#erictho

[monochrome-genesis]

Dumb dmc oc things

[oldschoolfrp]

“In the time of Nero, the Roman author Lucan wrote how the necromantic sorceress Erictho was tracked down by Sextus Pompeius, son of Caesar’s rival Pompey the Great, who wished to converse with a dead man’s spirit. . . She invokes chaos, the Kindly Ones [the furies], Proserprine, Hecate, and Hermes.”  (Roger Raupp illus. from AD&D 2e HR5: The Glory of Rome designed by David Pulver, TSR, 1993)  Besides the historical setting, this campaign book provides two new character kits for specialist mages, the Roman Witch and Philosopher-Mage, some NPC magician rules, plus a few new spells and magic items.

[denisforkas]

Study for the Thessalian Witch (Lucan’s Pharsalia, book 6)*, 2017

Ink on paper, 24.2 x 18 cm

*unavailable

[autumnbell32]

-from, “The Penguin Book of the Undead: Fifteen Hundred Years of Supernatural Encounters”

[loveitloud731-blog]

Just being me in class....

[bakkhe]

Luc. Phars. 6.759-760

Remanent pallorque rigorque/et stupet illatus mundo. “The paleness and stiffness remained/and he marveled at being brought into the world.” (Erictho has just resurrected a guy), but basically this guy is how I feel right now. 

[snailandhammer]

Hard by the reverent ruins Of a once glorious Temple, rear'd to Jove, Whose very rubbish (like the pitied fall Of virtue much unfortunate) yet bears A deathless majesty, though now quite ras'd, Hurl'd down by wrath and lust of impious kings, So that, where holy Flamens wont to sing Sweet hymns to heaven, there the daw, and crow, The ill-voic'd raven, and still-chattering pye, Send out ungrateful sounds and loathsome filth ; Where statues and Jove's acts were vively limn'd, Boys with black coals draw the veiled parts of nature And lecherous actions of imagin'd lust ; Where tombs and beauteous urns of well-dead men Stood in assured rest, the shepherd now Unloads his belly, corruption most abhorr'd Mingling itself with their renowned ashes : There once a charnel-house, now a vast cave, Over whose brow a pale and untrod grove Throws out her heavy shade, the mouth thick arms Of darksome ewe, sun-proof, for ever choak ; Within, rests barren darkness, fruitless drought Pines in eternal night ; the steam of hell Yields not so lazy air : there, that's her Cell.

Erictho's cave, from John Marston, The Wonder of Women, or The Tragedy of Sophonisba (1606) 

Imitated from Lucan's Erictho, I like to imagine this passage in Marston's play as a reference to Blackfriars or St. Paul's - boy actors, shepherd poets, next the site of an ancient monastery.

[babyloniangorgoneion]

This is my painting for the Monsters Among Us group show hanging at Gristle Tattoo right now.  The subject is Erictho, a Greek witch and necromancer consulted by Pompey's son in Lucan's Pharsalia.  Her face has taken on the pallor of a corpse and she lives among the tombs, stealing bodies and body parts and resurrecting them to answer questions from the other side.  I was really drawn to how joyfully destructive and antisocial she is, and how she appears to be in complete control of her own expansive powers and fears no god or spirit. The background monuments were designed after ones you can still see  at the Kerameikos and the ghost emerging from the head is made up of animals associated with Hecate (who she invokes later in the story)

"Whenever black storm clouds conceal the stars, Thessaly’s witch emerges from her empty tombs and hunts down the nightly bolts of lightning. Her tread has burned up seeds of fertile grain and her breath alone has turned fresh air deadly. She doesn’t pray to gods above, or call on powers for aid with suppliant song, or know the ways to offer entrails and receive auspicious omens. She loves to light altars with funereal flames and burn incense she’s snatched from blazing pyres. At the merest hint of her praying voice, the gods grant her any outrage, afraid to hear her second song.

She has buried souls alive, still in control of their bodies, against their will death comes with fate still owing them years. In a backward march she has brought the dead back from the grave and lifeless corpses have fled death. The smoking cinders and burning bones of youths she’ll take straight from the pyre, along with the torch, ripped from their parents’ grip, and the fragments of the funeral couch with smoke still wafting black, and the robes turning to ashes and the coals that reek of his limbs. But when dead bodies are preserved in stone, which absorbs their inner moisture, and they stiffen as the decaying marrow is drawn off, then she hungrily ravages every single joint, sinks her fingers in the eyes and relishes it as she digs the frozen orbs out, and she gnaws the pallid, wasting nails from desiccated hands."

-Lucan