Necromancy is the art of divination via talking to the dead. Therefore, it can be broken down into two parts: communication, and the dead.
“The Dead” is a pretty broad range of sources, to be honest, but a few examples to get the cerebrospinal fluid flowing are: the chair in my living room, the ghost of my dead great-grandpa who loved that chair, the very mummified c/ntipede underneath the chair that I’m still too scared to clean up and that my vacuum can’t reach.
Communication can be broken down into three interlocking processes: listening (sulfur), understanding (mercury), and responding (salt). Two of these stages are significantly complicated by the fact that the second party is dead, so I might add a 0th stage: contacting the dead (setting up the table).
If you type divination into the Tumblr search bar you’ll get half a dozen tarot advertisements, pendulum readings, runes, and maybe some bone throwing. The core of divination is that element of chance, that crack that lets the light in, the unpredictability that stands in as a red carpet for whatever ghost or beastie to strut down. Since so much of it is fishing with a shotgun, though, it’s heavily reliant on the interpretation part of “up to interpretation”.
That said, I believe there is a secret weapon to all of this.
This is also a necessary skill for communication in general. In the hypothetical circumstance that I ring up the pharaoh Tutankhamen to ask him about ducks, several issues immediately present themselves.
One: Is there any way to prove this is Tutankhamen?
No, probably not. I can attempt to increase the likelihood by breaking into the Egyptian Museum and stealing his tongue (do not try this at home), but even then ghosts are great at the fake ID thing.
Two: Are my own biases influencing how I understand the information I get?
Probably, since it’s charades through the lens of my own psyche, culture, experiences, and desires. Mental illness is also necessary to consider and filter for.
Three: If I did successfully get Tutankhamen, do I know enough about him as an individual and a representative of his culture to correctly interpret the information I get?
This depends on how much research I’ve done. If we suppose that shedding the mortal coil sheds the limits of language, and the postmortem concept of a person speaks the language of ideas, then the ideas he would communicate with would be influenced by the world and culture he grew up with. If he dropped the ancient Egyptian equivalent of a Loss meme on me, I might be woefully oblivious to an essential piece of context that colors the rest of the information.
Since the dead can be fickle and tricksy, as is divination in general, the key element of the interaction is your comprehension of the information. If it’s something you could Google, I recommend doing that first, since it’s prepackaged and pre-processed and likely explained empirically in your preferred language. But if you really want to call up that one dead guy, Know Thy Enemy. Sun Tzu did not spend that much ink despairing over the idealistic ambitions of ancient Chinese warlords for you to neglect proper preparations.
Then, and only then, are you ready to steal a mummified tongue and draw an unmute icon on it in crow’s blood.
(no animals were harmed in the making of this post)
(do not steal human body parts you fool, you moron. -Sun Tzu)
