Roman world.

Once again, Philostratos’s story is far too long to quote in full, but I will summarize it. In the story, Apollonios of Tyana comes to the Greek city of Corinth and converts a philosopher named Demetrios to become a student of his philosophy. Demetrios, in turn, brings many of his students to learn Apollonios’s teachings. One of these students is a handsome, athletic young man named Menippos, who falls in love with a mysterious woman who is extraordinarily beautiful and is rumored to be very rich.

Menippos first sees this woman as an apparition while walking alone on the road toward the Corinthian port town of Kenchraia. She tells him that she is a Phoenician, that she lives in a certain suburb of Corinth, and that he should come to her house, saying he will know which one it is because he will hear her singing for him inside. She promises him that she will give him “wine such as you never before drank” and that he will have no rival for her affections. He goes to her house and spends the evening with her and he begins spending every evening with her after that.

Apollonios recognizes immediately that the woman is not what she seems and warns Menippos not to pursue her, but Menippos instead decides to marry her the very next day. Apollonios arrives at the wedding and sees that there are expensive gold and silver decorations everywhere, so he asks who has provided them. Menippos replies that they are the woman’s.

Apollonios promptly reveals that the decorations are merely illusions and that Menippos’s girlfriend is, in fact, a lamia—a kind of female vampiric monster that is known to seduce men and then kill them and eat them. The lamia tries to deny and dismiss Apollonios’s accusations, but he proves that the decorations are light as air and they float away. All the lamia’s winebearers and cooks and slaves disappear as well.

The lamia pretends to cry, begging them not to torture her, but Apollonios refuses to relent and she eventually confesses that she is a lamia and that she has been planning to fatten Menippos up with pleasures and eat him, since young, handsome men always have the purest, strongest blood. Philostratos cites the memoirs of Apollonios’s supposed Assyrian disciple Damis of Nineveh as his source for this account. Scholars debate whether these memoirs ever actually existed.

ABOVE: The Lamia and the Soldier, painted in 1905 by John William Waterhouse, one of several paintings he did depicting a lamia

Once again, even when the Roman Empire converted to Christianity, people did not stop telling stories about revenants. There is, however, an interesting shift in the portrayal of revenants from the classical to medieval sources.

As I have already explored, ancient Greek and Roman sources usually portray revenants as young femme fatales, who give absolutely no outwards signs of being dead and use their beauty to seduce men, whom they usually end up killing, either directly or indirectly. The letter quoted by Phlegon about Philinnion and Machates even explicitly says that Machates couldn’t believe that Philinnion was really dead, even after her mother told him, since he had seen her eat and drink right before his eyes.

Medieval revenants, by contrast, are usually portrayed as males who outwardly appear to be corpses and are overtly frightening. For instance, the English historian and Augustinian canon William of Newburgh (lived 1136 – 1198 CE) is perhaps best known today as the earliest source for the legend of the Green Children of Woolpit, which I wrote about (perhaps a bit too credulously) in this article I published back in September 2019. He also, however, records a story of an especially frightening revenant in his Historia Rerum Anglicarum 5.23, as translated by Joseph Stevenson:

“In the northern parts of England, also, we know that another event, not unlike this and equally wonderful, happened about the same time. At the mouth of the river Tweed, and in the jurisdiction of the king of Scotland, there stands a noble city which is called Berwick. In this town a certain man, very wealthy, but as it afterwards appeared a great rogue, having been buried, after his death sallied forth (by the contrivance, as it is believed, of Satan) out of his grave by night, and was borne hither and thither, pursued by a pack of dogs with loud barkings; thus striking great terror into the neighbors, and returning to his tomb before daylight.”

“After this had continued for several days, and no one dared to be found out of doors after dusk — for each dreaded an encounter with this deadly monster — the higher and middle classes of the people held a necessary investigation into what was requisite to he done; the more simple among them fearing, in the event of negligence, to be soundly beaten by this prodigy of the grave; but the wiser shrewdly concluding that were a remedy further delayed, the atmosphere, infected and corrupted by the constant whirlings through it of the pestiferous corpse, would engender disease and death to a great extent; the necessity of providing against which was shown by frequent examples in similar cases.”

“They, therefore, procured ten young men renowned for boldness, who were to dig up the horrible carcass, and, having cut it limb from limb, reduce it into food and fuel for the flames. When this was done, the commotion ceased. Moreover, it is stated that the monster, while it was being borne about (as it is said) by Satan, had told certain persons whom it had by chance encountered, that as long as it remained unburned the people should have no peace.”

“Being burnt, tranquility appeared to be restored to them; but a pestilence, which arose in consequence, carried off the greater portion of them: for never did it so furiously rage elsewhere, though it was at that time general throughout all the borders of England, as shall be more fully explained in its proper place.”

Notice, however, that, even though the male revenant in this story is quite different from Philinnion, it is ultimately killed in exactly the same way—by cremating the body.

ABOVE: Illustration of a revenant from a woodcut dated to c. 1500 CE (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, 2 Inc. c. a. 3893, fol. h.ii.)

Reanimated mummies

I’m cheating a little bit with mummies because, technically, at least as far as I am currently aware, no one in the ancient world believed in mummies coming back to life in the world of the living. Nonetheless, the modern idea of reanimated mummies is unquestionably inspired by ancient Egypt.

Most people are already aware that the ancient Egyptians embalmed the corpses of the deceased to preserve them for the afterlife. The practice of embalming was an aspect of Egyptian culture from the very beginning until Egypt’s conversion to Christianity in late antiquity. Nonetheless, Egyptian embalming practices varied drastically, depending on the time period and the individual embalmer. This makes it impossible to make broad generalizations about the process of embalming itself and the rituals that accompanied it.

Herodotos, whom I’ve already mentioned for his description of the Neuroi, famously visited Egypt and gives stereotyped descriptions of three different processes the Egyptians of his own time used to embalm bodies in his Histories 2.86–90. There was much greater diversity in Egyptian embalming practices at the time than a person might think from reading Herodotos’s Histories, but Herodotos does correctly describe some of the methods that were used and he remains an important source.

ABOVE: Cropped version of a photograph taken by G. Elliot Smith in 1912 showing the exceptionally well-preserved mummy of Pharaoh Seti I, retrieved from Wikimedia Commons

The Egyptians believed that specific funerary rites needed to be performed on a person’s mummy in order for them to survive and flourish in the afterlife. The most important of these rituals was the so-called “opening of the mouth” ritual, which the Egyptians believed needed to be performed on a person’s mummy so that it would be able to receive the person’s spirit and reanimate in the afterlife.

There were many different variations of this ritual that were used at various points in Egyptian history, but the ritual stereotypically involved a priest touching a forked knife known in the Egyptian language as a psškꜣf to the mouth of the face mask of the person’s mummy to symbolically open it.

Wealthy ancient Egyptian people who could afford it were often entombed with collections of traditional spells that were meant to protect them in the afterlife. These collections were known in ancient times as Books of Coming Forth by Day, but modern scholars generally refer to them as Books of the Dead. There was no standard Book of the Dead in ancient times; each individual had their own version, which often varied drastically from each other. Each collection was personalized, with the deceased person’s own name being written into many of the spells in certain places.

Nonetheless, modern Egyptologists have compiled the various spell collections that were entombed with deceased Egyptians into a standard edition, with numbered spells. The opening of the mouth ritual was so important for ancient Egyptians that multiple spells in the standard Book of the Dead are meant to ensure that the deceased person receives this ceremony. Spell 23 of the Book of the Dead reads as follows, as translated in the book Ancient Egyptian Literature: A Book of Readings by Miriam Lichtheim (on page 120), based on E. Naville’s edition of the text:

“My mouth is opened by Ptah,
my mouth’s bonds are loosed by my city-god.
Thoth has come fully equipped with spells,
he looses the bonds of Seth from my mouth.
Atum has given me my hands,
they are placed as guardians.”

“My mouth is given to me,
my mouth is opened by Ptah,
with that chisel of metal
with which he opened the mouth of the gods.
I am Sekhmet-Wadjet who dwells in the west of heaven,
I am Sahyt among the souls of On.”

“As for any spells, any spells spoken against me,
the gods shall rise up against them,
the entire Ennead, the entire Ennead!”

It is important to emphasize that the opening of the mouth ritual was meant for reanimating the person’s mummy in the afterlife, not in the earthly realm. As far as I am aware, there were no ancient Egyptian spells or ceremonies that were meant to bring a mummy back to life in the world of the living.

ABOVE: Illustration from The Book of the Dead of Hunefer, dating to c. 1275 BCE, depicting the opening of the mouth ritual

The Egyptian people gradually converted to Christianity over the course of the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth centuries CE, along with the rest of the Roman Empire. The mummification of the deceased consequently fell out of practice, along with worship of the traditional Egyptian deities and the use of hieroglyphic writing (the latter of which was already well in decline before Christianity even came onto the scene).

In the seventh century CE, Egypt came under Islamic rule and many Egyptians converted to Islam over the course of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. Today, somewhere between 85% and 95% of Egyptian people are Muslims. Meanwhile, somewhere between 15% and 5% of Egyptians are Coptic Christians.

In 1798, the French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte began his invasion of Egypt. He took many of the most brilliant and most respected western European scholars, scientists, architects, and painters with him and his campaigns in Egypt garnered enormous international attention.

During the invasion, Napoleon’s troops discovered the Rosetta Stone, a decree stele that was originally carved in 196 BCE under the orders of Ptolemaios V Epiphanes, which bears the same text in the Egyptian language using hieroglyphics, in the Egyptian language using the Demotic script, and in Ancient Greek. This stele immensely aided western European scholars who were already trying to decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphic writing system.

The French scholar Jean-François Champollion began an attempt to thoroughly decipher the hieroglyphic writing system in 1820, building (without acknowledgement) on the earlier work of the English scholar Thomas Young. In 1822, he published his first breakthrough. In 1824, he published his Précis du système hiéroglyphique des anciens Égyptiens, which demonstrated the first complete, systematic decipherment of hieroglyphic writing.

ABOVE: The Battle of the Pyramids, painted in 1810 by the French Neoclassical painter Antoine-Jean Gros, depicting a battle fought by Napoleon’s troops near the pyramids of Giza on 21 July 1798

These events initiated a western obsession with all things Egyptian, known as “Egyptomania.” Whole armies of looters and plunderers—some of them western Europeans, others native Egyptians—descended upon the Egyptian landscape, scouring the land for lost tombs and robbing them for their artifacts. The trade in artifacts looted from Egyptian tombs swiftly grew into a thriving and lucrative international market. Wealthy western Europeans and western European museums amassed enormous collections of stolen Egyptian treasures.

Westerners during this time period were especially fascinated by Egyptian mummies, which they regarded as scientific curiosities. Ancient mummies were sold in all sorts of places, from the streets of Cairo to high-class auctions in western Europe. Wealthy western Europeans attended mummy unwrapping sessions for entertainment. They would gawk and marvel at how remarkably preserved the bodies were, even though they were thousands of years old.

Mummy unwrapping parties were so popular during the nineteenth century that they destroyed probably thousands of Egyptian mummies by exposing them to air, which quickly caused them to disintegrate. The British surgeon Thomas Pettigrew (lived 1791 – 1865) became particularly famous in upper-class social circles over the course of his lifetime for hosting private parties in which he would unwrap and dissect ancient Egyptian mummies in his living room for his guests’ personal amusement. He alone unwrapped and dissected at least dozens of mummies, if not hundreds.

ABOVE: Photograph taken by the French photographer Félix Bonfils in 1875 showing an Egyptian man selling ancient mummies

It was in this context of western European obsession with mummies and all things ancient Egyptian that the idea of reanimated mummies began to appear in modern literature. Oddly enough, the oldest modern stories involving reanimated mummies do not involve any kind of spells or Egyptian texts and instead portray the mummy being revived through electricity.

In 1818, the English novelist Mary Shelley, who was only twenty years old at the time, published her now-famous science fiction horror novel Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus. In the novel, a young undergraduate college student at the University of Ingolstadt named Victor Frankenstein, who possesses an extraordinary talent for science, fashions a creature from stitched-together human body parts and brings it to life using an unclear scientific principle that he has personally discovered. Shelley’s novel does not include a reanimated mummy strictly speaking, but it does reference the idea of reanimating a mummy in its description of Frankenstein’s monster. The novel says: “A mummy again endued with animation could not be so hideous as that wretch.”

The oldest known modern story about a reanimated mummy is the science fiction novel The Mummy!: Or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century, written by the English science fiction author Jane C. Loudon, who was only seventeen years old at the time she wrote it. The novel was published anonymously in three volumes in the year 1827. The story is set in the year 2126 and portrays a strange futuristic world filled with all kinds of amazing technologies. It clearly draws heavy inspiration from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

In Loudon’s story, scientists manage to revive the mummified body of the Egyptian pharaoh Cheops using a galvanic shock, thereby bringing him back to life. Cheops, however, is not portrayed as malevolent, nor is he portrayed as anything like a zombie. In fact, he is portrayed as very wise and he dispenses useful advice to those who seek his counsel.

ABOVE: Portrait of Jane C. Loudon, whose novel The Mummy!; Or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century is the earliest known work of modern fiction involving a reanimated Egyptian mummy

Over the following decades, reanimated mummies became a fascination for French, American, and British authors especially. In 1840, the French writer Théophile Gautier published a horror short story titled “The Mummy’s Foot,” in which a man buys the mummified foot of an Egyptian princess named Hermonthis at an antiques shop, intending to use the foot as a paperweight.

At night, however, the ghost of the princess herself comes to him in a dream and tells him that her foot is stolen and she wants it back. In exchange for the return of her foot, she gives him a statuette to replace it. She takes him to Egypt, where he meets her father and some other Egyptian kings. Then he wakes up in his bed as though it were all a dream, but he finds that the mummified foot is gone and the statuette is in its place.

The American author Edgar Allen Poe wrote a satirical short story titled “Some Words with a Mummy,” which was first published in The American Review in April 1845. The story makes fun of Egyptomania and scientism. It portrays a physician who is unwrapping and dissecting the mummy of an Egyptian man named Allamistakeo in the presence of a group of friends. They use an electric charge on the mummy, accidentally causing him to come back to life in exactly the same manner that the mummy Cheops does in Jane C. Loudon’s novel.

Allamistakeo turns out to be friendly and the scientists converse with him about history, science, and religion. The doctor and his friends believe that their own time is superior to the time from which Allamistakeo comes, but Allamistakeo is able to demonstrate repeatedly that the Egyptians were equal or superior to nineteenth-century westerners. Finally, though, one man manage to find one technology they have that the Egyptians didn’t: cough drops.

ABOVE: Illustration of Allamistakeo arising from the dead for Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “Some Words with a Mummy,” printed in an 1852 British printing of the story

The modern concept of a malevolent undead mummy brought to life through Egyptian spells is pretty much the single-handed invention of the British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (lived 1859 – 1930), who is best known today as the creator of the fictional detective character Sherlock Holmes.

Doyle had a lifelong fascination with Egypt, the supernatural, and the occult and he wrote two influential short stories about mummies coming back to life. The earlier of these stories, titled “The Ring of Thoth,” was published in 1890. It portrays an Egyptian priest named Sosra who has lived for thousands of years and seeks to reunite with his fiancée Atma, who is dead and mummified.

The second of Doyle’s mummy stories, titled “Lot No. 249,” was published in 1892 and is far more famous. It is the very first story to portray a revived Egyptian mummy as a horrifying, malevolent creature, as well as the very first story to portray someone reviving a mummy using spells from ancient Egyptian texts, rather than electricity. The main character of the story is Abercrombie Smith, a medical student and athlete at the University of Oxford who meets a student named Edward Bellingham, who lives on the floor below him.

Bellingham is described as physically unfit, but possessing extraordinary knowledge of “eastern languages,” Egypt, and mummies. He has a study full of all sorts of Egyptian artifacts, including the mummified corpse of a man, who is described as extraordinarily tall and strong, which Bellingham acquired at an auction. The mummy’s name is unknown, because his outer sarcophagus is missing, so he is known only as “Lot No. 249” after his auction lot.

Bellingham’s behavior grows increasingly erratic and he seems to be growing insane. People hear someone moving around in his study when there is no one in there, the mummy disappears and reappears, and two of Bellingham’s enemies are attacked. Smith concludes that Bellingham has brought the mummy back to life and is sending it to attack people. He confronts Bellingham, who tells him he is doing no such thing. The next day, however, the mummy attacks Smith, chasing him and nearly outrunning him.

Smith goes to Bellingham’s study with a gun and forces him to destroy the mummy and all the artifacts he used to reanimate it, telling him that, if he tries to reanimate any more mummies, he will come back. In the end, Bellingham leaves the university and disappears to Sudan.

The mummy in “Lot No. 249” is not wrapped in bandages because Bellingham has already fully unwrapped him at the time when the story begins. The image of the malevolent reanimated mummy wrapped in bandages seems to have been primarily popularized by the 1932 film The Mummy and its sequels.

Thus, malevolent reanimated mummies are not an ancient Egyptian idea, but they are a nineteenth-century western European idea inspired by ancient Egyptian ideas.

ABOVE: Illustration by William Thomas Smedley showing Abercrombie Smith running away from the mummy, as described in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story “Lot No. 249″

Why I’m not writing about witches in this article

Before I leave off, I feel I should explain what some readers may consider to be a rather startling omission on my part, which is that I do not talk about witches in this article, even though figures who could arguably be described as witches are plentiful in ancient pre-Christian literature (including Kirke in the Odyssey, Medeia in Euripides’s tragedy of the same name, the striges in Greek and Roman folklore, Pamphile the wife of Milo in Apuleius’s novel The Golden Ass, et cetera). There are, however, a couple of reasons why I have decided not to include them here.

The first reason why I don’t talk about witches in this article is because this article is specifically about Halloween monsters and I don’t consider witches to be monsters—or at least not monsters in the same way that ghosts, werewolves, revenants, vampires, and reanimated mummies are—since witches are usually said to be living human beings who have merely learned to use certain supernatural powers that other humans either do not possess or do not know how to use.

The second reason why I have decided not to write about witches in this article is because I think that witches have a much more complicated history than any of the monsters I have discussed and I would not feel comfortable abbreviating or omitting large parts of this history.

People have told stories about people who cast malevolent spells on other people since the very beginning of human history, but I think that the word witch tends to conjure up (pun definitely intended!) much more specific images in most people’s minds. Most of these images are products of much more recent history and are not obviously, directly inspired by ancient “paganism” in the same way that the modern concept of undead mummies is inspired by ancient Egyptian religion.

I may write an article about the history of the idea of witches at some point, but I’m saving that idea for later. I may write about it next year for Halloween or sometime after that.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a scene from an Attic red-figure kalyx-krater depicting Odysseus chasing the sorceress Kirke with a sword, dating to c. 440 BCE, now held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art