Necromancy Rites

Necromancy, in the strict sense, is divination by the spirits of the dead, rites aimed at summoning, contacting or drawing knowledge, especially of the future, from those who have died. The practice is attested across the ancient world: the Hebrew Bible's account of the medium of Endor raising Samuel for King Saul, the consultation of the dead in Homer's Odyssey, and the elaborate summonings preserved in the Greek Magical Papyri of late antiquity. It was widely condemned, by biblical law, and later by the medieval Church, which folded it into the broader category of forbidden magic, even as clerical necromancers copied and used its handbooks. Historically the word also broadened to mean dark or demonic magic generally. Scholars distinguish the specific ancient art of consulting the dead, which fits within widespread beliefs about the accessibility of the underworld, from the looser later use of necromancy as a term of condemnation for illicit ritual.

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.