Tag: necromancy

Bits and Pieces from the Tomb: Thomas K. Johnson’s Graveyard Wanderers

Thomas K. Johnson is an academic who translated 37 books of Swedish folk magic as part of his PhD thesis in 2010. These books comprised of spells that had been passed down through generations of the “wise people” From these translations, Johnson picked out all of the spells involving stuff that comes from graveyards (dirt, bones, coffin nails…) and compiled them into this macabre collection.

The Graveyard Wanderers: The Wise Ones + The Dead in Sweden

Society of Esoteric Endeavour – 2013

There’s spells to stop birds moving, to hex and un-hex a gun, to turn invisible and to kill a tree. Most of these spells involve mixing graveyard dirt into different things and then spreading it on whatever you want to affect. Another common way to invoke the magic of the dead is to hammer a used coffin nail into something. Doing so to a horse shoe will render the horse lame, and doing so to a piece of shit will give the shitter a bad case of diarrhea. Seriously. If you can’t find a coffin nail, but still want to give somebody the trots, you can also fill a human bone with your victim’s shit and then let a river flow through the bone. (My advice would be to let it flow over your hands too, unless you want to be a Mr. Shitty Brownfingers.) If you want help from the dead in raping a woman, stick a coffin nail in her piss. (I’ve heard from a reliable source that a more efficacious way of achieving this goal is to drink a pint of bleach.)

Speaking of piss, to cure a child who has had a stroke, their mom should piss in a skull and then give it to the kid to drink. If there’s no skulls handy, mom can just piss in her hand and give it to her thirsty whippersnapper that way. (It was only a year ago that I reviewed another grimoire that used a lot of piss magic.) If you want to turn invisible, plant some peas in a human skull and when they grow, put them in your mouth. If you want to get really close to a bird without it flying away, make a mask out of a human skull and approach the bird while looking through the eye sockets of the deceased. There’s also a cool section in here that describes making a belt from the skin of a corpse’s abdomen. When created properly, this belt allows its wearer to turn into a werewolf.

I quite enjoyed this book. Many of the spells are ridiculous, but this is folk magic, and it made me think about what ordinary people valued and how they tried to make sense of the world a few hundred years ago. It reminded me of The Black Books of Elverum, another collection of Scandinavian spells. Only 180 copies of the fancy embossed cover hardback of Graveyard Wanderers were printed, but a paperback copy is now available for anyone who wants this in their library.

The Necromantic Ritual Book – Leilah Wendell

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The Necromantic Ritual Book – Leilah Wendell
Westgate Press  – 2005 (First published 1991)

Here’s a short and sweet grimoire of necromantic death magic. I was fairly surprised with this one. It’s probably the grimmest book of magic I’ve ever reviewed.

The first part of the book deals with “getting comfortable in Death’s presence”. It explains how the prospective necromancer must spend a night of contemplation in contact with a corpse. At this point, alarm bells were going off in my head. If this was just the preparation, what would the more adept rituals entail?

A lengthy portion of the text is spent describing how to make “a sculpted talisman for necromantic rites”, basically a physical body for a magical entity. Unlike the “anchoring base for an artificial spirit” from The Dark Arts of Tarantula, this talisman must be physically made by the magician; a Dungeons and Dragons figurine will not do. And unlike the Genies created in The Hallowed Genie, Wendell’s talismans must be composed of as much dead matter as possible. Oh, and they’re supposed to be life sized too, so Wendell suggests using an actual human skeleton as the frame. This frame is then to be covered in a thick paste of festering dead matter. Pulped roadkill and hideously rotten human remains are to be ground up with graveyard dirt for this task. Once this is done, the stinking mass of death sausage is to be wrapped tightly in a winding sheet that has been soaked with glue. This putrescent monstrosity is to be kept hidden, presumably in the shadows of the magicians house.

I mean, that sounds like the beginning of an amazing horror story, and I wonder if anybody has ever actually gone through with it. Imagine the stench. You’d probably contract all types of horrid diseases from in the process. Imagine having friends or family over and one of them finding your stinky friend. You’d end up in a mad house.

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Ok, so after the creating a rot-golem section, I knew that Leilah wasn’t just your average witchy magician. She was clearly a real freak, but I was still a bit surprised at the end of the book.

In describing the culmination of an act of “high necromancy”, she explains that the magician will experience “an erection (in males) or sensuous expression (in females)”. She then instructs the magician, “At this point, do not suppress your desires. Give into them and follow their lead.” I ask you, my dear reader, how do you interpret that advice? It sounds very much to me like she is advocating necrophilia. In the following pages she seems to issue a solemn warning against doing so, but if you read this passage carefully, you’ll see that she only warns against having sex with a corpse if you’re not in love with death. She never says that it’s wrong for a true death lover to love the dead. Also, at the end of this book, there is an advertisement for another book of hers titled “Love Never Dies – The Journey of a Necrophile“. This book is described as “a collection of Leilah’s “personal” encounters with Death, via the dead.” It contains “necrophilic erotica, not for the squeemish” (sic). I found an interview with her in which she says that she draws the line at full-on intercourse with the dead, but she might just have been saying that to protect herself. Draw your own conclusions on whether or nor ol’ Leilah has ever ridden a corpse.

I didn’t expect the darkness and depravity of this book. I thought it would be a witchy manual for drawing magic circles in a cemetery. I’d like to read more by Wendell, but her books seem fairly rare, and I’d worry about ordering copies of her work to my house. I don’t know about the legality of owning necrophilia porn, and I’d be a bit apprehensive even looking up the details.

It just occurred to me that over the course of the past two weeks, I’ve published reviews of books on necrophilia, Satanic Ritual Abuse and Sadomagical techniques. I’ll be in big trouble if my mom ever finds my blog.