Part of a series of posts inspired by the South Wales Occult Conference in Cardiff on 2nd November 2024 – find the first post and index here.

It wouldn’t be a conference on death in the occult without at least one talk on, well, talking to the dead. Enter Dr Al Cummings. On video.

Poetically titled “Black Arts and Cunning Crafts”, Al’s talk was thick with information about Early Modern cunning folk practices and beliefs on speaking with the dead and enlisting their aid in supernatural endeavours.

Here, nowadays, we tend to be a bit skittish around the dead but that’s actually quite unusual for human beings throughout history and around the world. As Dr Al pointed out, of all the spirits dead humans are most likely to be invested in human life, and our ancestors even more so.

One of the factors which interrupted this relationship, we were told, was the fact that Christian orthodoxy held that the dead couldn’t return from the otherworld until Judgement Day, and as Judgement Day hasn’t happened yet the souls that Necromancers spoke to must be from Purgatory… except the Protestant reformation did away with Purgatory for political reasons. So who were these ghosts?

The devil? Catholic spirits? Demons pretending to care?

Whatever people were supposed to believe, and however the dead were supposed to behave, Necromancers and Ghosts continued to not only communicate with each other but to help each other.

Perhaps, Necromantic practice says, the Dead dwell beside us, “not restless but retired” and if so they likely have a lot of time on their hands. If they’re still interested in the things they were when alive, why wouldn’t they want to keep doing those things?

Dr Al shared stories and magical charms used in these practices, but one particularly interesting ritual included instructions for “Spectral Grimoire Delivery” – acquiring a book of magic with the help of the dead.

Specifically, someone who you make a deal with on their deathbed.

A deal that binds them after death to come when you call.

They are then sent to find a courier spirit to bring you a book of magic from the Elemental Kings, specifically a book of magic that you can use.

I find it fascinating that this ritual included them giving you their “christendom” – why? Because they’d lose it in the process? As a bargaining chip? Or because they can’t do the job if they are Christened? – and then you return it afterward, but retain the agreement that they’ll come when called.

The whole process suggests that you could find someone willing to do this task for you, which reminds me of the dead folk who turn up in a Spiritualist Church to prove that there is life after death to their congregants, and the promises others make to visit their loved ones.

We don’t stop wanting to be involved in community just because we died.

Dr Al mentioned the connection between the dead and the fertility and wellbeing of the community, and it is to our detriment that we’ve forgotten this as a culture.

There is a slow movement to bring more Ancestor Veneration within pagan spaces, though we’re often clumsy with it because it is both so simple, in many ways, and so complex in others.

To reconnect with our helpful dead many of us have to shift a fundamental understanding of the universe and the processes of life and death. To remember that Saturn’s sickle is not the end of existence, but rather the end of a chapter and we remain in community together.

The land of the dead, like the land of the Fair Folk, is not elsewhere but here. Our land, bleeding into planes of existence that we can’t quite see with our earthly eyes, but that are still here.

And if we ask really nicely, perhaps they’ll bring us wonders, and magic books, that are normally just out of reach.

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Did you know that if you travel into faeryland you’re as likely to find the dead as you are to find the fae? The two are very closely connected, as you’ll find in Folktales, Faeries, & Spirits…