A closer look
Medieval necromancers did not actually raise massive armies of rotting zombies to conquer kingdoms like you see in high fantasy video games, but rather performed incredibly tedious rituals to politely ask summoned spirits for basic academic tutoring or location hints for buried treasure. The actual historical texts outlining these dark arts read less like terrifying books of absolute evil and more like highly bureaucratic instruction manuals, requiring the practitioner to fast for days, draw incredibly specific chalk circles, and recite hours of monotonous Latin just to get a ghost to show up. It turns out that practicing the darkest and most forbidden of all magical arts was mostly just a massive test of patience and geometry, often resulting in absolutely nothing happening after weeks of preparation. The reality of raising the dead is drastically less cinematic than Hollywood implies, resembling a highly toxic and exhausting clerical job that doesn't even offer dental benefits
