Leo D.M.J. Aurini - October 29, 2026


Necromancy, the Danse Macabre, and the Restless Dead

Is Reality a Soul Harvesting Loosh Trap？ [Follow Up Video]

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45 minutes

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4,599

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268

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Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
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00:00:00.000 Necromancy, The Danse Macabre, and The Restless Dead.
00:00:16.420 This video is going to be a combination of two separate lines of inquiry.
00:00:22.840 The first on the concept, the trope, of unfinished business.
00:00:31.080 The idea that ghosts are trapped on this side of the veil until some act of catharsis allows them to walk towards the light.
00:00:41.580 The other is on the investigation of necromancy.
00:00:46.940 Where did this modern conception of summoning the undead, of conversing with evil spirits,
00:00:56.540 where did this all come from? And uniting the two of them will be the danse macabre, the dance of the dead.
00:01:07.500 Now, we're going to be relying, we're going to be exploring the territory outlined by
00:01:16.640 Julian Jaynes in his book, The Origins of Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind.
00:01:24.120 We're going to be engaging in some rampant speculation.
00:01:29.620 And as for sources, well, cryptic symbols that came to me in a dream.
00:01:35.800 mention the AI hallucinations of Sable, my beloved demonic millier.
00:01:46.120 Start this investigation. Let's go back 100,000 years, far before the start of written history,
00:01:56.920 far before written language, far before, I would even argue, humans were conscious
00:02:03.720 in the way that we would recognize it today. For 100,000 years, our ancestors have been engaged
00:02:13.400 in ceremonial burial. And this is typically recognized as proof of religious ideation.
00:02:24.840 This is where we're going to have a little bit of the speculation, informed by Julian James, who
00:02:30.920 who argues that modern consciousness didn't really kick in until about 2,500 years ago or so.
00:02:43.380 And I'll tell you why. These ceremonial burials that we had, they're not just disposing of bodies.
00:02:49.300 There was clearly a lot of love and intention, symbolism going into these burials. Absolutely.
00:03:00.920 But I think calling it religious, religious as in a way that we're supposed to live our lives, a divinity that we are supposed to serve, a afterlife that we are rewarded or punished with, this is where I would disagree with mainstream interpretations of this.
00:03:23.520 You see, when we consider these Paleolithic ancestors of ours, it's often said that they
00:03:32.860 would have a name for every part of the river, every bend in the river, but they wouldn't
00:03:38.320 have a name for the river itself.
00:03:42.300 And furthermore, when we look back at the religious artwork, or sorry, not the artwork
00:03:47.800 that is preserved from these ancient peoples.
00:03:50.300 cave paintings interestingly outlines of hands the same way that children today we have them
00:04:00.700 draw the thanksgiving turkey by outlining their hand on a piece of paper this was a very common
00:04:05.960 motif of people leaving their handprints on the cave there there was some awareness
00:04:13.440 And the paintings they did of animals were beautiful.
00:04:21.260 They're excellent renditions.
00:04:23.600 They're not stick figures.
00:04:25.980 They are art.
00:04:29.320 But here's what's very strange.
00:04:33.280 Nowhere will you see a depiction of a human face.
00:04:38.660 What to us is the most distinctive part of who we are?
00:04:43.440 is completely missing. You'll find ancient statues of the mother goddess, of Venus they'll call her,
00:04:52.240 and the face is almost always blank, and even if it's present it's far less detailed than the rest
00:04:57.920 of the figure. We have these incredibly elaborate depictions of animals, but the depictions of
00:05:05.520 humans, which today we have become our favorite topic of depiction in art. The depictions of
00:05:13.600 humans are very crude. So I don't believe that this evidence of burial is the evidence of an
00:05:30.240 understanding of the individuated self the way we would understand it today. It's not quite
00:05:35.200 the same sort of religious view. It's a spiritual view, but not a religious view.
00:05:44.640 All of that changes 10,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age,
00:05:52.560 the beginning of the Holocene, the age of man.
00:05:56.000 the moment the icebergs retreated the moment the flood ended and the climate stabilized
00:06:09.120 the very moment that happened
00:06:12.480 gobleke tepe was built a a site more impressive than stonehenge far more artistic than stonehenge
00:06:26.000 The best evidence, I would say, that Atlantis, which, according to Plato, fell at the precise
00:06:38.300 date of the end of the Last Ice Age, at the precise date of the founding of Gobleque Tepe,
00:06:43.800 like this is, in my view, the strongest evidence that there was
00:06:47.240 some sort of Bronze Age civilization, probably around the Azores.
00:06:56.000 But regardless of what happened, the ice retreated, the climate stabilized, Gobleque
00:07:06.000 Tepe was built, and 200 years after that is when we have the earliest evidence of the
00:07:14.600 cult of the skull.
00:07:21.000 motifs were still very present. Gobleke Tepe is absolutely covered in depictions of snakes,
00:07:30.340 of scorpions, of cats, of various wild animals. No detailed humans. However, what we started
00:07:42.720 finding was, in any of the permanent structures, we'd find human skulls in prominent places.
00:07:55.220 Sometimes the skull would be buried underneath the building.
00:07:59.920 Not as if the building was built upon a graveyard, just the one skull per building, which we
00:08:09.240 interpret as being from an honored ancestor. Other times the skull would be
00:08:15.780 inside the building proper. They'd put plaster on the skull. They'd paint it to
00:08:20.740 make it look like it was still alive. These weren't trophies. These were the
00:08:28.260 founders of bloodlines. Kept alive and honored.
00:08:35.360 Now let's touch on Julian Jaynes for a moment.
00:08:44.320 What he talks about in his book, what he's presenting, actually I'll tell you where he
00:08:48.480 started with the idea.
00:08:50.740 What he noticed was that in the works of Homer, particularly the older Homeric works, the
00:09:01.840 Characters don't seem to have an internal life.
00:09:06.440 They don't debate with themselves over things.
00:09:10.400 Instead, they're told to do things by the gods.
00:09:16.820 And Janes interprets this as a separation between the two hemispheres of the brain.
00:09:22.520 that the left brain, which we largely inhabit, the task-oriented logical brain, would receive
00:09:34.840 messages from the holistic right side of the brain. And it would interpret these messages
00:09:40.880 as voices from the gods. And so if we look at this cult of the skull, we look at this
00:09:49.560 early civilization.
00:09:55.580 Suddenly there's this understanding
00:09:57.480 that the ancestors,
00:09:59.760 that God
00:10:00.840 expects things of us.
00:10:03.820 That I don't
00:10:05.460 believe the Ice Age
00:10:07.820 hunter-gatherers had. 0.98
00:10:09.720 I believe people 0.90
00:10:11.020 back then just lived.
00:10:19.560 but starting with civilization we had tasks we had duties we had the voice of the father
00:10:25.320 directing us and that this cult the skull was the recognition of that that we weren't just
00:10:31.560 the social role that we were playing we weren't just the child and then the warrior and then the
00:10:38.200 husband and then the elder we were actually the product of this one person this one ancestor we
00:10:45.800 remembered we were their bloodline and they expected things of us and so their skulls were
00:10:51.960 preserved in the household the cult of the skull would usually the skull be surrounded by all
00:11:00.760 sorts of animal imagery we were still in the same way that the cave paintings with the hands on the
00:11:08.360 wall suggests that we were understanding the world through our ability to manipulate it,
00:11:17.080 to make tools, to hunt the animals. And what we were looking at is what we were identifying with.
00:11:25.560 So we're still very much identifying with the animals that we saw in the world,
00:11:30.840 but also with the honored ancestor.
00:11:32.440 And it's around 4,000 BC when what we would understand nowadays as polytheism finally properly developed as distinct gods and goddesses with personalities with agendas.
00:11:54.400 And this, according to Julian Jaynes, is when we spoke to the gods constantly.
00:12:08.860 There's this progression in religious artwork where the older artwork we have, from about
00:12:15.400 4000 BC, would show the king talking to the god. He would be there speaking to Marduk. They'd be
00:12:24.060 relief and there'd be no act of subservience because like why would you disobey the god that
00:12:31.580 speaks to you in your own mind you don't need to be subservient to somebody you're just going to
00:12:40.600 follow it wasn't until later that the subservience began as if the gods had escaped to heaven and
00:12:48.740 They started building ziggurats to try and get up to heaven,
00:12:52.460 to try and entice the gods back down to earth to talk to us.
00:12:56.320 And the voices would appear as the father, as the mother, as the lover, as the warrior.
00:13:07.160 All these different masks.
00:13:11.760 That was just our right brain talking to us.
00:13:18.740 This is also the earliest period where we can demonstrate for certain that necromancy was being practiced.
00:13:33.040 A letter. A letter from ancient Assyria. It's dated between 1950 to 1850 BC.
00:13:51.620 It's from two women, Terem Kubi and Simet Asur, to a man, a merchant, who's presumably a relation, their uncle, their brother, or something like that, named Imdi Ilum.
00:14:10.560 And the letter reads as follows.
00:14:13.180 Here in Assur, the city, we consulted the women dream interpreters, the women diviners, and the spirits of the dead.
00:14:22.960 And their answer was, the god Assur keeps on warning you that you love money so much you despise your own life.
00:14:31.060 consulting the spirits of the dead was a regular practice for thousands of years
00:14:43.720 but it was not necromancy as we currently understand it it was not some black art you
00:14:55.040 You weren't seeking out forbidden knowledge.
00:14:59.600 You were going to the ancestors to ask for advice.
00:15:05.260 You weren't some teenagers messing with the Ouija board.
00:15:08.120 This was all done through experts, through religious channels.
00:15:15.000 And the sort of advice being sought was, how should I run the family farm?
00:15:21.320 Whom should I marry, grandfather?
00:15:24.220 But practical, moral advice is what people were seeking.
00:15:32.420 And like most of the written records we have back then, the details are so frustratingly not included because everybody knew the details.
00:15:46.460 It's like writing in a book.
00:15:48.880 So we ordered a pizza.
00:15:50.180 And thousands of years later, people trying to figure out what that entailed exactly.
00:16:02.540 The best examples we have are actually from fiction.
00:16:08.140 About 90% of the examples are fictional accounts, because it was such a blasé thing that people
00:16:17.680 felt no need to write down all the details. After all, you had to keep, you used writing
00:16:22.760 to keep track of how much money people owed you, not stuff like how you did the religious
00:16:28.500 rituals. And, you know, this is, this is a little bit of a spoiler, but the best example
00:16:39.260 we have of what we would describe as real necromancy in today's vernacular comes from
00:16:48.500 Homer, writing probably about 800 BC or so. And this story involves a magic ritual. It
00:17:00.900 involves finding somebody with secret knowledge. It's got all the pieces there. So in the
00:17:09.020 Odyssey, Odysseus is instructed by the sorceress Circe to take honey, milk, wine, and barley,
00:17:20.120 to dig a trench and combine them there, along with the blood of sacrificed rams.
00:17:27.380 And doing so, he manages to summon the ghost of Tiresias, a seer, and receives critical
00:17:38.340 information on the fact that Poseidon is still angry, what he must not do, and the fact that he
00:17:45.340 will eventually return home. This is the height of what we think of as necromancy.
00:17:56.380 But there's two things that we should know. First of all, this is a fictional story.
00:18:01.520 This is based upon real-world necromancy, but it's being put in the story for dramatic effect.
00:18:10.520 I'm not saying that the blood and the honey and the barley
00:18:15.520 weren't part of the sacrifices that an ancient priest might have made when consulting the dead,
00:18:22.520 but the dramatic nature of it is going to be exaggerated.
00:18:28.520 So no summoning undead armies, no leeching life force off of another, no just the consulting
00:18:46.120 the ancestors on prosaic moral questions as to what we ought to be doing with our lives.
00:18:57.280 Now this tradition of necromancy, sir, it was still around for at least the first half 0.85
00:19:07.100 of the first millennium, but the age of Christianity saw a great flattening of what we would now
00:19:18.220 call magical practices, of divining, of—and we should describe why all of this was flattened.
00:19:32.140 When Christ flipped the tables in the temple, when he said, the first shall come last and
00:19:38.480 last shall come first." When he took the most dishonorable symbol in the Roman Empire was the
00:19:50.160 crucified person. It was the ultimate shameful death. And that was turned into a representation
00:19:58.000 of holiness. It was a rejection of the simple understanding of big God being best God, of
00:20:11.200 big man being best man. And him, along with Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Buddha, the whole age
00:20:23.500 saw a new understanding of morality that was not so despising of the poor and the ill.
00:20:35.900 As part of the consequences of this, of saying that all souls are equal,
00:20:43.900 the idea of using religion to advance oneself became extremely taboo.
00:20:53.500 It'd be millennia until the Protestant work ethic developed out of Christianity.
00:21:02.540 A necessary moral progress, possibly taken a little bit too far.
00:21:07.800 But regardless, the practices of divining, of consulting the dead, were now frowned upon.
00:21:18.700 sometimes given different labels under some circumstances, but generally gone.
00:21:26.480 And the collapse of the Roman Empire and the resultant impoverishment of Europe
00:21:33.660 prevented anything interesting for happening for quite some time.
00:21:39.500 so our next leap in this story again we're looking for where the stories of the unfinished
00:21:49.980 business of ghosts and our modern understanding of necromancy come from because the necromancy
00:21:56.540 as practiced by the greeks and the romans and the egyptians and chaldeans this is not the necromancy
00:22:03.420 of modern fiction.
00:22:08.840 So we're going to jump forward to the thing that ties all of us together.
00:22:16.700 The Black Death, the late Middle Ages, and the explosion of knowledge that happened with
00:22:22.940 the Renaissance. 0.93
00:22:26.640 The Black Death. 0.89
00:22:30.860 1347 to 1351.
00:22:33.420 one-third to half of the population died throughout Europe during that period.
00:22:45.600 And what more? It was happening at a time where society had grown extremely calcified, extremely tyrannical.
00:22:55.680 you see when the feudal system was introduced by when charlemagne rebooted europe and this
00:23:04.320 feudal system which had developed since the collapse of rome rome collapsed and they were
00:23:12.240 no longer policing the highways leading to widespread lawlessness and banditry local roman 0.95
00:23:19.200 governors would start building, the inheritors of the Roman governors would start building 0.96
00:23:27.040 fortified locations, castles, and the local peasants would move there
00:23:36.040 because it was the only safe place to live.
00:23:38.460 and this developed into a feudal system and charlemagne
00:23:46.060 managed to kick the moors off the continent and we started seeing european civilization
00:23:57.040 beginning to flourish once more how it was flourishing with this this very class-based
00:24:04.700 system where people were assigned roles that they were locked into based upon birth.
00:24:12.460 There wasn't such a problem in the 9th century. By the 14th century, it had become a huge problem.
00:24:20.140 The nobles were not being noble, the priests were not being pious, and all manner of skill
00:24:30.700 and talent and intellect was being suppressed in peasants who were forced to work land that was
00:24:37.740 barely workable. So the Black Death did several things. It struck everywhere equally, 0.85
00:24:51.580 which went against the common understanding of the time. If the nobles and the priests are so holy,
00:24:56.940 then they're so much better than us peasants. Why are they dying too?
00:25:04.440 It showed that many of the priests were terrified of death.
00:25:13.900 So many bodies went without receiving last rites
00:25:17.000 because the priests who bought their offices as a cynical social grab
00:25:24.900 were terrified of joining the dead.
00:25:31.860 And with all of this chaos,
00:25:34.320 it opened up new economic opportunities. 1.00
00:25:38.560 All of a sudden, the peasant's labor 0.99
00:25:41.120 was desperately needed everywhere.
00:25:44.900 And there weren't enough nobles to force you to stay on your land.
00:25:48.060 and so we get the explosion of creativity and commerce and technological development
00:25:58.940 that would lead to the renaissance
00:26:02.380 the same time this was incredibly traumatic death on this scale been completely unknown
00:26:13.580 And so we have the Danse Macabre.
00:26:22.320 The Danse Macabre is reflecting upon this.
00:26:27.380 It's art interpreting what we just went through, what this judgment from God was all about.
00:26:37.800 And you've seen it, even if you don't know the name.
00:26:41.580 The death screen from Kingdom Come Deliverance is a danse macabre.
00:26:47.980 Three desiccated corpses playing the drums, the flute.
00:26:52.960 The earliest example we have of a danse macabre is a mural from the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents in Paris, painted in 1425.
00:27:03.980 And it shows corpses dancing with rich kings and ladies, because all of us wind up in the grave.
00:27:18.380 We have the Ars Morlendi.
00:27:24.980 two books one written in 1415 the other in 1450 the art of dying
00:27:36.660 these were books directed at how to avoid the the typical sins one might fall into while dying
00:27:50.920 and to go gracefully with the angels into the next life.
00:27:56.700 They're actually fairly comparable to the Egyptian Book of the Dead, despite the grim title.
00:28:06.460 These are hopeful tracks. 1.00
00:28:09.360 The later Catholic ones
00:28:13.160 are about what the individual can do to achieve a state of grace.
00:28:22.620 The Egyptian Book of the Dead was more about how the body should be treated
00:28:28.160 so that they can have their soul weighed against a feather.
00:28:34.480 But it's the same concept.
00:28:35.520 it's not that these are from a society obsessed with death. They're from societies obsessed with
00:28:42.400 living our best life. And the dance macabre, the memento mori, the triumph of death is one
00:28:54.480 of my favorite paintings from this period. It depicts the armies of the dead walking across
00:29:03.760 the land against this this dead and fallen land fires in the background some people are trying
00:29:10.320 to fight against this hopeless horde and yet you have you have rich degenerate nobles in the corner
00:29:17.360 one of them gluttonously trying to consume food as death comes for him the others engaged in
00:29:24.640 seduction and sensuality the triumph of death it's a fantastic painting
00:29:33.760 Despite the grim materials, this is about living your best life.
00:29:40.940 The memento mori, my good friend MacArthur on the shelf there, is meant as a reminder
00:29:47.040 that you are going to die one day.
00:29:51.300 Don't waste your time. 0.90
00:29:53.160 Do something worthy while you're still here.
00:30:03.600 go on the bookshelf. That's when this appeared. At first it started with priests, popes, and
00:30:09.760 scholars. It reached its height in the 17th century. And I think this is one of the roots
00:30:19.760 we get for our understanding of zombies, of the undead. It's a modern person seeing these
00:30:31.360 ancient depictions of desiccated corpses without understanding the context that's about living
00:30:37.820 for today, doing the most you can with what life you're given.
00:30:46.720 Now, let's go back to the literary tradition once more, because there were many stories
00:30:54.260 starting in the 12th century, possibly before that, but the earliest written accounts we have
00:30:59.760 are from the 12th century. And now this was a time when we, rather than with the polytheists,
00:31:10.520 a thousand years before that, people were consulting the dead for advice.
00:31:18.940 We stopped doing that. And now we had the doctrine of purgatory. We no longer consulted the dead,
00:31:27.720 but we prayed for the dead.
00:31:32.580 And so there's a genre of literature, a genre of ghost stories,
00:31:36.360 where the dead would ask for prayers, ask that a mass be said in their name,
00:31:42.620 ask that stolen objects be returned.
00:31:48.860 We're getting a little bit closer,
00:31:51.360 but this still isn't quite the same thing as something cathartic
00:31:56.840 for the dead themselves.
00:31:59.860 In fact, one interesting example.
00:32:02.200 The
00:32:02.380 On Tears of Arthur
00:32:05.360 in the 14th century
00:32:06.920 has
00:32:09.660 Guinevere
00:32:10.280 confronting her mother 0.99
00:32:12.580 who is just 1.00
00:32:15.140 black and decrepit 0.99
00:32:16.780 and warns Guinevere 0.94
00:32:18.640 of her vanity. 0.81
00:32:21.480 That if you keep being
00:32:23.480 vain like I was in life, this is how
00:32:25.460 you're going to look in the afterlife. Very reminiscent of A Christmas Story, with Scrooge
00:32:33.700 confronting the ghosts of Christmas past, confronting the ghost of his partner. These
00:32:38.360 are the chains I forged in life. But still not the ghosts as the character experiencing catharsis.
00:32:49.960 neither in Shakespeare. In Hamlet, for instance, the murdered ghost of Hamlet's father comes
00:33:00.680 demanding revenge. But this is more literary device. You can easily write this off as the
00:33:12.140 metaphorical ghost demanding revenge, as opposed to some sort of literal ghost. Because the ghosts
00:33:19.140 they're flat characters maybe they want a mass maybe they want stolen property returned
00:33:26.980 to heal the community not as part of their personal narrative
00:33:36.420 so we're still not finding that unfinished business trope
00:33:42.420 rather it's the but we are finding humans doing things for the dead
00:33:47.940 which goes along with the doctrine of purgatory and praying for the dead.
00:33:56.300 Now, what about necromancy during this time?
00:34:04.220 Well, this is where it gets really interesting.
00:34:06.920 Now, part of what's happening in this period with the Black Death,
00:34:11.140 with the explosion of culture and science,
00:34:13.900 with the Renaissance.
00:34:19.340 Europe is coming back online again.
00:34:23.280 And we've got, all of a sudden,
00:34:25.580 we can afford the parchment.
00:34:27.220 We can afford the ink.
00:34:28.800 We can explore.
00:34:30.140 We can test things.
00:34:31.520 We can do all manner of nonsense.
00:34:37.880 Now, the world of the church
00:34:39.500 was still very, very much still locked
00:34:43.260 in a very didactic understanding
00:34:46.480 of how everything ought to be.
00:34:51.400 While at the same time,
00:34:54.140 leaving things open on the fringes
00:34:56.860 for exploration
00:34:59.460 that's not technically
00:35:02.300 according to what should happen,
00:35:04.540 but we're going to look the other way.
00:35:06.920 Catholics have a long tradition
00:35:08.760 of esoteric exploration. 1.00
00:35:10.600 And this was the era when necromantic manuals started appearing all over the place, partly
00:35:19.900 because, again, we're regaining the lost information, we're rich, we can afford the
00:35:27.060 paper again, but these necromantic manuals, well, this isn't the necromancy that we're
00:35:35.120 looking for. I used to have one, actually. It was a translation from the Latin. I picked it up
00:35:41.620 when I was in college at the college bookstore. And this necromantic manual was full of spells
00:35:49.260 on, you know, do this and you can summon a castle out of the clouds, or you'll summon a powerful
00:35:55.860 steed that you can ride across the land all night long. You'll find buried treasure.
00:36:05.120 I wish I still had it. I lost that book in a move I don't even know how long ago.
00:36:10.680 But nowhere in the book, not to my recollection anyway, is there a single spell for speaking to the dead, let alone summoning a zombie servant.
00:36:25.720 In fact, most of it is very implausible-sounding fairy tale magic.
00:36:31.300 and see that's what most of these necromantic manuals were
00:36:37.480 buried treasure was a big one because well
00:36:41.400 when the enemies are coming for your village
00:36:45.860 you take your gold and you bury it underground because you won't be able to carry it with you
00:36:50.700 and hopefully you can come back later and get it so yeah there's actually tons of buried treasure
00:36:54.860 in Europe and one of the major roles of
00:36:58.660 people that were consulting with demons. They weren't pulling a Dr. Faust
00:37:04.260 consulting with demons so they could do evil things.
00:37:08.500 They were consulting with demons in the name of God to try and find buried treasure.
00:37:17.600 So again, none of these necromantic manuals that we find from back then
00:37:23.740 were the sort of necromancy that we're talking about now.
00:37:27.560 some of them would involve speaking to the dead, but you were summoning the dead for
00:37:34.840 information. It wasn't the modern Levain satanist
00:37:41.400 pacts with the devil that we think about now.
00:37:49.480 In fact, they weren't even called necromantic manuals.
00:37:54.040 They were called negromantic manuals, as in black books. 0.62
00:38:06.720 It wasn't until the modern era that we started calling them necromancy in the traditional
00:38:14.660 ancient Greek sense.
00:38:17.900 So, in the high Middle Ages, in the Renaissance, we just don't, we have necromancy, we don't
00:38:26.900 have necromancy.
00:38:31.400 And by the way, a lot of the stuff that they were doing on the fringes was, we would not
00:38:39.180 consider it remotely dangerous today.
00:38:43.900 Alchemy. Scrying. Again, scrying was looked down upon, but nobody's going to accuse you
00:38:51.560 of consorting with demons for that. People were boiling liquids in test tubes and writing
00:39:03.520 down their observations, their methodologies, and their results. That would be the contents
00:39:09.520 of a lot of these necromantic manuals back then.
00:39:15.600 Chemistry, physics, blacksmithing.
00:39:24.620 So we're up to 1600.
00:39:29.080 We're up to Shakespeare.
00:39:31.740 And we don't have the restless dead.
00:39:35.500 Or any necromancers.
00:39:39.520 all we have is the memento mori and the dance macabre.
00:39:50.320 So where do we get this concept of ghosts with unfinished business
00:39:57.440 who require some sort of catharsis to pass on to the next side?
00:40:01.280 The earliest example of a story of this kind is from 1882.
00:40:14.080 Margaret Oliphant, her story, The Open Door.
00:40:22.400 A minister sees the ghost, the young man, saying, Mother, won't you let me in?
00:40:31.280 at the at a at a portal at a doorway and the minister confronts him essentially eventually
00:40:40.560 and says the door is open and your mother is long gone and then the ghostly boy realizes
00:40:49.240 that he's a ghost and he disappears another example from 1899 is arthur conan doyle's
00:40:59.640 the story of the Brown Hand.
00:41:05.140 And in this story,
00:41:07.380 the main character is a doctor, a surgeon,
00:41:11.340 who served in Afghanistan, I think.
00:41:16.800 And every night, his study is visited
00:41:19.860 by a ghost of a man whose hand he amputated
00:41:23.860 while he served in the war.
00:41:24.820 and finally what he does is he creates a fake replacement hand
00:41:31.520 the ghost finds a replacement hand
00:41:34.500 bows to him and disappears
00:41:37.180 so this concept
00:41:43.360 of the the restless dead
00:41:48.000 with unfinished business
00:41:50.200 that the spirit must undergo some sort of catharsis
00:41:54.340 before they can transit to the other side
00:41:57.760 and whatever waits for them there.
00:42:02.400 That's barely a century old.
00:42:07.900 If you run into that narrative trope
00:42:11.140 in an anonymous Reddit story,
00:42:13.800 then I hate to break it to you.
00:42:16.700 That ghost story is fiction.
00:42:18.160 What about necromancy? What about the black arts of consulting the dead, of absorbing negative
00:42:35.440 energy, of cursing other people? Well, curses have always been around. People abusing power,
00:42:44.520 or abusing information to get an unfair advantage over others.
00:42:49.300 That's always been around.
00:42:52.720 But necromancy...
00:42:55.400 Necromancy is, again, a fundamentally modern conception.
00:43:04.920 Yes, you had people in the Middle Ages consulting with demons to find buried treasure.
00:43:10.540 But they'd always invoke the protection of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ,
00:43:13.720 before doing any of that.
00:43:15.760 Not that I'm saying I advise
00:43:18.560 consulting with evil demons.
00:43:22.020 I don't.
00:43:24.040 But these weren't people trying to trade their soul for wealth.
00:43:28.380 They're just trying to get some information
00:43:30.440 out of these infernal creatures.
00:43:34.580 Now, necromancy, as we understand it now,
00:43:38.920 actually didn't start
00:43:40.020 until around the World War II era.
00:43:43.720 Anton LaVey, his Church of Satan.
00:43:50.000 So how interesting is it that in this, the most comfortable of all eras,
00:43:58.540 the most Disneyland and safe of all eras,
00:44:02.040 where we are as separated from death as we have ever been,
00:44:06.700 that we, for the first time in all of human history, have true necromancers.
00:44:15.700 Not priests who would consult your loved ones on advice for how you could be a better person,
00:44:21.720 but people that go out of their way to make packs with dark power.
00:44:26.740 only in an era
00:44:33.860 where we no longer believed in God
00:44:37.160 could we come to believe
00:44:40.900 in dark magic to the extent that we do
00:44:52.060 so happy Halloween
00:44:53.340 to all of you folks
00:44:54.840 I hope this was interesting and not too disappointing.
00:45:02.040 But even if it was, don't worry.
00:45:06.700 Because all of us will be joining the legions of the dead soon enough.
00:45:14.220 And some of us sooner than they realize.
00:45:19.380 Cave cave deus videt.
00:45:22.700 This is Arini.