I’ve talked before about how I consider some form of necromancy integral to my experience of Wicca. Wicca centers on mysteries of death and rebirth, and part of what that means magically is that I am often engaging with the spirits of the dead. This sounds spooky, but really it looks pretty simple, especially when it comes to people I knew when they were alive. I talk to them, just as I would if they were still alive. I keep their memories alive, share stories of them, and make offerings of the kinds of things I know they liked; my father (with whom I had and have a complicated relationship) gets offerings of gin and tonic, because that was always his drink of choice.

The basic idea of that kind of practice is that dead people are still people, and it’s possible to be in relationship with them even though they’re dead. This, of course, relies on a whole range of assumptions about life after death, but I’m not really in the mood to unpack them right now–so just a brief nod in their direction to acknowledge they’re there, and on we go.

Sometimes, I will ask the dead people in my life for help, most often in the form of advice. Dead people are still people, and they’re not omniscient or omnipotent, but if they’re people whose opinions I respected and valued in life, there’s no particular reason that should change in death.

The least woo-woo version of this is simply understanding someone well enough to know the advice would give. I think everyone who has lost a loved one has said, at some point, “If X were here with me now, what would they say?” And a lot of the time, we know people well enough to confidently answer that question. Necromantic communication with the spirits of loved ones is basically just doing that, except punched up with magic and with the notion that we don’t have to ask ourselves what they would say: We can just ask them directly.

People use all kinds of magical and divinatory techniques to do this work. The most famous are séances and talking boards, but basically you can apply any form of divination as a bridge to communicate with the dead. My own techniques are frankly unimpressive. They consist mostly of asking a question out loud and then waiting for an answer. Usually, the answer comes in the form of a vague impression, along the lines of “If X were here, what would they say?” Sometimes it’s more distinct, like hearing their voice or having a dream.

This kind of thing isn’t always reliable or easy to interpret. On one memorable occasion, I had a vivid dream where a dead friend instructed me to be at a particular location at a particular time. This resulted in me attending a talk about the history of computer microchips, and while the talk was very interesting, I still haven’t got the faintest clue what its significance was in the context of that dream. Maybe my friend was just curious about microchips. Go figure.

Last week, I had another dream of that sort. I don’t go into the details of it, but the takeaway was that I immediately woke up with a feeling that if my father were alive, he’d be telling me I should reach out to some (living) friends of the family to ask for help with my job search. And it’s true; if he were here, that is exactly what he’d be saying. So I followed advice from my dead father and contacted those family friends, and we’ll see where that takes me.

Being a witch is weird, and never for the reasons I expected. It’s not just weird in the sense that I dance naked under the full moon (because honestly, who hasn’t danced naked under the full moon?) but because I end up saying things like “I’m doing XYZ because my dead father told me to” with a straight face. I don’t really have good concluding thoughts to wrap up this post; I’m just sort of musing to myself. Thanks for reading, and I’ll catch you in the next one.