The Whole Haunted World #17

The Witch of Endor meets Erichtho, the grossest witch EVER

I seem to be somewhat…adrift lately.

I know I’m hardly alone in that. Many of us (Americans, I mean) are watching our country being pillaged by Cap’n Trump, Long John Elon, his merry band of DOGE, and their crew of affiliated pirates and privateers, and feeling completely powerless…adrift, in other words.

In my particular case, my two careers are currently poised on the two extreme ends of the spectrum: one (writing) currently has almost zero business, while the other (bookselling) has FAR more business than I can keep up with. My job as a bookseller at the Iliad Bookshop in North Hollywood has recently reached the point of exhausting overwhelm, thanks mostly to word-of-mouth spreading via social media. The Iliad has long been something of a hidden gem in L.A.’s sprawling culture (yes, you East Coasters, L.A. has CULTURE), lost in the haze of the San Fernando Valley (which seldom gets the news coverage that other parts of the metrosprawl do). But we’ve been discovered by the influencers, our business is EXPLODING, and we have neither the space nor the staff to keep up with it. My co-workers - who are all considerably younger than I am! - are all perpetually exhausted. Our Saturdays in particular invoke such dread that some of my fellow employees have told me they’re just eaten up with anxiety come Friday night. Me, I probably end up (like right now)…ummm, over-medicating on Saturday nights.

On the other side of the job spectrum…I still have no new books on the horizon. My agent is shopping my novel, but he has given up on a non-fiction book that is a dream project, so I’m pursuing that one on my own.

Death of Simon Magus in the Nurenberg Chronicle

I do have some fabulous short works in the pipeline: articles on Rosemary’s Baby and Hellbender, short fiction in anthologies edited by James Chambers, Stephen Jones, and Chuck Palahniuk/Michael Bailey - but that’s it. Today, out of a sort of desperation, I started a new piece of totally freelance fiction that I hope will blossom into a novella, and it felt GREAT. I hope to be able to report on that more as it grows.

In the meantime, I’m also working on more of my historical ghost investigations. Next up: Simon Magus, the wackiest Biblical story you probably don’t know. Simon was a hardcore magician who kept the ghost of a boy as a slave and challenged the Apostles in contests to raise the dead - this is seriously crazy shit! I think you’ll enjoy what I’m finding on Simon. To me, writing about these historical hauntings is all about finding connections and revealing our own human history, and I hope you’ll be fascinated by what I’m uncovering about Simon.

Until next issue, thank you again for joining me on this journey and stay real.

Lisa

PART 2 of “Saul and the Witch of Endor”

(In The Whole Haunted World #16, I shared Part 1 of my exploration into the Biblical tale of Saul and the Witch of Endor, who calls up the spirit of the prophet Samuel at the command of Saul, who has banned all those with “familiar spirits” from his kingdom; what follows is the remainder of that piece)

Something else to consider is: why isn’t the witch a he? After all, magicians were typically thought to be men…or were they? Daniel Ogden, an expert in occult practices of the classical world, noted how prominent “the association of necromancy with female specialists in the Greco-Latin tradition” is, and certainly that continues down through the centuries, from the witches who were murdered by the thousands during the inquisition to the Spiritualist mediums of the 19^th-century to the channelers of the 1970s. The Endor medium is often said to be drawn in part from possibly the first great witch of literature, The Odyssey’s Circe, who instructs the hero on how to summon up the spirit of the prophet Tiresius, who can help him find his way home from the Trojan War. Note also the mention above of Pythia, the great Oracle of Delphi – and a woman.