I’ve been listening to a podcast on BBC Sounds called ‘The Witch Farm’ about Heol Fanog in Wales, a real-life haunted house (I highly recommend it – the podcast, not the house – and the previous one called ‘The Battersea Poltergeist’; unless you scare easy, in which case maybe don’t listen to either of them). In a recent episode, the presenter, Danny Robins (whose response to anything scary is always ‘Bloody hell’) set up a psychomanteum. This involved him watching several scary films while depriving himself of sleep for 36 hours. He then sat and gazed into a mirror, then nearly shit his pants when he saw a shadowy figure in it. The point of this was to prove how easy it is to trick the human brain into thinking it’s seen a ghost.
The word psychomanteum was invented by a guy called Raymond Moody. After a near-death experience he built one in Alabama, called the Dr John Dee Theater of the Mind (named after Queen Elizabeth I’s astronomer and famous occultist). Here he carries out (he’s still going) experiments where he gets people to summon visions of ghosts by staring into a mirror in a dimly lit room.
Despite the newness of the word, psychomanteums and mirror divination (called catoptromancy, fact-fans) have actually been around for yonks. A psychomanteum (although it’s not called that) is mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey (written in the 8th century BCE) when Odysseus gazes into a pit filled with the blood of sacrificed sheep and eventually sees his dead mum presumably berating him for killing a bunch of innocent barnyard animals. And in the 1950s, a psychomanteum was excavated at Ephyra in the western Greek province of Epiros. It was a subterranean complex containing fragments of a giant bronze cauldron which was probably gazed in by ancient Greeks looking to contact long-dead relatives. Spooky, right?