In folklore what causes the dead to return without being called up by a necromancer? Much of the understanding of folk practices with the dead involved helping them to move on when they were stuck. The situation where they were stuck might have even called for a sin-eater to be called in. Such a circumstance was often indicated by omens, such as the mice leaving their homes inside the walls. Here we will try to sort the dead into two major categories, much like the dead are known to sort and count beans, those that need to move on, and those that might be enlisted as helpers.
We will explore ways to tell if the presence of the dead is life- giving or life-depleting. When we have determined this how then do we go about establishing or strengthening a bond with a particular spirit? In doing so we will also see deeper into the relationship of a practicing witch with the dead. You will be asked to seek a connection with a dead person, someone you could call a member of the beloved dead, for whom you have strong loving feelings. This person can be family or ancestral but only if the relationship is deep and warm. If you cannot think of someone who fits this description I will discuss possibilities for adoption.
From the medieval European ghosts in Claude Lecouteux’s books, and The Folklore of Wales: Ghosts, brought to us by Delyth Badder and Mark Norman, with ghost stories collected over the past two hundred years there are similar, echoing themes. It doesn’t seem to matter whether the sources for the ghost story are still largely pagan in origin or come through a thicker Christian influence, it seems to be agreed upon that nine days is the traditional time when the dead can reappear normally after a standard death. Regular reappearance after this time is a sign of something unfinished or off kilter.
A common reason for someone to return is unfinished business. In the medieval sources it is usually an unavenged murder, with revenge being the only panacea that would allow the spirit to rest correctly. This difference matters, as it shows how the dead are still held by the cultural stories of the living. If they lived in a world where revenge was necessary for full rest, then you find their spirit requires revenge to rest fully.
Suicides and victims of execution equally have always been suspected of returning as revenants. The figure of the revenant doesn’t fit with the ethereal idea of benevolent family members smiling upon us. Revenants are a more visceral type of haunting that are sometimes mistaken for a live person, even by those without the Sight, they generally can’t travel very far and are tied to the location of their murder, where they died, or sometimes their corpse. The poltergeist is often a form of revenant who was often pre-pubescent or right on puberty at the time of their death. Deaths during the completion of an activity, even puberty, change the nature of the haunting.
The ‘life style’ of the dead was characterised as very literal by pagan and early Christian-semi-pagan sources, and traces of this mindset continued to remain in folklore in rural areas up until very recently. In Norse medieval sources the dead are depicted as living lives inside their burial mound where they use their grave offerings as the living would use things, and have conversations with people in adjacent mounds. So when the dead came back it was a fearsome business that included being able to touch you, touch objects, exert downward pressure on a sleeper, and otherwise make their presence felt in a number of ways. This kind of thinking sometimes survived into modern times. I can remember my Dorset grandmother who went to a village school for a number of years remarking with anguish that her sister would be all wet and cold in the ground, due to how much rain her coffin would have received since her burial.
In the case of evil-doers it might seem simple to fix the problem of revenants by burning or otherwise interfering with the corpse. Things like rocks could be placed in the mouth to get the dead to stop talking or even prevent them from feeding on the life-force of the living. But there were many other reasons that the dead might return, such as to complain of a never being properly buried, a missing head they couldn’t rest without, or to reveal the location of treasure they were the only one who knew about. Often in stories when the protagonist helps the shade by opening a box or the earth they are rewarded half of the treasure hoard, but if they help themselves to the rest that belongs to the spirit things will turn bad for them.
We also see examples of spirits trapped in repetitious actions like always walking a particular section of floor, or up the stairs, at a certain regular hour. Often in these cases there is some unfinished procedure, such as a person on their way to their wedding day who didn’t make it to the altar, a mother who hasn’t had a chance to hold her baby because of death in childbirth, or someone whose body wasn’t given proper funeral rites. Sometimes something ‘unfinished’ can be quite mundane such as a ghost at an old manor I once visited who continued to appear on the stairs where she had fallen to her death because she had not completed the act of walking down the stairs! In folk stories we see people go to some lengths to find or rebury a body or otherwise place something to rights. Women who died without leaving the birthing bed were given scissors, thread and needle to prevent them returning looking for them. It was believe the living would incur bad luck if they didn’t fix these things and continued to live near or be related to the unsettled dead. There is also plenty of other advice that is just about clearing house, including the Roman habit of scattering black beans around the house before sweeping them all up. This technique of multi-granular scattering whether beans or salt or sand is a common technique to get the dead to leave an area. It is explained as meaning that the dead must count the beans or grains and thus become entangled with them before eviction from the home in the form of sweeping.
Artwork by Brett Morgan
Another much older source gives a more visceral, and at the same time more important piece of advice which points out one of the most important aspects of self protect, to show no fear, nor take one backward step from the phantom upon their approach.
You must bring -ire, a stake, and a rope with you there. Attach the rope to the stake and lower yourself into the mound. You shall see a man there dressed like me and several men at his side. Take his sword, his ring and his cape. Act fearlessly and no harm shall befall you. Then cut off his head. It will be easy. If you recoil though, from that, you will draw punishment upon yourself. 1
It appears though, when the dead grew fractious a specialist who was a dead-seer might be called in to handle the communications and resolution should people not wish to turn to brutal nighttime decapitations. The case of Anna la Rossa who was on trail for witchcraft in 1582 illustrates well what kind of things people came to a dead-seer for. Anna claimed to be able to see and talk to the dead and people paid her well to find out more about the postmortem fate of their loved ones. Often the dead wanted to ask for something. For instance, the shade of a young child wanted to have a pretty dress she’d never had in life. It seemed that Anna’s interventions helped people to resolve issues where the dead, and maybe the living too, had trouble letting go.
The relationship with the dead, even for dead-seers ,was not uncomplicated. More than one death-seer left testimony about being beaten by them if they do not keep silent about what they witnessed among the cavalcade of the dead. They were beaten with sorghum stalks specifically. This provides us with another key, some information was fine to pass along to the living, and some was silent and secret, on pains of bruising. This insistence on silence tips us off that Virtue is involved in the congress between the living and dead. In fact, it is mentioned in more than one place that the harvests were very good after various death-seers began passing through to witness the dead or feast with them. It appears that whilst these intermediaries were increasingly being charged with witchcraft, sometimes involuntary, folk-style, necromancy was very beneficial to their community. Here we see that silence and blessings often come from correct treatment of the dead.
Some people seem to have been able to hold down ongoing relationships with the dead without ill-effect, despite everyone else being keen to move the dead along. It is interesting to note in what ways this ongoing necromantic work was sustained and practiced. Anna La Rossa is described as being in an ecstatic trance when she meets with the dead rather than awake, rather than in a magical circle as many may envisage necromancy.
This woman used to be called by her husband many times at night while he was alive, and even though he elbowed her vigorously, it was as if she was dead, because she would say the spirit had set out on its journey and thus the body remained as if dead.
This story can be explored in more depth in Carlo Ginsburg’s Night battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth Centuries.
Visionary experience, whether for a full-blown ecstatic like Anna or during waking hours such as Bessie Dunlop and her dead-man familiar, seems to have been the mainstay of how people in the past purposely interacted with the dead. The witch-figure manages to cross the membrane between the living and the dead, and bring back Virtue. This Virtue can then enrich the fertility of the community of the living, or to provide automatic healings, or liftings of ill conditions.
These procedures also inoculated the witch against death powers, so that gradually they cease to be affected by experiencing the dead. This can include being able to view traditional harbingers and omens of Death such as the black dog without physically dying afterwards.
Other folk forms of necromancy include things like The Dumb Supper and various ghost drenching ceremonies where water or alcohol is consumed on the part of the dead and they are encouraged to eat or drink through us. This confounding of boundaries between the mouths of those living and those of the dead encourages this inoculation process still further, though to most this would be more of a side- effect of the work. What is touched by the dead regularly, what has passed through the veil between the living and the dead is imbued with a Virtue. This makes the witch able to pass for one of the dead and to gain entrance where normally only the dead may wander.
Prior to Christianity we know there were certain benevolent dead whose mounds had offerings poured to them in the hope of blessings. Later this impulse was transferred to the Saints. Similar in format to the hero cults of Greece there have always been people whose graves have transformed into shrines. The Catholic Church requires certain proofs of miracles for someone to become a saint, and it is not much different for the necromancer at a personal level, in that stringent proof of impact is required for that person to get new business.
There are things we can do to set down a healthy environment for working with the dead. We need to deeply consider some kind of offering to ancestors that have an addiction. You will need to be honest with yourself about the extent to which the addictions of your ancestors are rippling through you. What do you think caused that person to turn to that substance? Should you offer that thing (tobacco smoke or alcohol etc) to them without partaking of it yourself to appease them? You may wish to do offerings for troubled ancestral spirits outdoors, and set up an indoor space for those who prove to be allies.
You should also avoid working longterm with the spirits of people who are merely present because of unfinished business. They are single-focused and will only be helping you temporarily in the hope of resolving the state of unresolved tension they are caught in. Including any spirit that continually plays out loops of behaviour or speech that is repetitive, indicating they are stuck within certain parameters. Do not work with a spirit that leaves you more than usually tired after a working, or who makes outlandish demands of you in return for providing results. Also avoid working with spirits that regularly create unpleasant conditions such as a smell of death. This means they have not passed through a proper Underworld disintegration and reintegrating.
The spirits of the dead are like the living in that some of them only want attention and sympathy and to make you listen to their story of woe over and over and don’t want to be helped, or to help you, always make a helper spirit prove its ability to help, even if they are a family member. Begin with small tasks that you feel they can help you accomplish. When they succeed reward them with something high in fats. and then give them something a little harder to accomplish.
Here is a link that will help you get started with veneration of the dead if you have not already got such a shrine space in your life.
May I invite you to the dark parlous for some holding hands and a cup of ectoplasm or two?