Necromancy vs. Mediumship.

Dear Reader,

Necromancy is the art of divination that involves communication with the dead. It is an art that is often conflated with the creation of zombies, necrophilia, and playing with corpses in film and fiction. Mediumship is the art of divination that involves communication with spirits. Not all mediums are necromancers. Not all spirits out there are the dead. The universe is populated with far more strange and diverse spirits than what you can find in the category of the dead. Ultimately, the dead is a relatively small subset of spirits, it gets even smaller when you start discussing the human dead.

It has fallen out of fashion to refer to oneself as a necromancer because the term is fairly loaded with a lot of Hollywood baggage and a pretty wide range of cultural taboos. I use the term necromancer because it is the most accurate description of what I do when I am dealing with spirits. Most of the spirits I deal with are the dead. I have items that I have kept which are attached to spirits of the dead who owned or were in ... intimate contact with them.

My familiar spirit, for example is the spirit of a deceased cat that I owned when I was younger. I also have a spirit ally in a deer whose vertebrae are in a jar on my bookshelf and another deer whose tooth is in a bag on my altar. Among the spirits of the location where I am living, is that of a blue jay whose skull I found perfectly intact while I was walking in the woods near the property one spring afternoon. Some declare this to be morbid. Others question if it is taboo for me to be engaged in this as I am a Filyani and a godspouse to Freyr, who is ostensibly is a god of life.

I would argue that my work as a necromancer, which generally serves to act as a guide to point the recently deceased in the direction of their next life, is a life affirming work. When I facilitate communication between the living and the dead, this is also life affirming most of the time. The messages from the dead to the living concern how to live a better, more enriched, and more prosperous life. They are passing on lessons from their own lives and from what they can see in their new perspective as the dead.

And the dead can see this world in ways that we can not. Their messages generally are for us to cherish life as we have it and not to fear death because death is a part of life. I've wandered a bit afield from where I started. As I said earlier, not all mediums are necromancers. But most of the modern necromancers you see in the public eye are mediums. They use their skills to facilitate messages from the dead to the living.