Rites Necromantic

Necromancy, the magical art of calling the dead, emerges from many ancient traditions of sorcery. A vile and repugnant magic to the civilised, the dead have been invoked to gain magical power, and to wrest divinatory knowledge from their shadowy realm. Human remains have often been to employed to summon the shades of the dead, whether via fetish, music, or philter, linking corpse and skeleton to ancestral reservoirs of power. The use of cranii, longbones, teeth and other human remains have played a part of this tradition. Rites Necromantic examines these practices from the lens of the witch-tradition, from medieval Sabbats to early modern malefactors, to the post magical revival witchcraft of the twentieth century and beyond. Also examined are the locales of such magic: graveyards, ruins, deserts, and other spirit-haunted places shunned by humanity.