An introduction

What is necrobotany? The term itself is as easy to dissect as the bulb of a plant. Formed by combining the ancient Greek-derived prefix necro, meaning dead body or death and the suffix botany, which is the study of plants. What the subject is however is much more nuanced and subject to debate amongst academics. There are those such as Ricardo Pesanta who write that necrobotany is the animation of the dead stitched together with plant matter as a replacement for decomposed tissue1. Whereas Clarence Walters considers the subject to be one akin to Necromancy, but simply using those dark magics on plant matter as opposed to animal matter2.

There is much cross over on these academic theories and it is my opinion that the pair are mostly divided by their approach to the ethical quandary that has always been a problem in the field of Necromancy. Is it ethical to remove the deceased from their rest, this paper will seek to address that question and also how my personal approach to necrobotany might prove an answer to the problem. I shall undertake a theoretical analysis of the subject, touching on the connection between necromantic energy and the spirit and I will review the papers so far published to come to a conclusion.

My hypothesis is that Pesanta's approach and that of his peers does indeed breach ethical boundaries as. However by applying the work of Walters and to a lesser extent Blake3 (this work has been discredited but his theories do still add to the discussion) we can come to a place where Necrobotany is a positive addition to the herbological field whilst avoiding the negative connotations associated with its necromantic sibling.

Pesanta's Inferis Botanicus

We are all familiar with the existence of Inferi, undead puppets raised and controlled by the dark energies of Necromancy. What less people are aware of is the process in the late 18th century by which Pesanta's sought to produce a similar end result using necrobotany1. He would take the remains of a creature and infuse its remains with a fungal mixture that had been treated alchemically to encourage it to proliferate into all parts of the body. He initially did this with mice, then swine and then in two cases with medical cadavers. His notes do not give much clarity to the genus of mushrooms used, he mentions Death Cap Mycorrhiza and alludes to a source he uses from the tropics. My theory based on his drawings and the behaviours exhibited in his subjects was that he was unknowingly using a fungus related to the Ophiocordyceps unilateralis fungus discovered by Wallace in 18594. This fungus seemingly controls the motor functions of insects, so it would be a reasonable academic assumption that it may have been involved in the puppeting of Pesanta's creations.

He would allow this fungus to grow until a point that it would respond to his magical commands. He was never able to progress to a stage where verbal commands were useful so it is impossible to say what level he could have achieved. However, after his death, his research was subject to ethical scrutiny which made further study inappropriate.

One such critic, who himself has now been widely discredited was Blake. He noted that the more recently deceased the corpse was, the more responsive to commands the resulting necrobotanic creation would appear to be. He devised the theory of “Necromantic Energy Transfer”3 where the spiritual energy would be absorbed by the fungus in a magically symbiotic relationship.

His equation was as follows

NET = (plant energy x spirit energy) / decay

This suggests that both plant and spirit play a part in the animation process and that transfer of necromantic energy cannot occur without both being present.

Unfortunately Blake's theorem was shown to fail several arithmantic tests5,6 and he was unable to categorically prove either the existence of spirit energy or give a quantifiable figure for decay. I include it here as while his results were flawed, his observation that more recently deceased bodies are easier to animate with necrobotany, mirrors the observations of those that study necromantic methods and as such his ethical concerns are still considered valid7.

These concerns are that although the methods are botanical, the spirit of the deceased is still involved and as such it would likely be subject to the same metaphysical suffering involved in traditional necromancy.


Walters resurrection plants

Clarence Walter's approach2 is much more in line with traditional necromancy, except his subjects were plants and no animal matter was involved in any of his studies.

What Walter first did was take vegetable matter that had died and by applying magical techniques to it was able to bring the material back to life. This is a very simplistic form of necrobotany and is seen more as an extension of the Herbivicous spell with the added benefit of being able to work on completely dead matter. While the benefits of this are very clear, it is of limited scope and lacks the more practical applications provided by the reanimation of a musculoskeletal system. His further work is what draws the attention of this academic. He was able to animate this dead matter, allowing it to engage in very menial tasks. The greatest drawback though is that it was never able to achieve any form of autonomy so all actions needed to be performed by direct magical puppetry. There was some success using more animated plants such as the venomous tentacula but the processes that could be carried would extremely simple and the plants would very quickly deviate from any magical instruction.

This is a significant argument in favour of supporting Pesanta's methods over Walter's. As an addition, Hansel Mason had similar success in replicating these results using resurrected whomping willow material8. However his results were poorly documented and hard to clearly interpret.

Ethical Debate and the sentience threshold

To many the ethical debate regarding necromancy has been put to rest3,9. It is widely accepted by most including this academic that interfering with recently deceased and entrapping their spirits in order to animate their remains is abhorrent, and summoning new spirits into a longer departed is almost equally so, there has been little debate since Blake regards necrobotany. If one was to use a suitably vigorous plant to replace both the physical and mental impulse of the human condition, it would open up avenues of Necromancy that were metaphysically neutral, and an even greater victory would be if necrobatically animated plants were able to entirely replace the use of creatures.

The question of necrobotany's ethics is two fold. Firstly it is whether we subscribe to Blake's ideas that the animated plants are functioning symbiotically with the human spirit, if this is so, then necrobotany simply becomes necromancy with extra steps and as such would be subject to same negative connotations as the latter. If we can escape Blake's hypothesis then we are left with a cadaver that is now entirely controlled by the plant, but as Walter has demonstrated, plants alone appear to lack the impulse to perform useful tasks.