There’s just so much GOOD stuff in the notes, I’ll try to compile it into one post (sorted alphabetically by writer), since some of them are in different chains.
A society of druids that uses the dead to grow sacred gardens, and reanimation deprives the dead of their part in the cycle
A society where each plot in the cemetery is used to grow vegetables/herbs for community use, to ensure that everyone is fed and the dead are visited/remembered. Necromancy deprives the community of the food that person would have grown and disconnects the dead person from their community
A society obsessed with history/recordskeeping/memory, and necromancy prevents the dead from being properly catalogued
A totalitarian society wherein the citizens are property of the state and necromancy is stealing
Death is nirvana and reanimation deprives the dead of this experience
The dead are ritually eaten by friends/family to allow them to live on, and reanimation ends their time prematurely
The finest jewelry is made of the bones of the dead, so there’s a lucrative trade in grave robbing, and the bone jewelry lobby has convinced the public that necromancy is worse than the expensive jewelry made from the bones
The current regime used necromancy to take power, so now it’s forbidden for everyone outside the very small circle of favored state necromancers
The corpses of dead kings/honored warriors are laid to rest in the palace catacombs, so necromancy is heavily regulated as a matter of national security
in the afterlife, they’re still using the body. With an empty grave, their soul won’t be tethered to a point in the afterlife nor can they receive offerings
My conculture believes that the dead must be cremated quickly after death, in order to free the souls for reincarnation - if the body is not cremated but allowed to rot, the souls risk being trapped in the body and dying. For that reason, the most heinous crimes are punished with not just execution, but the denial of cremation - death of both body and soul. So, necromancy would be seen as risking the destruction of the souls - or, alternately, of imprisoning the souls, since an undead body may be able to preserve the souls’ existence, but they cannot control the body, and thus would be effectively imprisoned
a culture that recognizes the effort and emotional strain their people go through in life, and when someone dies they throw a huge wake and celebrate their break from life before joining their god/reincarnating/guarding something/etc. Reanimating someone or trying to bring them back to life is seen as a huge taboo because it’s like asking someone who constantly works and finally gets a time of rest to go straight back to work before they’ve recovered. Except it’s the hardest job/adventure ever. For the same reason, motherhood, illness, leadership, recreation, personal growth, and winter are all highly venerated concepts/times in the culture, as times of rest or things in need of a period of rest eventually. To honor these times as sabbats is commanded by one of their gods after a great catastrophe. The whole community is involved with these things, and so too are is the whole community involved with death and picking up the physical or emotional slack of the person who died. If permission is given from the person who is being reanimated, then maybe maaaaaybe it’s ok, but that’s only happened once when a guardian was once needed, and it’s pretty hard to verify if it really was the person.
The dead just turn into pillars of salt if they’re seen by the living once they’re reanimated, and it just gets annoying trying to clean up all that shit. Not to mention it screws over the crop field rotation. Thanks carl.
the dead like the afterlife and it’s just plain freakin rude to rip them from that, jerk
the spell to reanimate the dead is incomplete/glitchy, and it just spreads from corpse to person to person and creates a zombie plague
A Confucian society would be interesting here. Part of one’s duty of filial piety is to return the body your ancestors gave you to them (which is why China has historically been so against cremation, body modification, and even hair cutting, all of which damage the body your ancestors gave you), necromancy would be seen as robbing that body from the person’s ancestors and so would be highly taboo
there’s no stigma against reanimating bodies specifically, but there is a preference among necromancers in these parts for uh….fresher materials to work with, so they’ve developed a reputation for, you know, making their own dead. By murdering people. Not ALL of them do it but it’s happened often enough that most practitioners of necromancy are looked upon with suspicion at best
#if your fictional society has beef with necromancy there!must!be!a!reason
#also societies can think necromancy is bad unless relatives are doing it
#or they can think it’s good bc they’re a warrior society and it’s a way for your body to keep fighting after death
#or they can think it’s bad bc it’s a type of punishment for criminals/outcasts/whatever bc it’s basically saying “this person was only useful after they died"
In a community with a high rate of child mortality, dead adults are thought to be the caretakers of dead children; resurrecting an adult is seen as robbing a dead child of their parent.
There’s nothing wrong with reanimating the dead to live an unlife of leisure, as companionship to a living person, but any labor done by a dead person is viewed with disdain or stigma—basically, classism against working-class necromancers, while wealthy necromancers get a pass.
A dead person is buried with a highly personal artifact which tells their entire life story and holds their secrets, such as a tapestry-shroud or scroll, which only the dead person and their nearest relative has ever seen; reanimating the dead is seen as a HUGE invasion of privacy because a) You SAW their SECRET THING and b) Where exactly is their secret thing kept while they do undead things????
The culture believes that the dead come back in dreams to deliver prophetic warnings to their descendants; the voices of the dead are therefore considered inherently prophetic, which is awkward when you’re undead and trying to go about your day.
Death is an integral function of time in this culture and/or magical system; reversing the natural course of death risks reversing the natural course of time, halting the round of seasons or freezing the growth of crops in the fields.
This culture is highly informed/stratified by gender and the dead are considered to be genderless, therefore they have no place/role in the community and nobody knows how to treat them or speak to them.
It’s not that reanimating the dead in itself is an issue—but it *is* proof that the necromancer has done some other taboo act as part of the reanimation process (like animal sacrifice or sth). Nobody can look at the reanimated person without remembering that, oh shit, somebody did that gross thing. So having a reanimated corpse around is not so much taboo as really, REALLY awkward.
necromancy is associated with the culture’s traditional enemies, and is the same level of frowned-upon as using certain symbology or weapons or languages etc which are also linked to those enemies
once someone has died, it is severely disrespectful to look upon their corpse, so anything which is VISIBLE as being an undead is Very Bad, because it means you can see that person’s dead body
the reanimated dead have historically been used to spread plague and do other biological warfare type stuff; if you create something like that, a) gross b) unsanitary c) this is interpreted as the intent to commit war crimes
when someone dies, their death is considered a “sacrifice” to the deity who presides over their cause of death; how exactly you deal with the body, that doesn’t matter so much, but USING the body to your OWN benefit, that’s an insult to the god of warfare / disease / ocean / etc. Like stealing the offerings from a shrine.
reanimation is seen as asserting “ownership” over that being; so while it’s okay to have an undead animal (so long as it wasn’t someone ELSE’S animal, as that would be theft), reanimating a HUMAN counts as “slavery”
necromancy is considered “lazy”; like, dude, do the work yourself, or pay/convince someone else to do it, what kind of loser has to resort to CORPSES
only the divine can raise the dead; reanimating the dead is a poor mockery of the gods’ ability, and you are liable to be punished for your hubris, and that kind of punishment tends to have a lot of collateral damage so it’s best for mortals to solve the problem before the gods take notice
“animated corpses” attract carrion birds who then poop on everything
a decent chunk of the populace is secretly undead, and “ability to use necromancy” is strongly correlated with “knowledge of necromancy” is strongly correlated with “ability to tell that someone is secretly undead, and perhaps control them”
reanimating the dead involves borrowing the “property” (ie, the dead) from the god of death, who keeps a close eye on their belongings, and might take a shine to anything/anyone else they see while monitoring that; so not only is it potentially dangerous to CAUSE undead, it’s risky just being NEAR them
There was a huge necromancy fad a while back and now it’s just kind of tacky? Like if you’re gonna animate things with magic to do your bidding try to be a little creative at least.
You can reanimate a person’s body if you have their consent, but it’s difficult to reliably get in contact with the deceased so proving consent is difficult after the fact. You can get written consent but there needs to be a certain number of witnesses and a lawyer needs to write up the contract and it’s really more trouble than it’s worth. People start to wonder why you’re so set on animate corpses that you’re going through all that legal trouble.
The town used to let people raise the dead willy-nilly but something went catastrophically awry. You’ll also get the side-eye if you cast fireball.
If you could truly raise the dead, put body and soul back together in good health, it would be a Mitzvah. But most Necromancy does not do that; it merely raises the corpse into a puppet of the mage’s will. This is no slight on the dead–either they are safely in the afterlife, or else they are gone–but seeing the shell of their loved one will pain the mourners, and so it should not be done. Weep not for the dead, for they rest, and we moan. We would moan all the more to see their husks walking about. #now that I think about it #this means it might *not* be evil to animate skeletons #since all of their loved ones are probably also dead
@when-are-we-gonna-play-squash:
#i actually have a necromancer oc and as far as the magic system goes it’s not forbidden but is just an unpopular form of magic #because it causes the user physical pain #and she has chronic pain as a result of practicing necromancy
#also worth noting is she brings back extinct animals #so maybe think about the ethical implications of Ghost Jurassic Park
@woefully-undercaffeinated:
The dead are able to remember their past lives, and wars have been started by revelations from beyond the grave. The taboo arose after a particularly bloody set of clashes several thousand years ago.
The dead tend to be extremely… libidinous, and as most of the living are Very Much Not Into That, it was agreed that necromancy was a bad idea.
Necromancy can raise the dead, but it can’t control them. The reanimated will usually just lumber back to whatever home they had in life, and will expect to be able to return to their previous existences in every detail. Unfortunately, most beds were not made to accommodate multiple generations of dead relatives in addition to the living family, and necromancy was banned after the kingdom could no longer afford all of the additional mattresses needed.
Estate lawyers have formed a highly effective lobbying group and successfully convinced the king to outlaw necromancy so that they would no longer have to put all those extra terms into their clients’ wills or deal with having to reverse inheritances.
The undead all clearly know about the afterlife in detail, but none of them will give up any information about it. Clerics got tired of having their sermons interrupted by yet another dead asshole making sarcastic remarks about their god’s paradise and refusing to elaborate when asked to explain.
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