Necromancy

The Mystica Encyclopedia · All entries · Rewritten September 2026

Necromancy at a glance

Meaning and etymology

The word comes through Late Latin necromantia from Greek nekromanteia, "divination through the dead," combining nekros, dead body, and manteia, divination. Encyclopaedia Britannica defines necromancy as communication with the dead, usually to obtain insight into the future or to accomplish some otherwise impossible task. In the Middle Ages the Latin form was often written nigromantia, as if derived from niger, black; this helped the term become a general name for "black magic," not only divination by the dead.

The ancient world

Rites for consulting the dead are attested in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome and elsewhere. The oldest detailed literary account is Book 11 of Homer's Odyssey, known as the Nekyia. On the advice of the sorceress Circe, Odysseus goes to the edge of the world, digs a pit and pours offerings, including the blood of sacrificed sheep, so that the shades can drink and speak; he seeks the prophecy of the seer Tiresias. Greek sources also mention oracles of the dead (nekyomanteia), such as the one by the river Acheron in Thesprotia, where, according to Herodotus, the tyrant Periander of Corinth consulted his dead wife.

Roman literature developed darker images. In Lucan's epic Pharsalia, the witch Erictho reanimates a corpse to prophesy the outcome of the civil war, a scene that shaped later ideas of necromancy as gruesome and impious. Other Roman authors, such as Horace and Seneca, also portrayed witches and sorcerers calling up the dead, and Roman law and moral writers generally treated such rites with suspicion, associating them with secret nighttime practices and with harmful magic.

The Hebrew Bible

The Hebrew Bible forbids consulting the dead. Deuteronomy 18:10-12 lists among forbidden practices divination, sorcery, and inquiring of ghosts or spirits, and Leviticus prescribes death for mediums. The most famous biblical episode is 1 Samuel 28: King Saul, who had expelled mediums from the land, is abandoned by God before a battle with the Philistines and secretly asks a woman of Endor to call up the prophet Samuel. Samuel appears and foretells Saul's defeat and death. Jewish and Christian interpreters have long debated whether the woman truly raised Samuel or whether the apparition was a deception. Early Christian writers such as Origen discussed the passage at length, and it remained a key text in later debates about ghosts, witchcraft and the powers of demons.

Medieval and Renaissance Europe

In medieval Europe, necromancy came to mean above all the summoning of demons, who were thought to be the real agents behind any apparition of the dead. Historians such as Richard Kieckhefer have shown that its practitioners were often educated clerics who combined Christian liturgical formulas of exorcism with astral magic drawn from Arabic sources, using magic circles, conjurations and talismans. The fifteenth-century manuscript known as the Munich Handbook, edited by Kieckhefer in Forbidden Rites (1997), preserves this "clerical underworld." Church authorities and theologians condemned such practices as idolatry and pacts with demons.

In the Renaissance, learned magicians such as Cornelius Agrippa discussed necromancy in their surveys of occult philosophy, while popular legend attached it to figures such as Faust. Christopher Marlowe's play on Faustus made the "necromantic books" a symbol of forbidden knowledge. Accusations of necromancy also appeared in witch trials and political scandals.

Modern views

From the nineteenth century, Spiritualism offered a new, non-demonic framework for contacting the dead through mediums and séances, and some critics called it modern necromancy. In fantasy fiction and games, "necromancer" has become a stock term for a magician who raises the dead. Many cultures also practice forms of ancestor veneration, honoring and sometimes consulting the dead, which scholars distinguish from necromancy in the older, condemned sense.

Major religions that forbid necromancy regard it as spiritually dangerous. From a scientific perspective there is no evidence that the dead can be summoned or can reveal the future; investigations of mediums have repeatedly uncovered fraud, suggestion or unconscious cueing. Historians study necromancy today as a window into beliefs about death, the afterlife and the boundaries of acceptable religion.

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