Medieval Ghosts
Snuggled in beds of straw, wool, or feathers, medieval villagers hide from the darkness of night through the visage of sleep. Beyond the comforting walls of wood and stone, darker shadows blanket a cold, bleak night. In the quiet ruins of the cemetery, deathly pale and white figures rise from their tombs. A staunch contrast to the evening around them. Floating from their mortal remains on Earth, towards the shadowy figure who summons them. Joined by specters of haggard, naked witches, their long noses dotted with warts, riding on broomsticks across the night sky.
These rising spectral images are the phantoms of monarchs, noblemen, the sinful, and unrepentant. The latter two categories being those whose crimes brought them to the axe, the noose, or the stake. All beings fated to purgatory. The remaining creatures are the beings who yearn to join with dancing demons in fiery pits. For in the medieval time period there are three types of ghosts: the Holy dead (saints, monks, and clergy who all benefit the narrative produced by the early Catholic Church), the demonic, and the spirits of those who are trapped in purgatory.
The imagery detailed above comes from “A Night on Bald Mountain” from the movie Fantasia (1940). Though it is a clip from an animated feature, it paints a poignant picture of ghosts in the Old World. The music piece by Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881) endeavors to be a haunting series of compositions in its own right, without the vivid movie scene. Yet, with those added film cells, it truly captures the fears and supernatural elements of the medieval world.
Musée Condé, Chantilly/World History Encyclopedia/Public Domain
In ancient pagan times, the souls of the dead were not expected to reappear to the living. There were beliefs in an Underworld, with these same ideas mostly limiting to the deceased to staying in those places. The Greeks and Romans, for example, had three distinct realms for their dead: the Elysian Fields, the Asphodel Meadows, and Tartarus. The afterlife homes of the great dead, the good dead, and the evil dead. The last of these places also served to house those who angered the gods. Prometheus was sent to Tartarus for stealing fire from the gods to give to humans. Sisyphus was also ordered there for killing guests in his home, a black mark against the rules of hospitality. That was just one of many deeds committed by Sisyphus. Telling the river god Asopus that his daughter, the nymph Aegina, was kidnapped and assaulted by Zeus was another mark against his name.
Well beyond the torments and terrors of Tartarus, lies the Elysian Fields. It is here that heroes go. The great figures who are remembered from the ancient world and the demi-gods who died in good standing with the other gods. In the Odyssey, Homer wrote of one hero’s prophecy to be carried to the Elysian Fields following his death. King Menelaus, husband of the famed beauty Helen, daughter of Zeus. One of the principal characters in the Trojan War.
Homer, Odyssey 4. (Greek epic 8th century BCE)
“[The prophetic sea-god Proteus addresses Menelaus:] ‘As for yourself, King Menelaus, it is not your fate to die in Argos…The Deathless Ones will waft you instead to the world’s end, the Elysian fields where yellow-haired Rhadmanthys is. There indeed men live unlaborious days. Snow and tempest and thunderstorms never enter there, but for men’s refreshment Okeanos (Oceanus) sends out continually the high-singing breezes of the west.”
Homer, Odyssey 24. 12 ff:
“So did these ghosts travel on together squeaking, while easeful Hermes led them down [to the Land of the Dead] through the ways of dankness.”
Because of these ancient pagan beliefs, it was frowned upon by medieval society to believe in ghosts. It was considered a leftover of heretical ideas. The early Middle Ages, lasting from 476 AD/CE – 1000 AD/CE, is generally defined and classified as part of the “Dark Ages” due to the fall of Rome. In essence however, calling it a “dark age” does not encompass the full period. In particular, the Middle East and the Christian capital of Constantinople prided themselves on expanding their knowledge of the world. The whole idea that the first few centuries of the Middle Ages was a time of darkness, meaning a loss of knowledge and civilization, comes from Renaissance writers and later on, in 1764, in the writings of the historian Edward Gibbon. Gibbon is perhaps best known for his work on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. One of his contemporaries, a Scottish historian by the name of William Robertson, continued this thought in 1770, writing that, “In less than a century after the barbarian nations settled in their new conquests, almost all the effects of the knowledge and virility, which the Romans had spread through Europe, disappeared.”
Science even the most progressive science of this period, had its limits and it could not always compete with the narrative that was presented by one of the greatest establishments of the time, the Church. Stories of ghosts came primarily from writings by the educated in the Church. Monks, bishops, abbesses, deacons, and even popes had tales that they could tell. Among the most prominent storytellers was Pope Gregory the Great (540 CE- 604 CE). Gregory’s stories were more about providing tales of morality. His Dialogi, a discourse with the deacon Peter, was written during the same time that would be known as the “Dark Ages,” bearing in mind that it is a superficial description of the era. This work was hagiographical in nature, meaning that it a narrative of the lives of saints, and a very important writing for the medieval world.
In Book IV, Chapter XL of the Dialogi, there is a tale about Germanus, the bishop of Capua, encountering the apparition of the deacon Paschasius at a public bath in Angulus. Germanus approached the spirit with apprehension, questioning why a good man such as he should be sentenced to serve those still living. Paschasius then related his story of mistaken loyalty in regards to a dispute among other clergymen. There were two men, Lawrence and Symachus, both of whom wanted to be bishop of Rome. Paschasius chose the side of Lawrence, who failed to win the votes of the bishops who were to make the final decision on the seat. Despite the loss, Paschasius continued to support Lawrence until the day he died. By doing so, the deacon had chosen his own opinion over that of the Church. He asked that Germanus pray for him. The bishop would know that his request was answered when Pashasius was no longer at the bath house. Germanus answered the deacon’s request, and after a few days of thorough prayers, he returned to the bath house to find that Pashasius was gone.
A third story of Holy dead comes from Thietmar of Merseburg (975-1018), a Saxon bishop. Written in his history book, the Chronicon, where he tells of a conversation he had with his niece, the abbess of Saint Laurent. Brigid was her name, and she recounted a tale from Bishop Baudry, who was having the church at Deventer renovated. He placed a priest in charge to oversee the project and one morning this priest saw people inside celebrating mass and singing psalms. The priest was certain that they were not among the living. These same dead would go on to murder this poor priest by setting him upon the altar and lit him on fire. The only notion that can really come from this story is not one of morality but of warning that the dead will once again walk the earth. Or so at least the Bible says in Isaiah 26:19, “But your dead will live, LORD; their bodies will rise – let those who dwell in the dust wake up and shout for joy.”
Another popular source for medieval ghost stories was a monk by the name of Bede (672/3-735), who wrote the Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Bede told the story of a lady Tortgith, who was in failing health and could not use her limbs or tongue. Suddenly she awoke from her state of painful, sick limbo and spoke to a figure she saw hovering above her bed. She stated her happiness of seeing the visitor and asked that her suffering may not continue much longer. When those near her asked to whom she was speaking, Tortgith said that it was the spirit of her mother Ethelberga. She lived just one more day before passing into a realm where her mortal pain could no longer touch her.
In the Historiarum Libri Quinque, or the Five Books of Histories, by Rodulfus Glaber, there is a tale of a demonic ghost. The monk wrote of being frightened from his sleep by a hunchbacked little man with black eyes, a hound’s teeth, a beard like that of a goat. The monk ran towards the monastery, saying prayers all along the way, and recounted all of his sins in front of the altar of Father Benedict.
One conclusion that may be garnered from this last story is that even tales of a demonic nature with their dark, devilish looking figures, continue on the tradition of church based ghostly tales designed to prick at morality and sins. It is a fearful type of propaganda designed to maintain the flocks on a path to eternal salvation. The stories that take place in sleep or in a partially awakened state can have solid explanations of the sub-conscious mind playing into a number of levels of internal thoughts and plagues of guilty memories. Those that take place near the time of death can also be explained by the seeking of hopefulness in the bleakness of obscurity that is about to take place. For those who do believe in life after death, there are also a number of stories that give justification to their philosophies.
Noticeably absent from these stories are tales of ghostly experiences among the average person. Even the tale by Bede about an average, though prominent townsperson, still fits within a Biblical type of commentary. After all, the woman was passing from this world into the next and it was an ideal example of finding eternal life free from pain. They also mark a huge shift in societal ideas that the spirits of the dead should remain in the afterlife. If a spirit is going to come back, it should be to aid in the redemption of the living.
In the ninth century there came another large jump in ideas about the dead and how their spirits should be treated. There was an increase in ghost stories and there was also a change that was designed to benefit the Church. Prayers for the deceased would be made several times following their death and offerings would be made for the dead. Perhaps not surprising, these offerings were in the form of donations given directly to the church. These new masses and offerings became what is known as the liturgy of the dead. It developed during the Carolingian Renaissance, the first of the medieval renaissances, it occurred during the reign of Charlemagne and pulled heavily from the Christian Roman Empire that existed during the fourth century.
The twelfth century brought about another Renaissance. It was an evolution and continuation of practices begun during the reign of Charlemagne, who sought to fill his court with scholars and to revive art and literacy. By the twelfth century, courts had their own clerics who could record stories without the eyes of a church looking over their shoulders. Overall power in Europe was also being shared by both the monarchies and the Church. As a result, instead of stories relating to salvation or damnation, ghost stories became about tales of wonder and supernatural exploits. A few tales also seem to draw upon the ancient pagan stories that were once tried to hidden. Such as the story of the Wild Hunt that takes place in the Peterborough Chronicle. In which, it came about that the abbot, Henry of Poitou, went to abbey of Peterborough. Soon after his arrival on February 6, 1127, the abbey was surrounded by apparitions of wicked looking hunters riding dark horses and stags accompanied by ugly hounds. At night, the monks would hear the hunting horns being blown. This continued periodically through Easter of that same year. This tale though gives greater credence to an unlikable candidate for the abbacy, one who gained his position by appealing to a king, than it does to a ghostly ensemble of hideous hunters.
What followed these stories were ones of a literary nature for the sole purpose of being stories, not “true” tales designed to have people see a specific religious or political point of view. For brief examples, the ones that appear in sagas, tales of King Arthur, or romantic stories of phantom knights.
From the Laxdæla Saga 13th century: "That same evening that Thorkell and his followers were drowned, it happened at Holyfell that Guðrún went to the church, when other people had gone to bed, and when she stepped into the lich-gate she saw a ghost standing before her. He bowed over her and said, 'Great tidings, Guðrún.' She said, 'Hold then your peace about them, wretch.' Illustration from "Vore fædres liv": karakterer og skildringer fra sagatiden / samlet og udggivet af Nordahl Rolfsen; oversættelsen ved Gerhard Gran., Kristiania: Stenersen, 1898. English description translated from Icelandic by Muriel A C Press in 1880./Wikipedia/Public Domain
Beginning at the same time as the renaissance of the twelfth century and leading into the fourteenth, the Church was gaining a need to insert itself back into the minds of the people. Kings were holding their own intellectual courts and there were groups of people who held wealth and power outside of the church walls. The Knights Templar (active from 1119-1312) being one of those said groups. The Black Death (1347CE-1351CE) also caused a serious blow to the faith of the common people. Going along with the earlier scare tactics of using the ideas of spirits and demons coming back to ensure that people followed a strict path of Christen morals. It was determined that anyone who undermined the beliefs of the Church in anyway were guilty of heresy. Heresy itself contained a long list of possibilities: being non-Christian, believing in the ideas of Martin Luther, communicating with demons, the practice of witchcraft. Even witchcraft was not a clear answer as to what made one a witch. Someone who poisoned a court rival could be a witch, a person with a wart on their body, someone who was disliked by their neighbors, a midwife who delivered a child that did not live past its birth. So, it came to pass towards the end of the Middle Ages that beliefs in ghosts turned to the summoning and use of spirits and familiars by witches to further their heretical crimes.
As for witches and their familiars, that will be a post for another time.
References:
Primary Sources:
Bede. The Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Penguin Publishing Group, 1991.
Eusebius of Caesarea. The Chronicon Book I, Chapter VII.
Glabri, Rodulfi. Historiarium Libri Quinque, in Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina, ed. J.P. Migne, CXLII, cols. 40-1.
Ginzbury, Carlo. The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. Translanted by John and Anne Tedeshebi, 6
Homer, The Odyssey. Greek Epic 8th Century, BCE
Pope Gregory V. The Dialogues of St. Gregory, translated by E.G. Gardner, London 1911, pp. 234-5.
Secondary Sources:
Fantasia. Directed by Samuel Armstrong, James Algar, Bill Roberts, Paul Satterfield, Ben Sharpsteen, David D. Hand, Hamilton Luske, Jim Handley, Ford Beebe, T. Hee, Norman Ferguson, Wilfred Jackson. Walt Disney, 1940.
Isaiah 26:19 English Standard Version 2016 (ESV)
Joynes, Andrew. Medieval Ghost Stories: An Anthology of Miracles, Marvels and Prodigies. Boydell & Brewer, 2006.
Mark, Joshua J. Ghosts in the Middle Ages. World History Encyclopedia. (June 20, 2019)
Schmitt, Jean-Claude. Fagan, Teresa Lavendar (Translator) Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society. University of Chicago Press, 1999
Ward-Perkins, Bryan. The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization. Oxford University Press, 2006.
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