Necromance Ashley Johnson Commentary

The Drawers - Ashley Johnson - Primal Commentary by Ashley Johnson

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NECROMANCE

Necromancy is the practice of laying hands on the dead in order to communicate. Necrophilia is having sex with the dead. There are several famous cases in Western culture, like Jeffrey Dahmer and many grotesque urban legends about morgue events. Apparently it was a common practice for priests in some pagan cultures like the Moche of South America, to have sex with the sacrificial victim after death in an effort to communicate with the spirit world. Necromancy has a long tradition in Western cultures like the Greeks and Romans and many rituals were developed to facilitate the exchange.

While sourcing imagery for my dead deer, I came across an interesting story. Bryan James Hathaway was arrested for having sex with a dead deer that had been killed by a car. The Wisconsin State was seeking to have him incarcerated for two years for a crime against sexual morality. Quite apart from his strange perversity, it says a lot about our Western society that the concept of having 'sex' with a dead animal is so taboo. There is an anomaly in deciding when an animal ceases to be an animal and becomes a carcass.

We have a vision of life and death that, for many Western religions, devalues animals. Humans move through death to the hereafter, not animals. Life is separated from death and for many adherents of a scientific worldview death is merely decomposition. Despite these dogmatic insistences, Spiritualism remains a widespread belief. By contrast, the Tibetan Book of the Dead outlines procedures for passing over and communicating with the dead.

Environmental interdependence has become a pervasive ideal and it seems important to revisit these taboos. Religious culture has formalized a system of morality that is out of step with the natural world. Animal identity needs to be fused with human to expand our restrictive notion of individuality. We have to look at our own animal nature squarely in the eye.