Origin The character Erichtho may have been created by the poet
Ovid, as she is mentioned in his poem
Heroides XV. It is likely that the character was inspired by the legends of
Thessalian witches developed during the
Classical Greek period. According to many sources, Thessaly was notorious for being a haven for witches, and "folklore about the region has persisted with tales of witches, drugs, poisons and magical spells ever since the Roman period." However, Erichtho's popularity came several decades later, thanks to the poet
Lucan, who featured her prominently in his
epic poem Pharsalia, which details
Caesar's Civil War.
Lucan's Pharsalia in his epic poem
Pharsalia. In Lucan's
Pharsalia, Erichtho is repugnant (for instance, she is described as having a "dry cloud" hang over her head and that her breath "poisons otherwise non-lethal air"), She lives on the outskirts of society and makes her home near "graveyards,
gibbets, and the battlefields copiously supplied by civil war"; she uses the body parts from these locations in her magic spells. Indeed, she delights in otherwise heinous and macabre acts involving corpses (for instance, "when the dead are confined in a
sarcophagus […] then she eagerly rages every limb. She plunges her hand into the eyes, delights at digging out the congealed eyeballs, and gnaws the pallid nails on a desiccated hand."). She is a powerful
necromancer; while she is surveying dead bodies in a battlefield it is noted that "If she had tried to raise up the entire army on the field to return to war, the laws of
Erebus would have yielded, and a host—pulled from the
Stygian Avernus by her terrible power—would have gone to war." It is for this reason that she is sought by
Pompey the Great's son,
Sextus Pompeius. He wants her to perform a necromantic rite so that he might be able to learn the outcome of the
Battle of Pharsalus. Erichtho complies and wanders amidst a battlefield to seek out a cadaver with "uninjured tissues of a stiffened lung". She cleans the corpse's organs, and fills the body with a potion (consisting of, among other things, a mixture of warm blood, "lunar poison", and "everything that nature wickedly bears") so as to bring the dead body back to life. The spirit is summoned, but, at first, refuses to return to its old body. She then promptly threatens the entire universe by promising to summon "that god at whose dread name earth trembles". Immediately following this outburst, the corpse is reanimated and offers a bleak description of a civil war in the underworld, as well as a rather ambiguous (at least, to Sextus Pompeius) prophecy about the fate that lies in store for Pompey and his kin. , a character prominently featured in
Virgil's
Aeneid. Because the sixth book of
Pharsalia is seen by many scholars as being a reworking of the sixth book from Virgil's
Aeneid, Erichtho is often viewed as the "antithetical counterpart to Virgil's
Cumaean Sibyl. Indeed, both fulfill the role of helping a human gain information from the underworld; however, while the Sibyl is pious, Erichtho is wicked. Masters, as Zissos points out, argues that the Sibyl's commands to bury Misenus and find the
Golden Bough are inverted and compacted in Lucan: Erichtho needs a body—not buried—but rather retrieved. the opposing manner in which those seeking information from the underworld are described (the Sibyl urges Aeneas to be courageous, whereas Erichtho criticizes Sextus Pompeius for being cowardly), Simon A. Gilson notes that such a story is "without precedent in medieval sources, and highly problematic". a reworking of medieval concepts about necromancy, Gilson contends that the reference to Erichtho reinforces the fact "that Dante's own journey through Hell is divinely willed," although "this is achieved at the expense of the earlier necromantically inspired journey undertaken by Virgil." Similarly,
Rachel Jacoff argues: Dante's rewriting of the Lucanian scene 'recuperates' the witch Erichtho by making her necessary to the Dantean Virgil's status as guide: she thus functions in accord with the Christian providence that controls the advancement of the
Commedias plot line. At the same time, the Lucanian Erichtho is both marginalized and subordinated to a higher power. In this sense, Dante's rewriting of Erichtho also undoes Lucan's subversion of the original Virgilian model. Although it was a literary
anachronism to associate Lucan's Erichtho (who summoned a shade to foretell the
Battle of Pharsalus in 48 BC) with the shade of
Virgil (who would not die until 19 BC), this connection successfully plays upon the popular medieval belief that Virgil himself was a magician and prophet. Erichtho's speech takes the form of a
soliloquy, in which she references the Battle of Pharsalia, Julius Caesar, and Pompey. She also alludes to Lucan, claiming that she is "not so abominable as the wretched poets [i.e. Lucan and
Ovid] painted me." This scene immediately precedes the entrance of
Mephistopheles, Faust, and Homunculus to the rites that result in Faust's Dream Life Sequence as a knight living in a castle with
Helen of Troy—until the death of their child shatters the fantasy and Faust returns to the physical world for the conclusion of the play. In
John Marston's
Jacobean play The Tragedy of Sophonisba, which is set during the
Second Punic War, the prince of
Libya, Syphax, summons Erictho from Hell, and he asks her to make Sophonisba, a
Carthaginian princess, love him. Erichto, via the "power of sound", casts a spell that causes her to take on the likeness of Sophonisba; she subsequently has sexual intercourse with Syphax before he is able to realize her identity. Many critics, according to
Harry Harvey Wood, "have dismissed [this scene] as revolting." ==Notes==