Below is an image from my grandmother’s funeral, the only one I’ve ever shared digitally with the public. My nan’s funeral carriage had traffic at a standstill on the Weymouth streets. For part of the process the undertaker in his tophat, who you can perceive at the front of the picture (who is also oddly reflected in the back window of the carriage?) slowed the process down. We all travelled behind it, my mother at the front with me because she was the oldest child of the deceased and therefore chief mourner. The carriage driver was instructed to stop beside the esplanade so that my grandmother could ‘say goodbye to the sea.’ I share this family photo because it tells you more about my background when it comes to the mysteries of death than any other could. My family are not wealthy, my aunties live in a housing estate. Granted they own their own townhouse, but it is fair to say that the kind of money necessary to do this for my grandmother is hardly leaking out of the ceiling and walls in their home. The importance of the death rites that my nan still valued were paramount. My family weren’t prepared to see her off from any church built after the 1400’s.
This wasn’t just a carriage we hired to carry Nan away, it was the funeral for the whole way of life she had represented. Nan was born in a rural part of Dorset, had a village education and believed a wide range of things, including speaking with the most recently dead member of the family when you lost something and wanted to recover it. Though my aunty has a thick Dorset accent I doubt anyone after Nan will experience a proper funeral of the type that I was privileged to witness. This is a testimony to the fact that death isn’t just about humans, or even other animals, it is also about eras, ways of doing things, superstitions, place, and custom. When people die, such as a powerful matriarch who packed the church with over three hundred people so that there were folks standing outside, folks who chose to make a guard of honour for her as her coffin was carried out of the church, there is more dying than one woman.
In this era we are living through, great change is rollicking through the world. We need people who remember some of these older ways of doing things to report on them. In that case some of the worthier customs might be able to jump the gap that is opening up, and make their way into the future world that forms around us. Though I call what I practice traditional witchcraft, never think that I am dismissive of change. Much of it excites me, opens up the thrill of new opportunities, but I’m also about balance, about not losing our root-system in the process. With this in mind I invite you to join me for the gristle and the knucklebones of what I consider to be important legacies of Folk Necromancy.
Folk practice is a practice, after all. Much of this material won’t fully put its roots down with you unless you use your feet and hands in the Work. In advance I will mention you should probably start looking for the scapula of a sheep or other closely related animal!