“Thou Art Keeper of Man and Woman’s Bones” – Rituals of Necromancy in Early Modern England

Authors

• Daniel Harms SUNY Cortland

Abstract

In sixteenth and seventeenth-century England, high rates of mortality and churchyard burial placed the dead very close to the living both physically and emotionally. Experiments of necromancy, in which a magician sought to contact the dead by magical means, from the time have been little examined as historical documents. One such set of experiments is referred to here as the “Keeper of the Bones” ritual, in which a magician calls on a spirit to bring the ghost of a dead person in order to obtain desired information. We will examine these rituals and connect them with contemporary funerary rituals and practices, as well as beliefs in the nature of the soul and the role of the dead in early modern culture.