Necromancy: Death, Ritual and the Imagination
From ancient tombs to Victorian séance parlours, humankind has long sought to speak with the dead — and to listen when they whisper back. In this illuminating and unsettling lecture, cultural historian Lena Heide-Brennand delves into the shadowed history of necromancy: the rituals, taboos, and imaginative worlds that blur the boundary between the living and the departed.
Tracing the practice from the Greek Magical Papyri to Norse seiðr, from Renaissance conjurers to Romantic poets, this talk explores how societies have used death not only as a mystery to be feared but as a language to be read. What does it mean to summon a voice from the grave? How do art, faith, and folklore preserve the presence of the dead — and what ethical questions linger in that act of calling?
A journey through centuries of memento mori and midnight invocation, this lecture invites you to stand at the threshold where scholarship meets the supernatural, and imagination keeps the dead forever speaking.
Bio:
Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience
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