A Practical Guide to Necromancy (Introduction)

Necromancy is the magic of death, essentially. Usually if you see this term used, you are reading a fantasy or science fiction novel and being confronted with a wizard who is commanding armies of zombies, ghosts, etc. In the occult/new-age scene if you encounter someone calling themselves a necromancer, they are, no doubt, someone who thinks they talk to ghosts and may range from melancholia to pathological psychosis in their day to day life.

These aspects are part of the word and give it some of its personal appeal to me.

My whole approach to life is that artistic creativity and imagination are the fuel of truly heroic states of being; the kind we are in need of to not only have a high quality of life but also to solve the catastrophic social-economic-ecological problems of the world.

We live in a society which defines growth according to perpetually increased consumption, and we live in an ecosystem that, at some point (more than likely relatively soon), cannot withstand this kind of abuse without drastically lowering the quality of life for all humans.  I have talked with credible scientific minds about the ecological problems facing our world and studied the matter myself in great depth and find that a world where all human cuisine is reduced to things like rats, cockroaches, and pigeons is one of the better likely outcomes.

The political system is one which routinely strips dignity and opportunity away from people, and human nature is such that human beings beg for this kind of system and perpetuate it with glee, especially if supplied with steady rations of refrigerators, sportsball, and religion.

It is not merely enough that one should be at peace with the world and blissing out in Buddhist awareness, but one should accept great responsibility for their existence and try to incarnate the best version of themselves they can. I am happy to entertain all arguments against this statement and believe I am capable of refuting most of them as morally bankrupt.

So what does this have to do with Necromancy? Well, everything.

I take a more down to earth approach to the ideas of magick, magic, psychic energy, and these other fringe terms used by alternocrats in their travels. I believe that they can be used to simplify and supercharge real psychological phenomena (based on our natural nervous system) and produce tangible, empirically observable results in the real world.

I will not offer you mastery of ghosts in the sense of ethereal entities like the kind seen in Ghostbusters or imagined in ghost hunting TV shows. My definition of ghosts is more tied to DNA and History. In our bodies, we have the remains of the dead (our ancestors) kept alive in perpetuity by the self-interested (take that with a grain of salt) replication habits of DNA. Most of our ancestors were also not cool, noble heroes of old, but actually single-celled organism, and that undead programming influences our every move that we make in our real bodies.

A Necromancer sees the logic of ancestor worship, ranging from the terror of angry ancestors demanding blood sacrifice to the more refined Taoist and Shinto practices found in Asia. It’s in there, in your blood, and, far more importantly, in your neurons. Study the influence that your biology has on your being, for in there a Necromancer can hear the ticking of all clocks with their battery, the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (which basically promises everything to decay).

The other kind of ghosts the Necromancer must summon, commune with, and have some kind of mastery of are those found in history. History is another self-interested (take that with a grain of salt) replication habit found in nature. It is self-interested in the sense that certain aspects of itself repeat with greater efficacy. All it takes for this process to proceed unchecked is enough people to attain inner peace or complacency, then history gets to do whatever it wants.

But what is history really made of? The dead. The life energy of the dead; their words, their perpetuating influence on other human beings, their deeds (as written), and their ideas. This is powerful stuff and you will find it in great harmony with the Necromancy of the human genome.

A Necromancer sufficiently studied in these two aspects of death and undeath will find themselves in possession of great power and, also, will have to have endured countless developmental self-initiatory processes as thinking about death and decay is not generally considered to be a pleasant or desirable activity (kind of like push-ups, or advanced mathematics, or extremely sublime works of art).

Hopefully, this article is enough to get all interested parties engaged in a fully active and rewarding path of Necromancy.

-Enrique Recuero