Thoughts on Johnston's Restless Dead

Just over a week ago, I checked Sarah Iles Johnston’s Restless Dead out from my university’s library. Tonight, after reading the first two chapters, I wish I owned a copy so I could start marking it up like a coloring book.

I have many objectives for reading this book:

1. I want to know more about purification and dead people.
2. I want to know more about appropriate etiquette surrounding dead people, and I figure that a book like this would be good for that.
3. There is an entire section devoted to the Erinyes.
4. A creative project of mine requires some fact-checking before I get too far into writing it so I can accurately determine which aspects need to be creative extrapolations and inventions and how much I can draw from credible sources.

So far, the text has proved very dense, and I need to stop reading for a short while to digest some of the information in it. Some of it has altered my preconceptions a bit (read: Hekate is way more important when it comes to restless ghosts than I previously realized), and I discovered an interesting passage about the Deipnon in which Johnston questions whether it was done by everyone at every dark moon or if only those who needed to avert ghosts at the crossroads participated at that time (pp. 61). It just proves that, for every thing a modern Hellenist does, there is probably at least one other piece of literature advocating contrary behavior.

Another particularly striking element is the following, in which Johnston responds to some scholars’ efforts to separate miracles (done by a god) from magic (done by a mortal or demon):

This presumed dichotomy between miracle and magic was rejected several decades ago by subsequent historians of religion after further research showed that it was inapplicable to almost any religious system other than Christianity and perhaps Judaism; those who continue to apply it to systems other than these reveal a completely inappropriate (and probably unconscious) Christianocentric bias. It must be emphasized that until very late times, there is nothing in our sources that suggests that the ordinary Greek made any such division or rejected the mortal use of miraculous powers as “unethical” or “demonic” [emphasis mine] (pp. 33).

I find this interesting because it goes along with something I said earlier this year about working to formulate a more Hellenic ethical response to some issues. What I said focused primarily on thoughts I had regarding my search process from the Wicca-derived Neopaganism I was raised in, along with some (unspoken) thoughts about how it sometimes feels like everyone in the mainstream polytheistic and pagan community assumes that one’s moral framework is derived from the Wiccan Rede. 

I do wonder, however, how much the part I bolded from that passage in Restless Dead mirrors what the philosophers or modern adherents of traditions such as Neoplatonism and Pythagoreanism would say. Obviously, the petitioning of ghosts or underworld gods to do harm to others would probably seem at least ethically gray, and if we want to move towards virtue and the good, asking that a person receive what is due him or her would probably be more effective than explicitly wishing for harm to befall another.

Maybe it all comes down to κρινε δικαια and εττω υπο δικαιου — make just judgments and be overcome by justice. There is a time and a place for every action.