Episode Details

Perhaps a third of our episode is dedicated to detailing the accounts of mysterious voices emerging from the possessed as documented in pamphlets and broadsheets of 16th- and 17th-century England. Witches are frequently involved, not as the ventriloquist themselves but as those who’ve sent these talkative demons into the bodies of  their victims.  One exception discussed is that of 16th-century case of Elizabeth Barton, also known as “The Holy Maid of Kent” or “The Nun of Kent,” in whose case, the voice happens to be divine rather than demonic.

Several linguistic issues are discussed along the way, including the source of the word “ventriloquist” from the Latin “venter” meaning belly (or more broadly “insides,” gut, or even womb) and “loqui,” meaning, “to speak.”  While to many, the mysterious voices was understood to issue from the demoniac’s belly, other writers looked for a means of trickery employed, focusing on the Hebrew word “ov” taken from the Old Testament story of the “Witch of Endor,”in which  King Saul, seeks out a medium who can foretell the outcome of his imminent battle with the Philistines.  The future, in this story, is revealed by the spirit of the prophet Samuel, summoned from the dead.  (The Witch of Endor is also discussed in our 2018 “Ancient Necromancy” episode).

This necromancer of Endor, is identified in many translations as “a woman who has a familiar spirit,” but in fact, the original Hebrew only describes her as a  ba’alat ov, literally meaning “mistress” or “possessor of the ov.”  The mysterious word can be used to designate a bottle or wineskin, a meaning some have used to paint the medium at Endor as a fake, employing a sort of bottle or bottle-like device acoustically to create an illusion of voice emerging from elsewhere, but the word also has a clearly supernatural meaning in other contexts, one fairly well matched by “familiar.”

Skeptical Protestants likely engaged in their tortured interpretations of the term “ov” as a ventriloquist’s prop thanks to the Greek translation of this story with which they were already better acquainted.  Around the middle of the 3rd century BCE, when Greek was more widely spoken among the Jewish Diaspora than Hebrew,