“You lie on this hot bank, in this lovely, this fading, this still bright October day, watching boat after boat float through the combed-out twigs of the willow tree. And you wish to be a poet; and you wish to be a lover.”
From “the Waves”, by Virginia Woolf (1931)
01/11/2023, London, UK
My dear,
This month, the dead speak! Happy Samhain and happy Halloween, I hope you’ve had the most scrumptious, salacious, spooky month your heart desired. Oh, how time flies when you’re having fun. I’m sitting here on Halloween eve, with a big bowl of blackberries, blueberries and raspberries, and candles aplenty burning while I’m polishing up the last bits of the newsletter. Faux pas to eat blackberries past Old Mikaelmas on October 11th, I know. If I get cursed as a result, I promise you will be the very first to hear about it.
This bright-eyed October’s newsletter is dedicated to necromancy, as is only fitting for the month of the dead and the beginning of much colder days. The past month was a surprisingly calm month in terms of write-ups, but there is one other post of interest to share from the White Lily Society’s socials and that is the long awaited one year anniversary post! Do check it out if you’re interested in a little recap of the year, and the origin story of the White Lily Society. Yet for now, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. There will be a bit more on that particular event to follow later in this letter.
Shall we venture on, my dear?
I. Archive updates
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.”
“the Haunting of Hill House”, by Shirley Jackson (1959)
I must confess to you. This month’s archive updates are a little more sparse than previous months’ offering. There is a handful of new sources for your perusal in the White Lily Society archive, but not as many as I’d like to have added. With the witching season in full force I’ve simply had less time to read and research as I’d wanted to, and curiously enough there is a real lack of fun, enticing literature regarding necromancy (somebody, get on this!). So, in our ever-lasting quest for knowledge, this section of archive updates has expanded in topic to spider dreams, addicted scholars, and spiritualism. Just because.
“Do spiders dream? A new study suggests they do” - Link
Perhaps not fully related to the subject at hand, but definitely a short article that’s been on my mind a lot because of how captivating the research presented within it is. The idea of these tiny jumping spiders, no larger than a pinky nail, dreaming serenely is just so damn adorable, and fascinating to me. What do they dream of? What kind of nightmares are they plagued by? If their dreams are visual, what form do they take? Much to think about.
“[The researcher, Rößler] soon found [the spiders] experience periods of rapid retinal movement […]. It was during these REM-like periods that Rößler observed uncoordinated body movements—their abdomens wiggled, their legs curled or uncurled.”
“‘Occasionally, there are things happening that I can only explain with the theory of them having a nightmare,’ Rößler says. They’ll be peacefully dangling, legs curled in neatly, when suddenly ‘all the legs get extended at the same time, like aah!’”
“Scholarly Addiction: Doctor Faustus and the Drama of Devotion” - link
If you’re at all familiar with the trope of the “obsessed” artist or scholar, look no further than Doctor Faustus, the original devoted scholar who famously signs his soul over to the devil, in search of infinite knowledge. Looking at Calvinism as it relates to scholarly addiction through the concept of predestination, this paper analyses not only the religious aspect of Marlowe’s play, but also scholarly devotion as a classical concept, and Faustus’ “addiction over willpower”. It’s an enlightening read that is sure to resonate, if you’re anything like me.
“Addiction as deployed in these early modern classical translations, is a crucial component of scholarship: only with clarity and dedication can the philosopher find his calling. Furthermore, addiction represents a process of culling away rival pressures, be they worldly or intellectual.”
“Spirited Sexuality: Sex, Marriage, and Victorian Spiritualism” - link
This paper discusses Victorian spiritualism, seance and mediumship as a place for transgressions against the rigid gender norms of the times. Padded with reports from seances and stories about the famous medium Florence Cook, this is an interesting read on how mediums (who were most often female) through their mediumship gained a metaphorical get-out-of-jail-free card for their often erotic, subversive behaviour, but also how those blurred boundaries could work against them in the same ways.
“SPIRITUALISM WAS SEXY. The Victorian faith of sittings, mediums, and spirit contact thrilled its practitioners and detractors alike and broke all rules of decency and decorum in spite of the fact that it was nurtured and developed in the drawing rooms of the proprietous middle classes”
“[…] Spiritualism made social violations of all kinds possible and respectable because it blurred the boundaries between the spiritual and the material.”
II. Necromancy
“I love my wife. My wife is dead. […] Ps. Please excuse my not mailing this - but I don’t know your new address.”
Ending of a love letter to his two-years deceased wife, by physicist Richard Feynman (1946)
So, I recently had the fortune of attending a lecture called "Bridging Realms: Humanity’s Quest to talk with the Dead” by Gary Lachman as part of October’s “London Month of the Dead” events, which sparked a renewed interest in the topic of necromancy. No, surprisingly enough this is not the first time this year that I’ve had a preoccupation with necromancy. The talk I attended was hosted in the Brompton Cemetery chapel, decorated with those lovely tacky Halloween decorations in the form of fake skulls, and attended by a mysterious stray cat of (perhaps) ghostly origins. Cup of questionable punch in hand, I sat down and focused my attention, hoping to hastily scribble down some things to recount to you later on.
Let’s start by going straight to the beginning. Origins of the word necromancy are as follows; necromancy comes from the Greek nekromanteía, meaning divination by corpse. Thus, necromancy is a form of consulting with or contacting the dead, but it is also more often associated with the act of raising the dead, not necessarily for divination’s sake. Communication and restoration are the main connotations of necromancy.
Familiar stories are everywhere, and sometimes just a flash of a word can make us remember them. Lachman started his talk with the sentence “It started with the shamans, a long time ago”, linking the practice of necromancy to the earliest shamans in history, who were considered to be these kind of liminal people, existing in between worlds, those who were deigned to Know. Somehow dismemberment came up- through Shaman initiation- and then he mentioned a familiar story out of Egyptian mythology, the story of Osiris and Isis.
It had been ages since I’d thought about this story, but as a child it had been one of my main fascinations. One of those morbid hyperfixations you can’t quite place or shake. Children simply don’t have the words nor the wisdom to. “To be a kid requires detective work. You have to piece together the entire universe from scratch” (Karen Russell, ‘the Ghost Birds’, 2021).
The story goes as follows: in Egyptian mythology, the king of Egypt (and god) Osiris’ brother Set usurps him, killing him and dismembering his body, scattering the pieces all over Egypt. In response, Osiris’ wife, Isis, goes on a lengthy quest to find all the parts of her husband, eventually succeeding and restoring him. Quite literally putting him back together. Osiris lives long enough to bless Isis with a child, but throughout the many versions of the story, his resurrection, his return to the living, is not permanent. A price has to be paid, and Osiris moves on to rule the underworld instead of Egypt.
So, that’s restoration, but what about communication? Can we communicate with the dead? Certainly there’s been people who’ve tried throughout the course of history, for better or for worse, to reach out to something not quite here.
There’s a collection of artefacts in the British museum that once belonged to John Dee (also known as Doctor Dee), and to Horace Walpole after him. Walpole was of course, the author of the first ever “Gothic” novel; the Castle of Otranto. But he was, and is, also known for his Neo-Gothic house filled with all manner of eccentric collectibles and curious ephemera, including at one point owning a black mirror that was said to have belonged to Dee, and is now in the British Museum’s collection. Born in 1527, Dee was an English astronomer, astrologer, occultist and alchemist, among other things. Throughout his life, one of his main pursuits throughout his work was to essentially become a “scryer” or a messenger for angels. He wanted to be the link of communication between the earthly, and the divine. It’s in this pursuit that Dee would stare deeply into the glassy surface of the obsidian black mirror in question, and according to legend, would hear the angels speak to him. He wrote about his communications with the angels at length, though the resulting texts can be quite dense and unfortunately rather unexciting.


Another one of the lecture’s selection of stories struck me, about the practice of “nekyia”, or a classical ritual by which the ghosts of the dead could be consulted about the future. In the Odyssey, Odysseus performs such a ritual, journeying to the underworld in an attempt to ascertain a prophecy on how to get back to his home island of Ithaca. He goes through the motions, following the instructions the goddess Circe has given him- that when he reaches a certain point in the underworld he should
“[…] dig a trench […], and pour into it as a drink-offering to all the dead, first, honey mixed with milk, then wine, and in the third place water—sprinkling white barley meal over the whole. Moreover you must offer many prayers to the poor feeble ghosts, and promise them that when you get back to Ithaca you will sacrifice a barren heifer to them, the best you have, and will load the pyre with good things.”
“the Odyssey”, Homer (8th century BC), book X-XI
He sacrifices a ram and a ewe, and is tasked with protecting the sacrifices from the herds of dead that are attracted by the spilt blood. It is pitch dark, Odysseus is in the pit with the sacrifices, and the spirits swarm in, shrieking throughout the dark of night. All he can do is hold them off with his sword, until the desired spirit can come to taste the blood and provide him with the prophecy he seeks. It’s an otherworldly flash of a story ripped straight from a horror movie. Blood of course attracts spirits because, as the Bible writes and Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula repeats; “the blood is the life”.

Probably the most well-known, clear-cut form of necromancy comes from the 18th century’s Victorian obsession with spiritualism, including seances. As the concept of entropy, and a meaningless existence, gained traction, Western mankind increasingly started reaching for the otherworldly. Even Queen Victoria herself was reportedly interested in seances. In an age of uncertainty, spiritualism reconciled “science” with mysticism.
We might think we, our modern selves, are above these things we deem silly, or uneducated. We might think we are above needing to talk to our dead. But it is normal to yearn for reassurance, to reach for what is, or seems, lost. Historical context changes how we interact with these subjects, and what we think of them. Originally, seances and necromancy as a whole weren’t always seen as the sinister thing it is seen as now (no doubt with a bit of thanks to horror movies). In Victorian times, the idea that a call to the dead wasn’t a focused thing was still in its infancy.
Today, as I write this, starting with the pagan holiday of Samhain, it is thought that the veil between our world and the “spirit world” is at its thinnest point all year. Take from that what you will.
III. On turning One
So the White Lily Society turned one year old on the 26th of October! Happy anniversary to all of you, my beloved fellow Society members. It’s been nothing short of an extraordinary year. Don’t worry, I’m not going to drool all over your letter, I’ve already done plenty of that over on Instagram. But still, I want to take a moment to thank you in particular for being a part of it all.
The White Lily Society has surprised me with how fond I’ve grown of it, and that’s in part because of how it has allowed me a valid output for my interests, and an engaging and responsive audience to match. So, thank you. Here’s to the first of many more years to come.


III.I Devouring the Gothic
Now, forgive my imprudence in haphazardly pasting this segment in the middle of another one, but it was a particularly hard one to place. For a month or two now, I’ve toyed with the idea of making a whole post dedicated to a Gothic reading challenge, to no avail. While interesting, I could find no proper justification to over-extend that idea into a full wall of text, so here it is instead.
Around this time last year, I attended an official six week course on Gothic literature at the British Library, and I enjoyed the experience so much, that I’ve decided to repeat it in my own way this year. Besides having the chance to discuss literature in a group setting with a professor, my favourite thing was the “challenge” of it all; turns out being on a strict schedule does indeed do wonders for motivation! While October has admittedly proven too busy for me to start my reading challenge, I do intend to pursue it this year, albeit in November, and so I have attached both last year’s and this year’s itinerary, just in case you wish to participate alongside me. Or in case you desire a Gothic roadmap to work with and lead the way.
[2022]
Week 1, to 3/10: Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto.
Week 2, to 10/10 : Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest.
Week 3, to 17/10 : Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Week 4, to 24/10 : (Short stories) Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘the Fall of the House of Usher’, ‘William Wilson’ and ‘the Black Cat’. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘Young Goodman Brown’ and ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’. George Washington Cable’s ‘Jean-ah Poquelin’. Week 5, to 31/10 : (Short stories from the Oxford book of Gothic Tales) Ambrose Bierce's ‘a Vine on the House’. Eudora Welty's ‘Clytie’. Jorge Luis Borges' ‘the Gospel According to Mark’. Angela Carter’s ‘the Lady of the House of Love’. Patrick McGrath’s ‘Blood Disease’. Joyce Carol Oates’s ‘Secret Observations on the Goat-Girl’.
Of course, it goes without saying that this year’s itinerary consists of books I personally already own. Feel free to swap out with books on your shelf as you see fit, and books you in particular are excited about. Books that intrigue you and get your fingers itching to turn another page, and books you have been long intimidated by. The aim of the game is to consume, to read, to devour. Whatever shape that literary “meal” takes is entirely up to you.
[2023]
Week 1, to 5/11: Mona Awad’s Rouge OR Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. Week 2, to 12/11: Emily Brönte’s Wuthering Heights.
Week 3, to 19/11: Matthew Lewis’ the Monk. Week 4, to 26/11: the British Library’s anthology the Ghost Slayers (editor Mike Ashley)
Week 5, to 3/12: (Short stories from the Oxford book of Gothic Tales) Marcel Schwab’s ‘Bloody Blanche’. Charlotte Perkins Stetson’s ‘the Yellow Wall-paper’. H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Outsider’. William Faulkner’s ‘a Rose for Emily’. Alejandra Pizarnik’s ‘the Bloody Countess’. Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘the Masque of Red Death’.
As always I am simply speeding towards the email length limit for this newsletter, so instead of luxuriating, here’s a quick fire list of some of my current obsessions, in no particular order: “Haunting Ground” (PS2 game), horror video game protagonist fashion, final girls, Faust (Marlowe or Goethe version), warm apples with cinnamon, fake lashes, occultism, “the Originals” (CW show), “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (1992 film), New Orleans, and the year 1801.
Now, I really do have to run before the candles in my living room all burn out one by one, and I’m left in darkness. The candelabra in front of me is looking to be on its absolute last leg. So, my final words are these; I hope you have the most lovely cold and cozy November. I know I will.
Until my next letter,
x Sabrina Angelina, the White Lily Society
Currently reading: “Death comes to the Maiden: Sex and Execution 1431-1933” // Most recent read: “Bluebeard’s Castle” by Anna Biller
White Lily Society links // Sabrina Angelina links
You don’t need to be raising the dead to gain knowledge. No, in this modern day and age you can get monthly esoteric and niche knowledge sent straight to you, no need for prophecies or animal sacrifices or black mirrors (wait…). Subscribe to the White Lily Society today! Come, become a martyr of deliciousness. Join us.