Working with Known Dead

Working with Known Dead

and How to Approach It

From Ancestral Altars to lighting candles at the grave of Great Uncle So-and-So, we find necromancy of a very personal type fairly ubiquitous across the planet. In a very real way, this magic hits close to home! It makes sense why one would want, especially, to seek out the aid of people they knew in life who departed the mortal coil before them.

In this article we at Practical Occult want to provide our Discerning Individuals with some tips and tricks to make these workings more potent and generally effective.

Note that this is not a resource on working a Boveda or other sort of ancestral altar but, if one does have access to that spiritual technology, one can easily make use of these ideas through those modalities as well.

The first thing to understand is a difficult one for many. Your dead friend or loved one, unless they were an excellently powerful occultist in life, is not going to be some spiritual power-house in death whose abilities rival or exceed named spirits like demons, angels, elementals, lords of the air or any other denizen of a magician’s bestiary that one finds. As often as we want to believe that the ghost of our grandmother or murdered best friend can move mountains for us, they often can’t. They may try, and often do, but they can be met with failure.

Unless you are going to employ magic to boost their individual power (things like offerings, elevation rituals, sending them off to a faerie court to become a familiar or fusing them with other spirits to create a chimera ((not something I’d do to my dead uncle but, hey, to each their own))), they are going to be relatively limited in their personal capacity to help you.

What they are good at, however, are things like information gathering. They can go forth and learn things for you and, with a familiar voice and understanding of you as a person, transfer that knowledge in easy-to-understand and actionable ways. In many ways, these spirits are some of the best for this task. Their understanding of you is the key here.

Healing is another. In some ways necromancy can be used to heal a body if the ghost was a medical practitioner or was directly related to the person. The will of a dead mother to wrestle you from the hands of oblivion is not only potent but folkloric. They can, in dire times, rally and help fix a body or advocate in spectral courts on your behalf. I’d be remiss if I didn’t also bring up that they can sacrifice themselves for you by agreeing to join the legion of some spirit in exchange for a favor. That discussion on that particular spiritual ecology is a longer one than this essay has time to explore.

Yet another special skill they have, speaking of advocating, is influencing other people. They know you. You may have sat by their grave, candles lit, entreating them to help sway the heart and mind of someone in your life. Maybe it was someone you both knew and, if so, all the better. A ghost can whisper into someone’s soul without rest constantly until they are impacted. This is part of why things like Intranquil Spirit work can be so effective (but only part).

The classic thing they can do for us is guide us. Their wisdom is their strength. While they certainly don’t immediately (or ever in some cases) become more elevated people after dying, they can show us how to walk paths they walked. A dead bandmate can help you write the music you two always dreamed of and a long lost academic mentor can continue showing you the way to new vistas of knowledge with the same patient presence they did in life. In this, you have spirits who not only knew and cared about you but to whom you offer a precious gift: continuation of a mission they held so dear.

As you can surely see, the special skills familiar dead have are just that… familiar. They are abilities of proximity and emotion.

We at Practical Occult offer an entire curriculum on working with the dead and all of the methodology therein can be applied to the suggestions given here.

Finally, one of the things the familiar dead can do for us that most people who don’t do magic will never get is the chance to say goodbye properly if we didn’t get to. The opportunity to say things we worried might remain forever unsaid. They can bring us peace and, after a lifetime of lighting candles and bending reality, sometimes all we really need is that certainty.