B

Belief in necromancy, the employment of the spirits of the dead in divinatory or magical techniques, is attested from almost all periods of the Greek tradition; while treated with disapproval or scepticism by some, and at times subject to harsh legal sanctions, its existence and validity appear, nevertheless, to have been widely accepted on a popular level. Much of the information on necromancy provided by the various literary sources, as well as that derived from the curse tablets, tallies closely with technical material on the subject to be found in surviving manuals of magic. Although the Church always strongly condemned belief in magic and sought to discredit its intellectual foundations, the emergence of Christianity did not immediately destroy belief in necromancy. Orthodox Byzantines, echoing the doctrinally acceptable explanation for necromancy that was developed by the early Christian Fathers, did not view the spirits employed in it as actually being those of the dead but rather as demons disguised as such.