Digging the Dead: Interview with Dr. Alexander Cummins
There are, it turns out, an awful lot of ways to dig up the dead.
Digging the Dead is a new project of Radio Free Golgotha in which your illustrious and sometimes hosts, Radio Free Golgotha, interview scholars, practitioners, artists, magicians, folklorists, and other interested parties to worry away at this thing we have come to call folk necromancy.
We are interested in how relationships with the dead are made and maintained, inherited and invented, forgotten and recovered; in what happens when folklore is put back into practice, and when practice sends us scurrying back to the archive. We are interested in ancestors and strangers, saints and sorcerers, beloved dead and decidedly difficult ones; in old books, living traditions, strange survivals, useful mistakes, and the occasional dead end that proves not quite so dead after all.
The intention is not to hammer all of this into some grand unified theory of Talking to Dead People™, quite the opposite. We hope to foment a living canon of folk necromancy without calcification: one capacious enough for contradiction, regionalism, argument, experience, scholarship, and—rather importantly—the agency and plurality of the dead themselves.
Perhaps most of all, Digging the Dead is an experiment in (re) folking necromancy: putting these matters back into conversation, community, exchange, and mutual aid. Asking not only what the dead can do for us, but what relationships with them require of us—and what the living and the dead might yet make together.
Happy All Souls’ Day, we’re excited for this additional scope of Radio Free Golgotha. There will be more standard episodes, Digging the Dead, Speakeasies of the Dead, and more from us. But for now, back to the matter at hand.
Shovels at the ready. There is digging to be done!
INTERVIEW THE FIRST
Dr. Alexander Cummins
In Which We (Self-Reflexively, Self-Referentially, Self-Reverentially) Interview the Good Doctor himself…
We begin by worrying at definitions: what exactly makes necromancy folk, and what gets lost when either of those words is made to behave too neatly? From there we explore necromancy as relationship and mutual aid; spirits as a plurality of persons rather than an undifferentiated category of “the dead”; and the obligations, negotiations, boundaries, and occasional difficulties that follow from taking their agency seriously.
We rummage around in the productive mess between scholarship and sorcery: what historical sources can tell practitioners, what practice can reveal in historical sources, and where both can lead us astray. This brings us, inevitably, to authority—teachers and students, expertise and experience, occult marketplaces and guru posturing, and how we might transmit knowledge without pretending to possess the final word on it.
There are also practical matters: divination, grounding, boundaries, cultivating sustainable relationships with spirits, and knowing when not to knock on a particular door.
Beneath all these various mind-worms lurks a question that will no doubt continue to haunt Digging the Dead: can we speak about folk necromancy without embalming it? Can we give shape to a body of knowledge while leaving it sufficiently lively to contradict us, escape us, acquire strange new habits, and refuse to stay where we put it?
Our first excavation, then, begins close to home: with one another, our assumptions, and the rather suspicious business of deciding what we think we’re talking about before we go asking everybody else.
We hope you enjoy this first bit of digging, and that you’ll join us for the conversations, complications, disagreements, digressions, and assorted revenants still to come. We have plenty more people to bother with our questions, plenty more ground to disturb, and—if the dead and our guests are willing—many more (rabbit? mole? armadillo?) holes to fall into along the way.
This episode is also available on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.
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