Admission: $55 ($50 for $5/month and up Patreon Members)
To become a member, click HERE

Date: Sunday, March 6
Time: 4:30–6:30 pm EST

This class will take place virtually, via Zoom. Ticket sales will end at 2 pm EST the day of the lecture. Attendees may request a video recording AFTER the class takes place by emailing proof of purchase to [email protected]. Video recordings are valid for 30 days after the date of the lecture.

Ticketholders: a link to the conference is sent out at 2:30 pm EST on the day of the event to the email used at checkout. Please add [email protected] to your contacts to ensure that the event link will not go to spam.

The practice of necromancy is regarded most strictly as consorting with and gaining knowledge from the dead, and more broadly as magical work conducted by means of such shades. It has enjoyed a treatment – at least in the Western world – as the preserve of wicked black magicians, devilish witches, and other ghastly ne’er-do-wells. Yet all cultures and peoples also have ways of heeding and honouring and remembering their departed dear ones and ancestors, and even attending to the posthumous needs and advice of the dead. Necromancy may be found in the in-between, where the licit meets and the illicit, and where the spiritual meets the sorcerous.

This class will look beyond necromancy’s spooky reputation to the valuable, responsible, and nourishing spiritual work that can be done with the dead: from veneration of ancestors, to the evocation of great ghosts to teach one things, to taking care of your local churchyard and asking the occasional favour from the residents, to dealing with the intrusive and disturbing impacts of restless shades.

This class is taught by diviner, consultant, historian and – yes – necromancer Dr Alexander Cummins, who draws on both his academic research and professional experience as a spiritual reader and worker to draw together these examinations and explorations of how the living and the dead may aid each other.

Dr. Alexander Cummins is a magician, diviner, historian, and poet whose work focuses on magical books, demonology, geomancy, and folk magic as well as love divination and enchantment. His doctoral research centered on magic and the emotions in the pre-modern world.

Image: John Dee (at right) with his friend Edward Kelley evoking a spirit in the churchyard of St Leonards's Church in Walton-le-Dale, Lancashire, at midnight on 12 August 1560. Coloured engraving about 1740.