A particular folk eschatology – a popular idea about What Happens When We Die – haunted early modern Europe way past the important theological debates and schisms of the Reformation: that of certain dead souls awaiting final Judgment Day awake and sensate to the comings and goings of the living. Crucially, many of these souls were thought to congregate about the places, professions, activities, and endeavours they once loved; perfecting craftsmanship as their blessedly “unfinished business”.

Contemporary astrological magicians reported that a certain elevation of the souls of these particularly ‘excellent’ deceased folks to ministering planetary ‘Genii’ was not only possible but a naturally arising benefit of God’s ineffable plan. Such starry tutelary shades benevolently haunted their former workshops, court-houses, and other planetary locales, and their wise counsel was taken as further proof of the occasional minutiae of divine guidance. These posthumously-promoted Great Dead were equally considered to be ‘in society of the Airs’ with other aerial entities, and could potentially even mediate between these other forms of spirits for the folk nigromancer who called them.

These historical crossroads of astrological magic and necromancy present a variety of perspectives, approaches, and techniques for modern practitioners of nigromantic cunning, and indeed anyone else who has called conjurations for a planetary spirit and found the vacancy filled by a dead person fulfilling that very role. In the course of these explorations, we shall find renewed conceptions of ancestry, veneration, the Mighty Dead, and astrological tradition as including active engagements with the shades of the Wandering Ones.

This class-bundle includes:

An illustrated lecture of two-and-a-half-hours duration
Lecture slide-deck
Course List of Further Class Recordings 

A full table of contents of the lecture itself runs:

•       What That Necromancy Do
•       Ambience & Airs
•       Doctoring Vapours
•       Planetary Actions
•       The Retired Dead
•       Who Is Haunting Your Craft
•       Starry Elevation
•       Tutelary Shades
•       The Spectral Children of the Wandering Ones
•       …Especially Dead Magicians
•       Planetary Folk Exorcism
•       A Terroir of Time-Space
•       The Blacks Between the Stars
•       Being Successfully Haunted