For many, Halloween has become a festive celebration allowing people of all ages and creeds to party on down through a gauze of diminished cynicism of what can be rather sinister subject matter. Rather than following the flock, we believe that we should be returning to the roots of Halloween and implore that you avoid bobbing for apples, donning gaudy fancy dress, carving up perfectly edible pumpkins and trick-or-treating, and attempt to flood our earthly plane with the living dead.

To aid you in your quest of raising the dead, we’ve compiled a helpful list of reanimation ideas that should make you the talk of the neighbourhood and make 2011 the year you successfully reanimate that cadaver!

Plain Old Rural Necromancy

Surprisingly, necromancy is the divination of the dead as opposed to the explicit raising of. Typically our medieval forebearers would be looking for treasure, trinkets and unsurprisingly, more necromantic power that they would obtain by questioning the dead in spirit form. However, one must be beware that the act would place the spirit in some serious discomfort and torment, even for a dead person, so requests and questions should be kept brisk and to the point. Asking the spirit where your keys are, whether you’ve left the grill on and other such domestic mundanery should be avoided. Likewise, asking questions outside of the spirit’s own history and experience should be discouraged, for example, asking an 18th century housemaid what next week’s lottery numbers are would be interpreted as ‘what are the numbers of a lot of trees’ or some such poorly conceived translation problem.

Getting to the ritual itself, it can be conducted either at a crossroads, a battlefield or a graveyard. For simplicity we recommend a graveyard as the prime time is traditionally between midnight and one in the morning with other locations being unavailable or simply crowded. It is vital that you have an assistant during the ceremony, presumably for Debbie McGee type purposes, although their primary function would be holding a light and carrying your stuff – in other words, leave the chivalry at home.

Boiled down to its very essence, the act requires three things. A set of concentric circles made in the ground allowing yourself and the assistant to remain within the circles with appropriate occult-like/emo symbols drawn within (note: if your creativity is a bit low emoticons will suffice). Some fresh blood to entice the wandering spirit and deter it from breaching your circle defences; Ribena is not considered an adequate substitute and should supplies run low, there’s always the assistant. Lastly a set of words to summon the spirit will be required. These tend to be the names of old gods, such as Jehovah, but don’t be tempted to simply chant ‘Jehovah’ as, while this may discourage the living from engaging in conversation for obvious reasons, it will all too soon sound like a poorly played solo Monty Python sketch.

In the unlikely event that your spirit does materialise, don’t panic. The spirit can only consume your soul and life blood if you step outside of the protective circles. Ask your questions and dismiss the spirit in whatever gothicky language sounds appropriate. But a word of warning: even if you don’t believe you’ve been successful, it would be prudent to discharge the spirit anyway as some can be particularly evil and may have decided to remain hidden. By all accounts 67% of all soul consumptions have been due to this simple lapse of concentration.

What Would Jesus Do?

The ability to make credulous people assemble should be foremost in any potential messiah’s arsenal, but what really grabs the attention and ensures good book sales is a good ole resurrection. Deliberately not turning up to one of his followers’ deathbeds, our halo hero apologetically resurrects the unsuspecting Lazarus simply through the power of prayer and lo, immortalising his name to ensure it is used in the future as the password for returning employees. But just like Neo in the Matrix who died to prove some point or something, he inspired others to do stuff as well.

So as Neo had that lackey Kid hanging on his every word pestering him and keeping him away from Trinity, our two thousand year old Stieg Larsson also had people encroaching on his territory. Chief among these is the resurrection of Daniel Ekechukwu, a Nigerian pastor who was involved in a car accident that should have claimed his life. Certified dead, the mortician was unable to fill the corpse with embalming fluids due to some massive ‘electric shocks’ when attempting to cut the body. Mortified (see what I did there) he made several phone calls that saw the corpse in front of an Evangelist. Here the Evangelist and his entourage got down and prayed only to be shocked when the stiff, cold, rigor mortis affected corpse sneezed and came back to life after not breathing for two days.

The common factor seems to be prayer and any mortuary, or if you’re feeling shy, a graveyard should provide an adequate audience for your penitence and genuflections. Of course, the subject matter of these prayers is certainly one of debate with, what we believe is, the prayer being directed at an individual. What isn’t clear is whether a change of subject matter such as prayers for a minor win on the lottery or maybe an embuggerance to an annoying family member could expand the scope and power of your reanimation skills?

Do it the ‘Tom Riddle’ Way

In the world of J K Rowling, it is planning and preparation that holds the key for successful reanimation. Certainly in the case of Voldemort (chief antagonist and unaccomplished pedicide offender for seven books) the trick was to become immortal by the plot/book stretching method of phylactery (imbuing one’s soul in an object to become immortal) or, or in his case, seven chunks aka Horcruxes.

This occult insurance policy will guarantee that, should you perish, your soul is not consumed by the fiery pits of Hell and through some simple magic you will return to some kind of earthly flesh sans some facial features. Thankfully the ritual is reasonably easy to follow…

Bone of the father unwillingly given
Flesh of the servant willingly sacrificed
And blood of the enemy forcibly taken

In reality the above items should be reasonably easy to procure, presumably with some slight alterations when advertising for that cleaning lady and declaring vendetta against various service staff. This done, the more complex issue of choosing the objects to impregnate with your soul comes around. Selection should be based upon the criteria that your object appears innocuous and is unlikely to fall into the wrong hands. Our thinking is that a treasured gentlemen’s magazine or six month old cultivated mouldy coffee cup are bad ideas, whereas an old but functioning highlighter pen may pay dividends.

From the Quill of H P Lovecraft

To many, ‘essential Saltes’ would include a good Kosher Salt or even the famed Maldon Sea Flakes, both ideal when seasoning or even brining without a budget. But in H P Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward we find that the ‘essential Saltes’ are not used for flavouring food and increasing our chance of heart disease, but for the nefarious act of raising the dead…

The principal is relatively simple, from the human remains or dust of the raisee, the ‘essential Saltes’ must be extracted. While the method of extraction is not described in the short novel, despite a certain amount of alchemy taken behind closed doors, a swift recall of that distillation of water and salt experiment from High School chemistry should suffice. Keeping your powder dry, we move onto the task of drawing circles, triangles and pentagrams using a sword dyed with blood, although chalk seems to be the more civilised way to go and far easier for a Roomba to clean up.

Now at this stage an enthusiastic evocateer can leverage other items such as the head of a black cat fed on human flesh for five days, four nails torn from the coffin of an executed criminal and the skull of a parricide (to save you looking this one up, it’s the killing of one’s parents as opposed to parrots). It should be noted that while they may be classed as indispensable, there is too much studious preparation that the average individual (myself included) would find hard to muster, hence our reluctance to muddy the water. Also, feeding your cat with human flesh that also incorporates the necessary proteins and minerals to ensure a shiny coat and prevent hairballs is nothing short of tiresome.

Back to the ritual, when complete and standing within your circle it is then necessary to chant the following. For two hours straight.

Per Adonai Eloim, Adonai Jehova, Adonai Sabaoth, Metraton On Agla Mathon, verbum pythonicum, mysterium salamandrae, conventus sylvorum, antra gnomorum, daemonia Coeli God, Almonsin, Gibor, Jehosua, Evam, Zariatnatmik, veni, veni, veni.

If successful you should see a flash of light and find that the local canines, sensitive of occult japery, will start howling for all they are worth. Next comes the summoning of a demon using the ‘DIES MIES JESCHET’ invocation followed by the below to complete the ceremony.

Y’AI ‘NG’NGAH, YOG-SOTHOTH H’EE—L’GEB F’AI THRODOG UAAAH

Unfortunately for Charles Dexter Ward, his success at raising the dead using the above technique was somewhat tempered by the fact he raised one of his evil ancestors whose impressive curriculum vitae not only included a deep understanding of necromancy and other black arts, he was also a mass murderer. From this we learn one important lesson; it’s not what we resurrect from the dead but who. Resurrecting Auntie Ethel, who may have been rather generous at Christmases and birthdays due to her barren ovaries, may not be the ideal choice if she spent her remaining years locked in an asylum writing her murderous bucket list on the walls with her own faeces.

The needs of the One… Outweigh the Needs of the Many

Unlike the other suggestions that contain some dollop of mysticism and copious amounts of eyeliner, future documentary Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, provides a more coherent approach to the act of resurrection without having to look like Brian Molko from Placebo. Here any corpse can be placed onto any dead planet or empty space rock and be shot with the terraforming rocket ‘Genesis’.

Conveniently avoiding teething and potty training, the introduction of proto-matter can speed up the process, re-birthing the individual using the DNA within the cadaver. Unfortunately proto-matter does have some minor side-effects such as rapid growth. For Vulcans, the accelerated growth will mean the onset of ‘pon farr’ occurring at fairly close intervals causing hot flushes and the desire to masturbate over Algebra and MENSA tests. For the actual planet though, the unstable substance will accelerate its lifespan seeing its birth and destruction in a few short star dates and will require all resurrectees to be removed where the rapid growth bondage somehow gets broken.

Regrettably there have been no reported successes on humans using the Genesis device due to a lack of proto-matter, although experts believe that anti-matter is an adequate substitute because it sounds just as cool. Obtaining the anti-matter in today’s market may prove slightly troublesome but a backdoor deal from the Large Hadron Collider (other colliders are available) should see some success. From here it is simply a matter of picking some dead or decayed area (insert your own joke about Wolverhampton, Cleveland or Belgium) and allowing Genesis to do its thing. Prudent individuals may want to time the extraction point to ensure that the subject has passed puberty but hasn’t reached the doldrums of middle age. In addition, the consumption of all known life on the Earth should also be monitored.

Good luck with your attempts to raise the dead this Halloween and remember to drop us a line if you have success (or fail in the process).

Disclaimer: OneMetal does not condone murder or manslaughter; if you kill someone after reading the above OneMetal will not be held liable for your impatience and, quite frankly, complete and utter idiocy. There are plenty of morgues and graveyards knocking around with a continuously bountiful harvest. Go visit one today!

One Response to “5 Ways to Raise the Dead: OneMetal’s Guide to an Alternative Halloween”
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  Earl Head says:

  my wife died last year from cancer i want her back.

  February 22, 2013 at 18:48