People think necromancy is all "evil magic this, devil worship that" when the word itself really just came from Greek nekromanteia, where ancient Greek people tried to evoke spirits to, y'know, ask them stuff.
Throw an ashphodel flower into a burning bronze dish at the crossroads at midnight on a new moon (hail, Hekate) and boom, ya got yourself some necromancy!
Throw in some incantations for a little bit of spice, too:
"I adjure (exarkizó) you, corpse-daimon (nekudaimon) by the powerful and inexorable god and by his holy names, to stand beside me in the coming night in whatever form you used to have,
and inform me whether you have the power to perform the so-and-so deed, immediately, immediately; quickly, quickly"
And, you know, a ghost just might appear. Hopefully you have an offering so they're not mad!
They say that no matter the season, fresh flowers always appear at Kitty Jay’s grave, wild or garden-grown, laid in silence by hands no one sees. Some whisper it’s the work of Dartmoor’s fair folk; others believe it’s the enduring kindness of strangers moved by her story.
We arrived at sunset, the sky streaked with fire and hush. Her grave was there, just as the legend promised: humble, weathered, and crowned with new blooms. We knelt not in pity, but in communion, offering quiet words to the wind: you were wronged, but the world has changed.
The moor did not answer, and we saw no ghosts, but the air thickened with memory, and in that hush we felt her presence as a wound that the land still grieves.
I've noticed that a lot of generic witchy books and posts tend to give info about the importance of certain practices without having an idea of the history of the practices.
Like, crossroads are liminal, but why are crossroads important in magic? Does it come from the Greeks via Hekate? Is it another thing appropriated from Voodoo/Voudun? Is it a natural human impulse to think that crossings are important?
I'm already researching crossroads, but I plan to research knot magic too. Witches Ladders seem interesting to me but I want to know where they come from before using them in my practice.
Let me know if you have any similar questions about the history of things!
HYPNAGOGIA: The state of awareness between waking, sleeping and dreaming. It is the Crossroads of the Psyche, where the continuity of awareness is attained.
Andrew Chumbley. The Azoetia: A Grimoire of the Sabbatic Craft. Page 198
Road opening work for a friend! My dear friend is a PhD student who is running into trouble with her research, so with her permission, I did a little working on her behalf. She likes ocean scents and I found a soy wax candle on sale at Target that actually smells like the ocean without smelling crazy floral or like dead fish.
I lit the small, orange beeswax candle and let a few drops of the orange wax land on the ocean candle, all while burning cedar incense. I put salt around the base of the candle for purification and consecration. I usually burn cedar for workings involving Lady Hecate. I asked Hecate Enalia, Queen of the Ocean, to help my friend be steadfast in her research and to overwhelm all obstacles like the waves of the ocean. I asked Hecate Phosphorous, Light Bringing at the Crossroads to light the way and open the roads.
Gaël Turine. Haiti.
The 'arranged bottle', placed on the ground at various crossroads, contains the harmful energies of a person liberated from a bad fate. The red thread means the contents of the bottle are 'enchained' and therefore cannot escape. Baron Samdi, the spirit of the dead, which reigns over the crossroads, will recover the bottle and enable the person to live in peace.
S. I. Johnston on Crossroads, focused primarily on Greek traditions.
On rituals at crossroads:
[...] “Crossroads are liminal points or transitional gaps between defined, bounded areas, that is, between roads or between the areas of land that the roads define.
These rituals can be divided into two categories, both of which reflect their liminality: 1) those in which an individual sought help and protection at an uncertain liminal point, and 2) those in which the detachment of the liminal point was exploited.”
On offerings at crossroads:
“Crossroads, precisely because they were unclaimed “nowheres,” were among the few appropriate places to leave material expelled from society. According to several sources, [...] the polluted remains of household rituals, were left at the crossroads.”
On symbolic display of parricides:
[ parricide: the killing of a parent or a near relative; someone who committed parricide ]
[...] “that Plato only prescribes this purifying treatment at the crossroads for parricides -- the most polluted and polluting of murderers -- indicates that what is of concern is not the punishment of the murder per se (which, after all, already would have been accomplished by this point) but the expulsion of a particularly dangerous bloodguilt. [...] This alternative combined the ritualized expulsion of pollution to a liminal place with the practical removal of the offending corpse.”
On exploiting the magic at crossroads:
“If one sought contact with the unquiet dead, then a crossroads was the place to look. It is possible, too, that only selected crossroads became burial places for atypical corpses and thus, repositories of restless ghosts. [...] perhaps, there were appointed crossroads for the burial of other stigmatized dead, chosen for their distance from the city or other qualifying circumstances.
By manipulating the souls who gathered at crossroads, the magician, in his own way, exploited the liminality of the crossroads that brought him there; he recalled the polluted souls that others had cast out.”
Johnston, S. I. "Crossroads." Zeitschrift Für Papyrologie Und Epigraphik 88 (1991): 217-24. Accessed April 21, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/20187554.
