Life after Death: Necromancy

It probably wasn't long after ancient people developed a belief in the afterlife that they began trying to contact those who had crossed over to the other side.

Necromancy, the term for such communication with dead souls, comes from the ancient Greek word nekromanteia, but the practice dates back much further than the Greeks. Egyptian and Chaldean magicians attempted to conjure up the deceased and speak with them, and God specifically barred the ancient Hebrews from engaging in the practice in Deuteronomy 18:10-11. In the epic poem "The Odyssey," Homer describes his hero Odysseus casting spells according to the instructions from the sorceress Circe, in an effort to speak to the prophet Tiresias and gain assistance to return home. Roman neuromancers believed that it was easiest to reach the dead in caverns and near volcanoes, which they believed to be passageways to the underworld.

In Medieval and Renaissance Europe, occultists persisted in their efforts to conjure up the dead and speak with them, even though in some countries at various times, it was a crime punishable by death (that is, when civil and/or ecclesiastic authorities weren't practicing it themselves). In 1664, for example, the famous English jurist Sir Matthew Hale convicted two elderly women of "unlawful communication with infernal agents" and sentenced them to hang. By the late 1700s, however, necromancy had resurfaced and was being practiced again openly, thanks in part to the pioneering efforts of George, First Baron Lyttelton, who published a manual called "Dialogues with the Dead," which quoted his conversations with the classical Greek statesman Pericles and the deceased Russian czar Peter the Great, among others.

In the 1800s, believers in necromancy even organized their own religion, Spiritualism, and held gatherings called séances, during which they attempted to contact the spirits of the deceased. The belief became so popular that during the American Civil War, Mary Todd Lincoln held séances in the White House in an effort to contact her dead son Willie. His father, President Abraham Lincoln, dutifully attended those events. Typically, in séances of the time, participants would gather around a table in a darkened room, while the leader of the gathering, called the medium, would cast an incantation and go into a trance that purportedly allowed the spirits of the dead to enter his or her body and use it as an ethereal public-address system. The medium would speak in the dead person's voice, or use a pen and paper to convey messages, a practice called automatic writing.