Integral to the idea of communicating with spirits is the notion that there is a place that spirits go which we can not see. Supposing one believes in the persistence of the spirit after mortal death at all it is necessary to believe also that these spirits must have some abode which is not readily visible to the eye or that they float freely as the classic disembodied ghost. Many necromancers favour the view that the spirit actually has a "meeting place" of sorts, sometimes called the universal consciousness, but more often called hell, hades, gehenna, sheol, tartarus, limbo, heaven, paradise, or the abyss. By impressions, there seem to be just as many who do not subscribe to such ideas though. It is a matter of semantics. It should be noted that though mythology will be heavily relied upon to draw anecdotal analogies for the potential nature of the underworld that it is profoundly unlikely that mythology has much business with the underlying nature of the nether. The first part will be spent discussing the mythological sources of information about the underworld (which has, in times past, been considered a serious and reliable source of information) such as Greek, Jewish, and Roman mythology, and the second part of this page will be dedicated to the practicalities and applicability of the netherworld concept for the modern necromancer.

Many cultures have a hell concept of one sort or another. The word "hell" itself comes from the Norse concept of the lowest level of existence named after Hel, the daughter of Loki. Of course, one of the most famous netherworld concepts in existence comes from the spread of the middle eastern religions like Islam and Christianity which both state that there is a netherworld for the soul. In Jewish traditions the term "sheol" is used to refer to the abode of the dead and is used many times in the book of Psalms, poorly translated in the King James version of the bible as "the grave". Many modern translations of the bible such as the New American Standard restore the use of the proper term "sheol". "Hell" concept comes from Norse mythology, as was previously stated, but the nature of the Norse hell was vastly different than the middle eastern one. Norse hell, while also an abode of the dead (and usually the wicked), was a very cold place of isolation from the realm of the living. This stands in vague agreement with the Greek biblical reference to Tartarus, which is the lowest and most remote depth below hades where the titans of Homer's Illiad were confined and which is mentioned in the bible again in 2nd Peter and also in Virgil's Encid. To contrast this view however there is the existence of the gehenna concept which is used in the bible as a metaphor for the valley of Hinnon in which the bodies of sacrificed animals continually burned. The fat of these sacrifices ran off into cesspools of blood and animal oils "where the worm never dies" due to the overwhelming volume of rotting and burning refuse. It was a wretched place filled with the smell of blood, rotting and burning flesh, and piles of animal corpses strewn in every direction. Gehenna is another name used in the bible for hell, though oddly enough this is one of only two references that might suggest a hot hell. Most hell references speak of a place of darkness and isolation yet only the Greek myth "phlegethon" (the river of fire; one of the five rivers of hades) and gehenna would indicate heat.

This leads us to the concept of hades as a whole which is often mentioned throughout various Greek mythologies. It was supposed to have five rivers: Phlegethon (the river of fire which literally means "blazing"), Acheron (the river of woe), Styx (the river of hate), Lethe (the river of forgetfulness), and Cocytus (the river of lamentation). There is information about two other rivers -- Mnemosyne and Eridanus -- which can also be studied for interest's sake though are not typically considered comparable to the five main rivers. Whether these myths are true or not is up for much debate though it is almost universally accepted that the precise details of hades were creatively invented to produce a more interesting story rather than for the purpose of leaving an accurate map of the underworld.

We can identify a few things about the nature of the netherworld which can be used to an advantage. The first of these is that, contrary to popular religious opinion, spirits have been recorded as going in and out of this realm with some frequency. Note that the "realm of the dead" does not equate to "hades" necessarily. Hades is seen through literature as semi-permeable, often citing obstacle characters as Charon the ferryman, the imposing figure of Hades himself (the name of a deity as well as a place), and the dog which guards the entrance (which appears in both Norse and Greek myth). These obstacles were by no means unpassable though. In the case of Charon he actually took simple coinage as payment for his ferrying services across the river Styx. The guard dog of hades, both in Norse and Greek myth, was also able to be creatively lulled into passivity. In this sense we can see that it is easy to bypass myth as a source of information on the nature of the netherworld for the sake of its continual "yes and no" information. The ambiguous and inconclusive nature of this information leads us to suspect that the necromancer is further ahead experimenting with the realm of the dead directly without referring to the texts which may give opinions based on any number of sources with any range of truths, falsehoods, or half-truths which would be invariably more difficult to sort than it would be to start fresh.

For the necromancer's purposes it is more useful to define the terminology used to refer to the netherworld rather than attempting to chart or describe the nether. In general it is safe to say that the term "hades" can be taken to mean any place where there is a conglomeration of spirits in the netherworld. It is fair to note however that the term "netherworld" itself is abstracted from the idea that hades is inside the earth. The idea of "realm of the dead" is not the same as that of netherworld however. The realm of the dead refers to any spiritual plane where the soul may wander or reside. Hades is part of the realm of the dead yet is not the entirety thereof.

Hades is the source a necromancer might use if their interest is in finding a terrestrial demon, to find the most awful of the necromantic cursing powers available, and generally to locate a spirit if traversing the underworld in person. The most common use for the locale of hades, in particular, is the source of the necromantic form known as "greater" or "infernal" necromancy. By exploring the powers of hades the necromancer finds that interaction and communication is likewise possible with the geists of this realm. The necromancer puts their own soul in peril to navigate the realm of hades but also has the power to attempt to draw other souls into such a realm as well. Most people are unskilled in the art of traversing the nether though and would suffer from the experience, which may manifest on the material plane as nightmares, visions, hallucinations, poor health, and general mental unrest.

The denizens of hades are one of the prime reasons a necromancer might wish to interface with that realm. The hades concept hinges on a few suppositions that necromancers have found to be likely. Among these is that spirits may wish to conglomerate in an afterlife to share experiences and continue to be social creatures. Also among these spirits are different beings. Perhaps they are accidental matrices, a creation of some other being, or maybe dimensional natives to the netherworld. How they came to exist there is as much an enigma as the existence of humanity itself, yet the presence of necrodaemon is a constant throughout the "history of hell". The spirits themselves have often had time to interact with these native entities and have learned. Some are rumoured to have merged into greater beings and others have been said to have lost most of their wit and are only shades of their former selves and may be anywhere from slightly dimmed to barely themselves. The demons of hades seem to not be hostile, per se, though put up with no silliness or laziness either. Generally speaking, a trek to the netherworld is seen as damaging enough in its own right, and Hades is considered a volatile and alien place which is far removed from any experiences we might have on the material plane.

How to apply this knowledge is, as always, a matter of personal discretion and situational application. The necromancer's infernal rites have become more commonly known in the modern age yet this intriguing and utterly awful facet of necromancy remains largely a mystery even still.