Necromancy

Necromancy, in its oldest and strictest sense, is the art of divination through the spirits of the dead, summoning them to reveal hidden knowledge, foretell the future, or lend their power to the operator. The word derives from the Greek nekros (dead) and manteia (divination). Its classic literary instances are ancient: in Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus travels to the edge of the world and, with blood-offerings, calls up the shades of the dead, including the prophet Tiresias, to learn his way home; in the Hebrew Bible, King Saul, on the eve of his death, has the medium of Endor raise the spirit of the prophet Samuel, an act the text presents as forbidden and ominous.

Indeed necromancy was widely prohibited and feared, consulting the dead is condemned in Israelite law and viewed with dread across many cultures, precisely because it was held to work. Over the medieval and early modern periods the word broadened, partly through confusion with the Latin nigromancia ("black" divination), to mean dark or forbidden magic in general, and the ritual raising of the dead became a staple of the grimoire tradition and of the demonized image of the sorcerer. Necromancy thus occupies a particular place among the divinatory arts: the one that seeks knowledge from those who have crossed into death, and the one most consistently marked, across traditions, as transgressive and dangerous.

The word has drifted twice and both drifts matter.

In Greek it meant divination by the dead, and that is what the classical instances are: consultation of a shade for information, at a designated place, with prescribed offerings. In medieval Latin the first element was assimilated to niger, black, and nigromancy came to mean dark magic in general, whether or not the dead were involved. A great deal of what is catalogued as necromancy in medieval sources is conjuration of spirits with no connection to the human dead at all.

That medieval practice had a specific social location. The manuals were written in Latin, they use liturgical forms, and they assume knowledge of the mass and of the exorcistic formulas of the church. Their users were largely clerics, the substantial population of men in minor orders with literacy and no benefice, and the practice is best understood as a misuse of the church's own instruments by people trained in them.

Nineteenth-century Spiritualism is a different phenomenon and should not be filed under the same heading without a note. It was public rather than clandestine, it was often domestic and led by women, its practitioners generally believed themselves to be doing something consoling rather than transgressive, and it produced an organised religious movement with its own churches. The medieval conjuror sought information under compulsion; the seance sought contact.

The atlas keeps both, and keeps them apart.