Informed speculation about the Psalms as ancient media technology for managing ghosts

In Babylonian medicine, there was a disease category called sibit etemmi, seizure by a ghost. The ghosts of deceased family members, fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters needed attention — they were pacified and contented through ancient practices of care for the dead. Otherwise, their lurking effects would portend evil.[fn 1]

Particularly unnerving to those living were unfamiliar ghosts — those that were unattached or strange — like “the roving ghost with no one to care for him” … “May the evil [portended by] his cry go off after him. May the evil [portended by] his cry not approach me.” (Babylonian prescription. Scurlock. 2006, 178).

According to JoAnn Scurlock’s tabulation of the prescription texts she considered about ghost-induced illnesses (Scurlock. 2006, 5):

• 2 deal with a ghost that cries out in a person’s house

• 52 deal with a ghost that visibly appears

• 173 deal with a ghost that manifests in a physical symptom, like an aching head, a ringing ear, or a rumbling stomach.

• (125 are too fragmentary to describe the ghost)

I wish, for the sake of my series on Psalm 23, that the ghost who cries out in a person’s house was much more common. It would be amazing, frankly, if the singer of a Psalm was invited to voice the cry of a ghost — a spirit possession linking the voice of a living singer to the haunts of the past dead. But if the numbers above are indicative, it is far more likely that the singer’s complaints about his bodily symptoms are a map of his world’s specters — the body is haunted.

Could a textualized body be haunted?

Whether ghosts imposed on the living visually, audibly, or through medical distress, one commonality between familiar and unfamiliar ghosts in Scurlock’s Babylonian medical texts was the importance of the circumstances of their deaths. [fn2]

Whether you be a strange ghost, whose name nobody knows, or a roving ghost, or a roaming ghost, or the ghost (of someone) who was abandoned in the steppe, or the ghost (of someone) who died in water…in a river…in a well…of hunger…of thirst…burned in fire…has nobody to care for him. (Babylonian incantation. Scurlock. 2006. 33).

Were strange ghosts crying through the Psalms of first-person speech?

Were strange ghosts manifesting in the embodied first-person poetics of the Psalms?

Did ghosts haunt the bodies that are textualized by the Psalms?

Was this a poetics giving voice to errant ghosts?

Was this a poetics of an individual calling for protection from ghosts?

Was this a poetics of an individual calling for protection from the ghosts inside his body?

Was this a poetics that effectively evacuted bodily ghosts?

— OR —

Was this a poetics that was invented to protect the world, the kingdom, the temple — where a set of inscribed songs are like a garbage dump — the Psalms make songs materially durable and voice the symptoms of distressed bodies — all of which functions like a sink-hole that stores the roaming ghosts of history, the ghosts threatening the contemporary world of the living?

If this was a poetics that managed the overflow of unfamiliar ghosts who died bad deaths with no one to care for them — was this an inscribed poetics that was stored in the temple archives for apotropaic purposes?

Were embodied, material Psalm poetics a new technology of apotropaic magic for a temple or kingdom?

Were embodied, material Psalm poetics a linguistic, durable technology for national ghost-writing?

________________________

fn1. Most Babylonian diseases of the first millennium BCE were not linked to ghosts but rather to a much wider array of agents of affliction: demons/spirits, sorcerers, broken oaths, physical substances, and especially hands of gods. There will likely never be a modern system that explains all of these agents. The guarantee that we are looking at texts that are still randomized by medical pluralism warrants against trying. But medical pluralism also introduces a fascinating principle that may be widely applicable to ancient medical discourses — namely that one group’s demon may be another group’s ghosts, one group’s magical-healer may be another group’s medical adversary. A thorough investigation of emic terminology for the agents of affliction is needed: an investigation that does not adopt the categories of medical/magical and that does not force the evidence into etic categories of demons, gods, ghosts, and adversaries in the social domain (sorcerers, oaths, curses, etc.). A second general principle about ancient West Asian medical discourses (and I am especially thinking here about the grossly under-discussed/theorized Hebrew medical discourses) that I consider a good hypothesis is that malevolent “ghosts” were wellness concepts in the domains of ancestral practices and oral/literary epics of filiation while “demons” were wellness concepts in the domains of cosmology-oriented genres, everything from the minor cosmogonies of chain incantations to the cosmogonic discourses of righteous sufferers (which includes Israelite prophets) to the major cosmogonies of royal/temple ritual-scripts.

fn2. The most famous example of how important a ghost’s death was appears on Tablet XII of the standard Babylonian text of Gilgamesh. It echoes an ancient Sumerian composition — Bilgamesh and the Netherworld. In the SB versions, Gilgamesh’s warrior companion (Enkidu) has died and is permitted to enter the world of the living as a shade where the two friends (one living, one dead) can converse about life/afterlives in the netherworld. The dialogue is a Q&A — they discuss two categories of ghosts: (1) Men by the number of their sons. A higher number of sons implies better care for the ghost by the living for the dead. Indeed, the man with seven sons sits among the junior deities listening to their proceedings! (2) Men by the conditions of the their death — in battle, in an open field. [It is possible that they discuss ghosts according to their social roles, for example, a eunuch — in the broken middle section of Tablet XII.]

In this poignant image, Vik Muniz reimagines Jacques-Louis David’s “The Death of Marat” by depicting a Jardim Gramacho worker using recycled pieces from the Brazilian landfill. This image is part of his series, “Pictures of Garbage” about which he says:

In 2008, my work as an artist took me to a gigantic landfill outside Rio de Janeiro called Jardim Gramacho. After operating for more than 30 years, the sanitary facility, once one of the largest in the world, had reached its maximum capacity and was on the eve of closing permanently. A garbage dump like Gramacho is a good place to observe how things that were once useful or meaningful can descend into a material purgatory, where everything is mixed back into a primeval mess. In Gramacho, nothing is complete; only fragments of things stubbornly holding on to some residual property or identity remain. Amid the decay, there is also a sense of entropy. Here in the refuse heap, discarded designs and once-popular labels from our excessively commercialized world blend together. This is the ultimate effect of our economic growth that could only be financed by the atomization of desire. (Vik Muniz, “Reframing Trash Into Art.” 2023. A guest essay for Turning Points, NYTimes)

Jacques-Louis David’s original “Death of Marat” was painted during the French Revolution and specifically, during the Reign of Terror in 1793 that took his friend’s life.