The Helios Biblios Hour : 2 DAY Until LIFE OR DEATH

In ancient Mesopotamia, the happiness of the dead in the Neth-erworld was dependent upon a continuous series of funerary offer-ings provided by their surviving relatives.1 Moreover, ghosts peri-odically left their homes in the world below to come back for visitsduring the course of which they expected to receive entertainmentfrom the living.The manufacture of both male and female figurines is a rela-tively common feature of ancient Mesopotamian magic, the objectbeing to ensure results in cases where the real perpetrator of theoffense (sometimes a ghost but more usually a sorcerer)Necromancy is unique among rituals preserved in the HebrewBible, mortuaiy or otherwise, in that it precipitated direct contactwith the world of the gods as well as with the world of the dead(although not of the deified dead!). In necromancy, both the deadand the gods "bodily" invade the world of the living; therefore it isthe quintessence of liminality. Its (con)fusion of three worlds—those of the gods, the living, and the dead—explains why necro-mancy—among the many magical and mortuary rites Necromancy (/ˈnɛkrəmænsi/) is the practice of magic involving communication with the dead – either by summoning their spirits as apparitions, foretell future events, discover hidden knowledge, to bring someone back from the dead