Warnings from the Grave: Necromancy, Talking Bones, and the Final Marvel of the Wonders of the East

Abstract

This article examines the concluding entry in the early medieval catalogue of marvels known as Wonders of the East preserved in London, British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius B.v. The text relates the apocryphal story of two magician brothers associated with Pharaoh: Mambres conjures the soul of his dead brother Jamnes through opening the latter’s ‘magical books’ and the dead Jamnes then speaks a warning from hell about the inevitable doom awaiting Mambres. The accompanying full-page illustration, I argue, does not show the reanimated Jamnes in hell (as is frequently assumed), but instead represents Mambres teetering at the edge of an open pit wherein a hairy, green Satan reaches up toward him. While the text affirms the possibility of communing with the dead, the illustration denies and even warns against that possibility by showing Satan, rather than Jamnes, responding to Mambres’ necromancy. I argue that text and image negotiate two different homiletic traditions about the conjured dead, ultimately functioning as both a warning against practising magic and an admonition to prepare for death.