By the late 1970s, precisely in 1979, the world witnessed a massive and instant change in British society and soon after was shifted to the globe. This change was clearly noticed by the music people played and the way they were dressing.

We all experience the uncanny: that “horrible, eerie, shuddery feeling”, as a character in one of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s short stories describes it. This we feel in response to certain phenomena — such as strange coincidences, identical twins, and waxwork figures — which are characteristically eerie, creepy, and weird.

Dark culture does not love science. Its favourite way of knowledge is some form of magical thinking. The dark ideology is rooted in the aesthetic culture of dark romanticism, which was a backlash against the new world opened by the Age of Enlightenment.

There seems to be a narrow choice on offer: either agree with Epicurus et al. on the annihilation thesis and the impossibility of the posthumous harm, or circumvent the problem by posing ante-mortem harm (Feinberg–Pitcher).

In December 1861, a few months after he published the first instalment of his supernatural masterpiece, ‘A Strange Story’, the distinguished novelist Edward Bulwer Lytton told his friend John Forster that he wished to make philosophers inquire into [spirit manifestations] as I think Bacon, Newton, and Davy would have inquired. There must be a natural cause for them — if they are not purely imposture. Even if that natural cause be the admission of a spirit world around us, which is the extreme point. But if so, it is a most impartial revelation in Nature.

As has already been discussed, the origins of the expression of necromancy can be traced back to the Hellenistic period of ancient Greece, and it is also here that we will start our research into its practice.

‘‘Demon’’ is technically a neutral word that refers to any spirit, whether good or evil, that is neither divine nor mortal but inhabits the intermediate realm between gods and humans. Thus, even angels belong to the general class of beings known as demons. But in common usage, owing to habits established between roughly 200 B.C.E. and 200 C.E., ‘‘demon’’ has come to refer solely to the evil members of the category.

Some imagine that a master in the art, to show the way, is all that is needed to become a Zanoni. Others, that one has but to cross the Canal of Suez and go to India to bloom forth as Roger Bacon or even a Count St. Germain.

In contrast to witchcraft historiography, recent reliable academic treatises on werewolves are exceedingly scanty. This is due both to a lack of interest in them, and a dearth of the source material. New presentations on the subject also have to position themselves against the many existing interpretations, which are inversely proportional to the research.