Medieval necromancers were often clergymen who borrowed prayers to summon demons
In medieval Europe, the people accused of raising spirits were mostly literate clerics, not village witches. Trained in exorcism and armed with astrology texts, they blended Christian prayers with Arabic astral magic, traced protective circles on the ground and called up demons they believed could reveal secrets, bend minds or conjure illusions.
Necromancy is magic that seeks contact with the dead, summoning their spirits as visions to foretell events or uncover hidden knowledge; the word is sometimes stretched to mean black magic in general. It comes through Late Latin from a post-Classical Greek compound of the words for corpse and divination, first recorded in the 3rd century AD by Origen of Alexandria, and it reached English in the 17th century. It probably grew out of shamanic rites for calling on ancestral ghosts, and classical practitioners reportedly addressed the dead in a blend of shrill squeaks and low drones.
Evidence of it comes from ancient Egypt, Babylonia, Greece, Etruria, Rome and China. Strabo named diviners by the dead as the leading seers of Persia, and Babylonian practitioners raised spirits known as etemmu. The oldest literary version sits in Homer's Odyssey, where Circe teaches Odysseus to call up the shades beside a fire pit at night, using a libation mixed from sacrificial blood, so that he can question the seer Tiresias. Greeks and Romans thought each shade knew only certain things; Ovid even imagined an underworld marketplace where the dead swapped gossip.
The Hebrew Bible forbids consulting the dead in Deuteronomy, and Leviticus sets death as the penalty. The most famous breach is King Saul asking the Witch of Endor to bring up the prophet Samuel before a battle; Saul died the next day, which Chronicles connects to the ban.
Medieval writers held that only God could truly raise the dead, so they treated necromancy as demon-conjuring, and the Church condemned it as maleficium. Its practitioners, often clergy or men in lower orders with informal training, promised three things: control over another's will, illusions such as reanimation or conjured feasts, and knowledge like the identity of a thief. Rituals combined circles traced on the ground, repeated conjurations and a sacrifice, as in the Munich Manual of Demonic Magic, and many drew on nightshade plants such as henbane or mandrake. A Paris church court record of 1323 describes a group planning to summon the demon Berich from a circle of cat-skin strips.
Source: Necromancy
