ColossiansOne

fortune · 2 claims

Consulting the Dead

Forbidden in the law, prosecuted by Saul, and then used by Saul the night before he dies.

Familiar spiritsNecromancy

The Hebrew Bible legislates repeatedly against those who have familiar spirits — the ov — and then gives the most memorable scene of one in operation. Saul, having driven the mediums out of the land, goes in disguise to the woman at Endor and asks her to bring up Samuel, who arrives and tells him he will die tomorrow.

The text does not treat the consultation as fraud. Something comes up, and what it says is true. The later 'familiar spirit' of the deliverance literature means something rather different: an attendant spirit attached to a person or a family line, which is closer to the grimoires' promise of a familiar than to anything in 1 Samuel.

Oldest first

Who was blamed, and by which text?

Each card is one text making one attribution, in its own framing. Reading down the column is a transmission history rather than a set of independent witnesses — and where a claim carries a grading, that grading is about how well it is grounded in the passage it cites, nothing more.

A familiar spirit

Hebrew Bible & Deuterocanon · c. 900–100 BCE

The medium at Endor brings up Samuel at Saul's request; the apparition speaks and its prediction holds.

1 Samuel 28:7–20

Familiar spirits

Pigs in the Parlor: A Practical Guide to Deliverance · 1973

Understood as spirits attached to a family or individual across generations, gaining access through ancestral occult involvement.

Grading · Moderate as a phrase, weak as a doctrine. The biblical term denotes a medium's spirit; the generational-inheritance framework is modern.

Which texts make these claims?

Oldest first. The distance between the earliest and the latest is the thing worth looking at: a claim made in an incantation four thousand years ago and one made in a paperback in 1973 are different kinds of evidence about the same symptom.

All afflictions