E. THE CONSEQUENCES OF NECROMANCY
(I) THE TRANSFUSION OF PSYCHIC ENERGY

WHAT rites are required for establishing effective contact with a
ghost with -whom a necromancer has business to transact ?

According to a legend in the Odyssey, the technique of raising the
dead was found to be a dangerous game by the hero of the epic when,
some twenty-seven centuries before Columbus's day, he cast ofF from
the land of the living and made the untried westward transit of Ocean
Stream in quest, not of gold and spices in the workaday markets of a
terrestrial Cathay, but of oracles from a phantom seer's uncanny lips in
a mouldering House of Hades.1 Though Odysseus showed his usual pru-
dence by following, to the letter, the professional instructions of the
sorceress Circe,2 even so he had considerable difficulty in extricating him-
self from his hazardous psychic adventure; and Odysseus' experience, as
narrated in the epic in the adventurer's oratio recta, is doubly discon-
certing to the reader; for the hero of the Odyssey was granted a privilege
which we cannot hope to share if we venture in his wake in real life.

The crux of necromancy lies in the hard fact that a psychically depo-
tentiated ghost cannot hold converse with the living unless its vitality
has been momentarily raised again to the level of consciousness;3 the
sole means of administering this indispensable temporary reinvigora*
tion to the shades of the departed is to give them a restorative draught,
and for this purpose such insipid ingredients as honey, milk, wine, water,
and barley meal4 are not enough; in order to bring a ghost back to an
effective state of animation, the vivifying brew has to be 'laced' with the
sinister infusion of some living creature's freshly shed blood. This is a
prescription sine qua non without which no business can be transacted;
'no blood-offering, no oracle';5 and Odysseus duly provided the life-
taking life-giving draught; but the legendary Achaean hero was allowed
to reanimate the shades of Teiresias and the rest of the ghastly rout by a
vicarious sacrifice. The operative blood that Odysseus infused into the
innocent but ineffective bloodless offerings in his sacrificial trench
spurted from the sword-slashed throats of a young ram and a black ewe,6
whereas the blood that has to be contributed in real life is not an amen-
able substitute's but is the necromancer's own—with which he parts at a
risk, for himself, of succumbing to pernicious anaemia.

Thus, in real life, the necromancer can restore a ghost's vitality only at
the cost of lowering his own by the exact degree to which he raises his
phantom beneficiary's; and the venturesome necromancer's plight be-
comes more and more precarious as the difference in psychic potency
between the souls of the two parties to this ghoulish encounter is pro-
gressively reduced by the living party's deliberately performed self-

* Odyssey, Book XI, 'Necyla', passim.

2 For these, see Odyssey, Book X, 11. 504-40.

3 See Od. XI, 11.i4°-54. + Od. X, 11. 518-20; OA XI, 11. a6-a8.
s The shade of Teiresias in Od. XI, II. 147-9.

6 Od. X, 11. 537-8; Od. XI, 11. 35-36.