Apocalypsis

 Necromancy

The word necromancy is altered from Late Latin Necromantia, itself obtained from the post-Classical Greek word (nekromanteía), meaning the study of death. This field involves communicating with the dead, by summoning their spirits or raising them inside your body, to predict future events, discover hidden knowledge, bring someone back from the dead, or use the dead as a weapon. Sometimes related to as "Death Magic", the term may also sometimes be used in a more common sense to refer to black magic or witchcraft.

The oldest literary account of necromancy is found in Homer's Odyssey. Under the direction of Circe, a powerful sorceress, Odysseus travels to the underworld to gain insight about his approaching voyage home by lifting the spirits of the dead through the use of spells that Circe has taught him. He wishes to summon and question the shade of Tiresias in particular; however, he is incapable to conjure the seer's spirit without the assistance of others. The Odyssey's passages contain many illustrative quotations to necromantic rituals: rites must be conducted around a pit with fire during nocturnal hours, and Odysseus has to follow a specific recipe, which includes the blood of sacrificial animals, to create a liquid for the ghosts to drink while he rehearses prayers to both the ghosts and gods of the underworld.

Practices such as these, varying from the mundane to the grotesque, were commonly related to necromancy. Rituals could be quite elaborate, involving magic circles, wands, talismans, and incantations. The necromancer might also encircle himself with morbid aspects of death, which often included wearing the deceased's clothing and consuming foods that signified lifelessness and decay such as unleavened black bread and unfermented grape juice. Some necromancers even went so far as to take part in the mutilation and consumption of corpses.

These ceremonies could carry on for hours, days, or even weeks, leading up to the eventual summoning of spirits. Frequently they were executed in places of confinement or other melancholy venues that suited specific guidelines of the necromancer. Additionally, necromancers wanted to summon the recently departed based on the premise that their prophecies were spoken more clearly. 

In the present day, necromancy is more generally used as a term to describe the manipulation of death and the dead, or the pretence thereof, often facilitated through the use of ritual magic or some other kind of occult ceremony. Contemporary séances, channelling and Spiritualism verge on necromancy when supposedly invoked spirits are asked to reveal future events or secret information. With the development of more complex and detailed ideas about the afterlife and the underworld, humans have started to think through methods for contacting the dead. The reasons may vary, ranging from the emotional to the purely realistic, but the effort remains the same. A quantity of rituals has been developed over time intended for reaching the dead and summoning them to the land of the living. And thus the process of the necromancer was born-and the person who is able or knows of ways, to speak to the lifeless. But are we able to determine where this practice originated? When the moment that man was thought to himself that he might be able to disobey the thin line between life and death?