An Old Charge, a Practice with No Living Line

The consulting of the dead for hidden knowledge is attested about as far back as any recorded practice: the Odyssey describes Odysseus performing a blood offering at the edge of the underworld to draw ghosts who can speak to him, and the Hebrew Bible describes King Saul seeking out a medium at Endor to raise the spirit of the prophet Samuel against his own earlier ban on such consultation, a passage that treats the practice as both effective and forbidden in the same breath. That double character, real enough to fear and forbidden strongly enough to legislate against, runs through the practice's entire history: biblical law condemns it explicitly, and medieval Christian and Islamic authorities alike classed necromancy among the most dangerous of forbidden arts even while grimoire compilers kept writing procedures for it. Medieval and Renaissance grimoire literature blurred necromancy with ceremonial magic more broadly, and much of what circulated under the name concerned commanding spirits generally rather than the dead specifically, a looseness in the term historians of magic have had to untangle.

Unlike many divinatory or magical practices with an unbroken or reconstructed modern lineage, necromancy has no continuous living tradition practicing it today; what survives is historical and textual, studied and occasionally reenacted by modern occultists as a reconstruction from old sources rather than inherited practice.