Familiar Spirits
A familiar spirit, in the language the UPDV uses for the older Hebrew vocabulary, is the spirit a "spiritist" claims to be mistress of — the medium's controlling presence, called up to answer the living. Alongside the spiritist stands the wizard, the necromancer who inquires of the dead. Both are forbidden by the Mosaic law, both are mocked by the prophets as vain, and both are written into Israel's history through one famous transgression: Saul's night visit to the woman at En-dor.
The Mosaic Prohibition
The law sets the rule plainly. Israel is told, "Do⁺ not turn to the spiritists or to the wizards; do not seek them out, to be defiled by them: I am Yahweh your⁺ God" (Lev 19:31). The penalty for the people who transgress is excommunication: "And the soul who turns to the spiritists or the wizards, to go whoring after them, I will even set my face against that soul, and will cut him off from among his people" (Lev 20:6). The penalty for the practitioner is death: "And a man or a woman among them, who is a spiritist or a wizard, will surely be put to death: they will stone them with stones; their blood will be on them" (Lev 20:27). Earlier in the same code the form is even shorter: "You will not allow a witch to live" (Ex 22:18).
Deuteronomy gathers the whole forbidden family into one list. There must not be found in Israel "anyone who makes his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, one telling the future, one interpreting omens, or one who uses magic, or a sorcerer, / or one casting spells, or one requesting a spirit, or a wizard, or one inquiring of the dead" (Deut 18:10-11). The reason given is contrast: "For these nations that you will dispossess, listen to psychics and fortune-tellers; but as for you, Yahweh your God has not allowed you to do so" (Deut 18:14). The rule and the rationale travel together — the practice belongs to the dispossessed nations, not to the people Yahweh has set apart.
The Vanity of Mediums
Where the law forbids on the ground of holiness, the prophets attack on the ground of futility. Isaiah turns the absurdity of consulting the dead back on the consulters: "And when they will say to you⁺, Seek to the spiritists and to the wizards, who chirp and who mutter: should not a people seek to their God? On behalf of the living [should they seek] to the dead?" (Isa 8:19). Egypt, when its native counsel collapses, runs the same circuit: "And the spirit of Egypt will fail in the midst of it; and I will destroy its counsel: and they will seek to the idols, and to the charmers, and to the spiritists, and to the wizards" (Isa 19:3). Consulting the spirits is a sign that real counsel has failed.
Isaiah even pictures the medium's voice in its true register — a thin, ground-level whisper: "And you will be brought down, and will speak out of the ground, and your speech will be low out of the dust; and your voice will be as a spirit out of the ground, and your speech will whisper out of the dust" (Isa 29:4).
The wisdom tradition condenses the same verdict: "Divinations, and soothsayings, and dreams are vain, As you hope so does your heart see" (Sir 34:5). The spirit answers the inquirer's wishes, not the truth.
The Woman at En-dor
The one detailed narrative the UPDV gives of consulting a familiar spirit is Saul's. He is afraid before the Philistine host (1 Sam 28:5); Yahweh has stopped answering him "neither by dreams, nor by Urim, nor by prophets" (1 Sam 28:6). So the king who had himself enforced the law — "And Saul had put away the spiritists and the wizards out of the land" (1 Sam 28:3) — now reverses it: "Then Saul said to his slaves, Seek me a woman who is mistress of a spirit, that I may go to her, and inquire of her. And his slaves said to him, Look, there is a woman at En-dor who is mistress of a spirit" (1 Sam 28:7).
Disguised, he comes to her by night and asks her to "Tell my fortune, I pray you, with a spirit, and call up for me whomever I will name to you" (1 Sam 28:8). She hesitates, citing the very purge Saul had ordered: "Look, you know what Saul has done, how he has cut off the spiritists and the wizards out of the land: why then do you lay a snare for my soul, to cause me to die?" (1 Sam 28:9). Saul swears protection by Yahweh — the same Yahweh whose law he is breaking — and asks for Samuel: "Then the woman said, Whom shall I bring up to you? And he said, Bring me up Samuel" (1 Sam 28:11).
The rest of the encounter is the spirit's own verdict on the inquirer. Samuel's word is not comfort but indictment: "Why have you disquieted me, to bring me up?" (1 Sam 28:15), followed by "Why then do you ask of me, seeing [the Speech of] Yahweh has departed from you, and has become your adversary?" (1 Sam 28:16). The kingdom is torn from Saul's hand and given to David; tomorrow Saul and his sons will fall (1 Sam 28:17-19). The Chronicler later names this consultation as one of Saul's death-warrants: "So Saul died for his trespass which he committed against Yahweh, because of the word of Yahweh, which he did not keep; and also for asking counsel of a spiritist, to inquire" (1 Chr 10:13).
The Wider Mantic Family
The spiritist and the wizard are part of a broader category the UPDV calls fortune-tellers, sorcerers, sacred scholars, psychics, omen interpreters, and charmers — all the trades the prophets and historians lump together as Yahweh's rivals for inquiry. They appear at every court Israel encounters. Pharaoh has his sacred scholars and sorcerers (Ex 7:11), unable in the end to stand before Moses or even to ward off boils on themselves (Ex 8:19; Ex 9:11). The Philistines call their fortune-tellers when the ark afflicts them (1 Sam 6:2). Babylon's king consults talismans, shaken arrows, and the liver at a crossroads (Ezek 21:21); his court is staffed with "the sacred scholars, and the psychics, and the sorcerers, and the Chaldeans" (Dan 2:2), none of whom can read what God has written.
In the indictments against Israel and her neighbors, the same vocabulary returns. Manasseh "made his son to pass through the fire, and interpreted omens, and used magic, and dealt with spiritists and with wizards" (2 Kgs 21:6). Jezebel's reign is summed up in "the whoring of your mother Jezebel and her witchcrafts" (2 Kgs 9:22). Babylon will fall in the loss of "the multitude of your witchcraft, and the great abundance of your magic words" (Isa 47:9). Yahweh will cut off sorcerers from his people's hand "and you will have no psychics" (Mic 5:12), and will be "a swift witness against the sorcerers" (Mal 3:5).
The voice spoken by the talismans is consistently false: "For the talismans have spoken vanity, and the fortune-tellers have seen a lie; and they have told false dreams, they comfort in vain" (Zech 10:2). And rebellion itself is set on the same scale: "For rebellion is as the sin of fortune-telling, and stubbornness is as idolatry and talismans" (1 Sam 15:23).
Continued Forbidding in the New Testament
The Pauline catalogue keeps the term in the list of works the heir of the kingdom puts away: "idolatry, witchcraft, enmities, strife, jealousy, wraths, factions, divisions, parties" (Gal 5:20). The Apocalypse names sorcery twice as a marker of those outside the city — first as the deception of the nations by Babylon's "witchcraft" (Rev 18:23), then as one of the practices that locks a person out: "But for the fearful, and unbelieving, and those who have become disgusting, and murderers, and whores, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, their part [will be] in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone; which is the second death" (Rev 21:8).
Across the whole material the picture is consistent. The familiar spirit, the wizard, the medium speak — sometimes they even produce a Samuel — but what they say is either vanity, or condemnation, or a path that ends outside the people of God. Inquiry that bypasses Yahweh and his Speech is forbidden because it does not work, and forbidden because it does.