Dead Excited, A Folk Necromancy Panel with Dr Alexander Cummins, Jesse Hathaway-Diaz & Ben Joffe

What is folk necromancy? Are you a folk necromancer? What does it mean to engage in folk necromantic practices?

JOIN the moderators of your favourite / only social media forum dedicated to folk necromancy – the charming scholar and translator Ben Joffe, the charmingly befuddled Al Cummins, and the ever-handsome World’s Best Goat Jesse Hathaway Diaz…!

ENGAGE as they discuss the practices, philosophies, histories, and methodologies of necromancy, nigromancy, spirit conjuration, ghost-lore, charm-craft, and demonology…!

MARVEL as they enthuse about working with the Dead in world traditions - extant, extinct, historical, literary, and revived…!

RECOIL IN HORROR at some of the best and worst of the submitted posts we have had to look at running a Facebook group about folk necromancy…

This is a 120 minute, foundational level panel discussion.

About the Presenters:

Dr Alexander Cummins is a contemporary cunning man and historian. His magical specialities are the dead (folk necromancy), divination (geomancy) and the grimoires.

His published works include An Excellent Booke of the Arte of Magicke (Scarlet Imprint, 2020) with Phil Legard, The Starry Rubric (Hadean Press 2012), A Book of the Magi: Lore, Prayers, and Spellcraft of the Three Holy Kings (Revelore Press 2018) and contributions to collections by Three Hands Press, Hadean Press and Scarlet Imprint.

He is a frequent speaker on the international circuit, co-hosts the podcast Radio Free Golgotha, and is a founding editor of Revelore Press’ Folk Necromancy in Transmission series. Dr Cummins’ work, classes, and services can be found at www.alexandercummins.com

Jesse Hathaway-Diaz is a folklorist, artist, performer and independent scholar with a Masters in Performance Studies from NYU. With initiations in several forms of witchcraft from Europe and the Americas, he is also a lifelong student of Mexican Curanderismo, and initiated priest of Obatala in the Lucumi Orisha tradition, and a Tata Quimbanda. He co-hosts an occult themed podcast called 'Radio Free Golgotha' and edits the 'Folk Necromancy in Transmission' imprint from Revelore Press. For the better part of two decades, he has been involved with Theatre Group Dzieci, a New York based experimental theatre ensemble which explores theatre and ritual as a way, blending service with self-exploration and performance. Dividing his time between the Bronx and a farm in the Hudson Valley, his artistic and written work navigate the world-as-magic through exploring orality and transmission, decolonialism, ritual theory and praxis, herbalism and healing modalities through private study, apprenticeship, and community involvement.

Ben Joffe is an anthropologist, diviner, translator, and editor currently based in Cape Town, South Africa. He holds a PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of Colorado, Boulder, with a specialization in the anthropology of Tibet, Tibetan Buddhism, religion, magic, Tantra and the globalization of esoteric traditions. His doctoral dissertation fieldwork in India, Nepal, Tibet, and the United States focused on Tibetan Buddhist ngakpa – non-celibate, non-monastic sorcerer-yogis – and the ways in which their knowledge and practices have been circulated, mediated, appropriated and contested as part of increasingly transnational networks and economies. As a scholar and practitioner of Tibetan Vajrayana with a long history of involvement in Western magical and esoteric traditions, Ben is especially interested in overlaps and divergences between Indo-Tibetan and Western esoteric traditions and the messy exchanges and blurry divisions that have arisen in interactions between so-called Western and so-called non-Western occultists. Ben has read tarot cards for clients since the age of eleven and he continues to offer divinatory services in between his full-time work as a translator, editor and educator. He serves as head Tibetan translator and editor at Sky Press Books and works as a curriculum developer and teaching assistant for Sowa Rigpa Institute (https://www.sowarigpainstitute.org/). Through publishing texts and developing educational programs, these organizations seek to make Tibetan medical, magical and yogic traditions accessible to a broad array of students worldwide. More information about Ben’s interests, research and activities can be found at his blog A Perfumed Skull (www.perfumedskull.com).