{LIVE REMOTE ONLINE OFFERING} ANCESTORS & REVENANTS: THE DEAD IN ENGLISH MAGIC

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PLEASE NOTE: This class is not an in-person class. This class is being offered as a LIVE ONLINE-ONLY OFFERING. The zoom link will be attached to your receipt. Please check your junk folder in your email if you do not receive a receipt. If you have not received one please email learn@ritualcravt.com. Please register ahead of time to ensure that you make it to the online session on time! (Class times are in MDT time zone)

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At once more human yet also more unknown than any angel or demon, the restless dead haunt the early modern world.

The importance of the dead in occult philosophy and magical practices can be gleaned from many practices: from funerary customs of salt and earth to prevent revenants (malevolent undead) returning, to the use of corpses as magical medicines and spell components; and from the exorcism and summoning of ghosts and spirits, to early sensationalist reports of the supposedly “black magical” customs of various indigenous peoples of the Americas. And yet, across the boneyards of Europe, necromancers gathered components and materia to summon and question the dead in magic circle and incubated dream alike…

Thus when considering such shadowy adumbrations of magical practices blackened – literally, de-nigrated – we will also investigate the diabolical associations of necromancy and nigromancy with witchcraft, demonology, and the alterity of Othering, offering analysis of a number of pre-modern rituals and techniques involving shades of the dead, places of execution, and the allurement of restless souls.

In this class, contemporary cunning man and historian Dr Alexander Cummins will take us through detailed study of several operations of early modern necromantic magic, sourced from popular grimoires and sorcerous chapbooks, treatises of occult philosophy, the working-books of cunning-folk, historic scrying journals, and accounts by early modern heresiographers and demonologists. In so doing, we will examine where the human meets the no-longer-human in these melancholy hauntings, and consider the manners by which we may honour ancestors and ward revenants.