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I hope everyone had a happy Halloween and All Saints’ Day, and is now having a somber and reflective Day of All Souls. Since this is the week for reflecting on death and fear, I thought I might start a thread on another troubling Biblical passage — the story of the Witch of Endor.
This story comes from the first book of Samuel, which I’ve always found to be one of the saddest and most moving parts of the Bible. King Saul, surely one of the most pitiable characters of the Old Testament, has lost the favor of the Lord, and the Philistines are encamped all about the land, in a position to conquer Israel. He prays to the Lord for guidance, but because he has lost God’s mandate and approval, there is no answer. In his desperation, he seeks the advice of his old mentor and advisor, the prophet Samuel. There is one problem, however. Samuel has died.
In accordance with Jewish law, Saul had banished all those who practiced black magic from the land. But now he goes to his advisors and asks them to find him a medium. They tell him that there is a witch living at Endor, so he seeks her out and asks her to raise the spirit of Samuel from the dead. And here is the really strange thing… she does.
Samuel doesn’t offer the sort of help or comfort that Saul is seeking. He tells Saul that his problems are the fruits of his own disobedience, and further, he promises in that both he and all his sons will be “with me” by the end of the next day. Saul, who has been fasting, falls down in terror and grief. The witch proves herself surprisingly hospitable by preparing him a meal before he departs, but of course Samuel is right and Saul and his sons are killed in the next day’s battle, leaving the way open for King David to ascend to the throne.
Now, obviously the strangest thing in this sad story is the fact that the witch is actually able to summon Samuel’s shade. It is primarily this story that always makes me think twice when people ask whether I believe in ghosts. I do, of course, believe in demons. My understanding is that demons are fallen angels, not the souls of the damned; I don’t know whether Satan is entitled to use the human souls he has claimed as messengers to plague the living, but it seems doubtful. Even if he can, though, I take Samuel to be a pretty good guy on the whole, so I wouldn’t expect him to be damned. And if he were damned, why would he be privy to information about the future? So, we should probably assume that Samuel was still one of the good guys. But in that case, how can a bad woman (and despite her kindness in feeding Saul, the witch surely can’t be a particularly good character if she practices the dark arts) call up the soul of a good person? That’s just very bizarre. Presumably if he loved God he couldn’t be summoned against his will by an evil art, but it also seems surprising that God would use someone like the Witch of Endor as a messenger to Saul.
The other funny detail of the story is Samuel’s claim that Saul and his sons would be “with me” the following day. Obviously the implication is that they will be beyond the grave… but if Samuel is waiting in Limbo or Purgatory, or wherever the souls of the just could be found before the Resurrection, it’s interesting that he would expect Saul to be there. Given the way in which his reign ended, Saul’s salvation could legitimately be doubted. Might Saul, if he had understood properly, been happy in the realization that he was not in fact going to be damned?
I guess the bottom line is just that it’s an interesting data point when you’re considering the question of what to think about magic and ghosts. Just on a more general note, I think one of the things that’s always seemed so sad about the story of Saul is that he does seem quite sorry for his misdeeds, but oddly, Samuel, his spiritual advisor, never seems to offer him repentance and absolution as a means for repairing the damage. Once he strays the first time, he more or less seems to be doomed. The story definitely has some of the air of a Greek tragedy, though I suppose it differs in that Saul is actually blameworthy to some degree.
Anyway, I can’t lie… I have before shed tears when I got to the end of the story, when the men of Jabesh-gilead come for his body, to give him an honorable funeral.
St. Louis-Marie de Montfort,
Pope St. Pius X,
St. Joseph,
St. Ambrose of Milan,
St. Thomas Aquinas,
St. Francis (and St. Clare),
St. Catherine of Siena,
St. Alphonsus Ligouri,
St. John Chrysostom,
Yes, it’s interesting how God sometimes uses the least-likely tools. Balaam was a pagan prophet paid to curse Israel, yet God overwhelmed him so he’d bless Israel. The Magi who adored the Baby Jesus were astrologers, diviners, and sorcerers, at least before they got to Bethlehem. People who were not true disciples of Christ and who did not gather with Him still used His Name effectively in exorcisms. God could certainly grant a real apparition via someone he otherwise would not use.
There have been exorcisms in which ghosts of the damned joined the demons in possessing the person. A woman exorcised in Iowa in 1928 was possessed by the souls of Judas and Nero. There are prayers that priests can say in order to “settle” haunted houses. I don’t think that the Rituale names them as such, but that’s what exorcists use them for. Ghosts can and have come back from Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. Of course, the ones involved in hauntings would seem to be suffering something, and so would be coming from either Hell or Purgatory. The need to “wander” in the material world or on its borders can easily be seen as a punishment inflicted on souls not yet ready to enter into spiritual beatitude, or doomed to suffer perpetual torment. The ghost of Hamlet’s father clearly has come from Purgatory, as Shakespeare makes clear.
“The story definitely has some of the air of a Greek tragedy, though I suppose it differs in that Saul is actually blameworthy to some degree.”
Tragic heroes often (usually?) have a tragic flaw. I believe that Aristotle said that you shouldn’t make your hero too innocent or else his calamities will just look sickingly sadistic instead of partially deserved. Pity can be especially acute when you realize that guy *is* getting some justice — you’d love to let him off the hook altogether but truth won’t let you.
Okay. So it is real tragedy. Like I say, in Saul’s case, what I’m really longing for is confession and absolution. Presumably we have to conclude that Saul wasn’t penitent in quite the right way, or he would have been forgiven. Nonetheless, he does seem to feel pretty bad about the mess he made of things. Why does Samuel never offer him that solution? The Israelites are often urged to repent, but in Saul’s case it seems like the main message is “well, that’s it for you then” and the whole sad story just unravels from there.
But King Saul does have a real nobility about him. That’s why it’s so poignant when the men from Jabesh-gilead send the armed contingent of men to retrieve his body and honor it — he had courageously fought for (and rescued) them in his earlier, triumphant days so they genuinely loved him for the truly good things he had done.
One other question: are we really supposed to understand the Magi to have been workers of dark magic before coming to see the baby Jesus? I knew they were supposed to be astronomers, but I didn’t get the impression that they were evil. Is that the tradition?
The main thing that convinces me of the truth of the Gospels is that Christ is so utterly innocent. He is still subject to the chances and sufferings of human life, but He is perfect in thought, word, and deed. There’s no moral education.
And it’s because Jesus is perfectly innocent when every literary convention is against a completely innocent, completely good hero, that I think that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were not making the books up.
You’ve got me, Clara. I imagine that they were true seekers of the natural law, and not practitioners of black magic. But that is what a “magos” usually does — divination, astrology, and stuch. I would have to investigate the matter. I bet the traditions say that they were certainly not involved in wicked things at the time they first beheld the Star of Bethlehem, so they were operating in good will, according to the natural law, in compliance with God’s grace. But still it must have scandalized Jews to see what they surely regarded as “heathen witch doctors” (which *most* magi were, by definition) come to Bethlehem. Even the Romans thought the Chaldeans (as they called them) were quacks and on several (numerous?) occasions expelled them from Rome and even from all of Italy. Shall we should compare them to the Samaritans, whom Our Lord treated very kindly while still acknowledging that they were damnable schismatics (”salvation is of the Jews”).
It is discussions like these (just who were the magi?) that makes me enjoy this blog…
Before I add a real comment let me preface that I too have always liked (is that the correct way to put it?) the death of King Saul. As mentioned before it is very Greek with its tragic flaws.
Now to the point… The original question I believe was how was Samuel conjured up by a witch if he was in heaven? If you will permit me to be historical critical for a moment, my hypothesis is that we must remember that an understanding of the after-life as we know it did not appear in Judaism until later development. This part of the scripture probably fall in that epoch.
Poor Samuel was stuck in sheol. Why couldn’t a witch call upon him?
Well… okay… but you see the obvious problems with that answer, if you take Sacred Scripture to be inspired. The Jews may have easily assumed that Samuel was in sheol, but what are we to take to be the truth of the matter?
As for this question about the Magi, you have me very much intrigued. They do seem to represent natural wisdom coming to God… or something like that… but that raises some questions. Perhaps I’ll ruminate on this one for awhile and see if we can make an interesting thread out of it in another month or so when Christmas is nearer at hand. But in the meantime, if anybody uncovers an authoritative treatment of the topic, please do share.
One more thing about Saul… has anyone ever made much of the fact that St. Paul also began his life with that name? So St. Paul could be like a “second Saul”, the redeemed one? The thought has flitted through my mind before, but I’ve never seen it developed by anyone trustworthy.
I’m going to do some looking into this Saul question by actually consulting some books, but the hour grows late. More later…
Is there anything on the Magi in the old Butlers Lives of the Saints? Their relics are in the Cologne Cathedral!